Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub
A tragic cantata

C_Music NOW

It is terrible to remember

but it is far worse to forget

30 April 1945. The thirty-eight-year-old war photographer Lee Miller stands inside the bathroom of Adolf Hitler’s private residence in Munich. Her clothes still carry the stench of her visit to the Dachau concentration camp. She removes her uniform and her mud-caked boots – deliberately soiling the floor as she does so – and steps into the “Devil’s bathtub,” in an attempt to wash away the smell of annihilation clinging to her body. A colleague captures her in what will become one of the most notorious photographs of the twentieth century. On the very same day, Adolf Hitler commits suicide in Berlin.

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The stage is occupied by an exact replica of Hitler’s bathroom. Five musicians stand around the bathtub. while images of Miller are projected in shifting succession across a screen. Two performers embody the turbulent arc of her life, while beside them a block of ice slowly melts over the course of the performance – the likeness of young Lee, as photographed by her father at the age of seven, after she was raped by a relative. In every photograph, Lee Miller dies a little more.

Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub is not a biographical work. Historical accuracy does certainly not rank among its prime objectives – in fact, it is almost a deliberate refusal of it. Here, artist Jan Lauwers, together with composer Maarten Seghers, and the invaluable presence of mezzo-soprano Ellen Rose Kelly and his daughter Romy Louise Lauwers, does not present an idealised account of Miller’s life, but rather a dazzling libretto that traverses the full spectrum of art, memory, trauma, and what it means to be both woman and muse.

Far from a monograph, this is the portrait of a multitude of women in restless motion, yet perpetually ejected from the institutional rooms of art. Women who asserted their autonomy in the shadow of eminent men and hierarchies of dominance, only to vanish in obscuration or inner dissolution, while nonetheless remaining autoluminescent. Model, journalist, acclaimed artist, mother: Lee Miller, in the hands of Lauwers and his collaborators, becomes an archetype through which the genealogy of a certain femininity transpires across centuries, reaching into the present on its own terms, in defiance of an ever more cynical patriarchal order.

Like a photographic negative that reveals far more than its positive image, Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub becomes a discreet – and at times deafening – elegy on the notions of the muse and female creation, as well as the historical debris that surrounds them.