The pictorial narrative an exuberant mixture of 850 watercolours and texts starts three years before

The pictorial narrative , an exuberant mixture of 850 watercolours and texts, starts three years before Salomon’s birth, with the suicide of a relative. Both her mother and her grandmother committed suicide; she started the project as a 23-year-old after seeing her grandmother jump to her death from a window in their house in the south of France.She left the diary, now owned by the Jewish Historic Museum in Amsterdam, with friends before she was transported to Auschwitz. “Charlotte Salomon was for an astonishingly long time an unknown quantity … but now interest in her work is exploding.”Unlike Anne Frank’s diary, Salomon’s is not a daily narrative but reviews her past, documenting the key events and relationships of a dramatic and troubled life. “Previously, [the diary] was just considered a historic document, and her artistic achievement was neglected.”Der Spiegel put the artist’s watercolours in the same league as Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall.”Everything is surprising about this work,” the paper raved. Her unblinking vision of family relationships and experience of the Nazi dictatorship have brought comparisons to Frank, though she was 10 years older.Hundreds of watercolours in the diary are being described as the work of a newly discovered major German artist.An exhibition of Salomon’s art is currently being held in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt and is set to tour Germany before reaching the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.”For the first time, Salomon’s work is being shown in Germany as art, and in major galleries,” said Sabine Schulze, who curated the exhibtion. A Berlin-born Jewish artist and diarist who died in Auschwitz in 1943 is being hailed as Germany’s own Anne Frank.

He was moved from the Interior Ministry to the Finance Ministry by Mr Chirac in March in the hope that his ambitions would be broken by the impossible task of boosting the French economy while repairing a runaway state budget deficit.Since then – little thanks to Mr Sarkozy, but that will not stop him taking the credit – the French economy has risen, near-miraculously from its deathbed, with 2.3 per cent growth forecast this year.. He was recently invited to dinner at 11 Downing Street by Gordon Brown and had a meeting next door with the Prime Minister.Mr Sarkozy also has the first requirement of a successful politician: infernal luck. He is popular with the British government, which sees in him a kind of Gallic, centre-right Tony Blair. He now regards himself – and sells himself both domestically and abroad – as a kind of Chirac antidote, a man who acts rather than talks, a man interested in what works for France rather than ideology or what works for himself. If he does so, a struggling government, repudiated by the electorate in regional and European elections, will become a mockery, unable to push through even the semblance of its reform programme.Having made such a public issue of the UMP presidency, can Mr Chirac back down? Confrontation seems inevitable, either next month, when the current UMP president, Alain Jupp?steps down, or in September, which is the deadline for candidatures to replace him.Mr Sarkozy was long regarded as a clone of Mr Chirac. President Chirac is no longer the force he was; the Chirac era is already over.The President, the Finance Minister’s friends say, would not dare to sack his most popular and successful minister.

Over the past couple of days, the Finance Minister has let his decision be known through statements from political allies.If he must choose between becoming president of the UMP and remaining pilot of a rapidly recovering French economy, Mr Sarkozy will choose – both. In other words, he has decided to call the President’s bluff: a sign of what Sarkozy supporters, and others on the centre-right, have been saying for weeks. There is a widespread assumption that he wishes to do so, not least to thwart the ambitions of Mr Sarkozy, once a favourite with the entire Chirac family, now regarded as a traitor and an upstart.After the President’s warning, Mr Sarkozy said that he would go away to consider his position. If he remained Finance Minister and captured the presidency of the UMP, a party created as a platform for Mr Chirac, he would be in an unassailable position to seize the “nomination” for the centre-right in the presidential election in 2007.President Chirac, who will be 74 when the election is held, has not revealed, even to friends, whether he plans to seek a third term in the Elys?Palace. If Mr Sarkozy did so, the President said, he would sack him from his job as Finance Minister in the government of the floundering Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.In recent months, the frenetic, straight-talking Mr Sarkozy has become the runaway favourite of French centre-right voters, ousting Mr Chirac from a status he has held, on and off, for two decades.