Bruno Schulz: writer, artist, masochist
The author and artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. He bitterly called his hometown Drohóbycz, on the Ukrainian border with Poland and a “little Texas” center of oil production, “a rich but empty and colorless vegetation of vulgarity.” From 1772 to 1918 the town was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; from 1919 to 1939 it was in the Polish Republic; in 1939-40 it was invaded and absorbed by the Soviet Union; from 1940 to 1944 it was ruthlessly occupied by Nazi Germany.
The local society was composed of Austrian civil servants, Polish landowning nobility, Ukrainian peasants and Jewish merchants. The Jews, 80 percent of the population and allies of the Poles against the Ukrainians, were commonly despised as speculators who lived by trade and deceit. In 1857, a generation before Schulz, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, 290 miles east of Drohóbycz, in the Russian Empire. In his teens Conrad fled from the oppressive regime and the abundant graves of Polish martyrs like his father. Schulz, by contrast, lived, worked and died in the town where he was born. He took holidays in the mountains of Zakopane, where Conrad and his English wife and children were stranded when World War I broke out.
A friend described Schulz “as one of those people who kind of apologise for their very existence.” Melancholy and despondent, Schulz went in for self-condemnation. He lamented that he “felt brutalized and soiled inside, filled with distaste for myself,” and with “a sense of inevitable disaster, irreparable loss.” Wallowing in his weakness he confessed, “I am not made to offer resistance, to stand up for myself, to defy the will of another person. I don’t possess the necessary strength of conviction, the narrow faith in the rightness of my cause.” He transformed his personal misery into an apocalyptic vision of the world, into “the sadness of life, fear of the future, some dark conviction that everything is headed for a tragic end.” As W. H. Auden observed of the indifferent universe: “Looking up at the stars, I know quite well / That for all they care, I can go to hell.” Schulz’s only escape from this deep-rooted wretchedness was writing and art, to fulfill his need to order the world.
The Catholic Jerzy Ficowski explains in his life of Schulz, Regions of the Great Heresy (1956), that in 1917 “despite mobilisation, he was not drafted into the Austrian army.” He had a weak heart and was considered unfit for military service. He studied architecture in Lvov, in newly independent Poland, and in Vienna. In 1923, 16 years after Hitler was rejected, Schulz was also denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was not a great draftsman, returned to Drohóbycz and taught art in his former high school for 17 unhappy years.
Schulz wrote in Polish, but his favorite authors were German: Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. He could not, as Benjamin Balint writes in his new biography, have read Mann’s “four-part novel Joseph and His Brothers.” The fourth part of Mann’s longest and least readable novel was not published until 1943, a year after Schulz’s death. Balint does not quote Schulz’s response to Mann’s other works. In Warsaw an influential older patron—and later lover—helped Schulz publish his first book of stories. Cinnamon Shops (1934), translated as The Street of Crocodiles, contained autobiographical fantasies based on his childhood.
Schulz spoke contemptuously about the sexual act, and one of his girlfriends left an amusing account of his attempted seduction while painting her portrait: “His hands glided higher and higher over my calves, reaching the knees. From the first moment I froze. But when I felt his hands under my dress, I jumped to my feet. A terrible thought pierced me—not fear (I wasn’t afraid of Bruno), but the thought that Bruno would discover that I wear warm woollen panties in spring.”
Schulz was engaged from 1933 to 1936 to an attractive and well-educated Jewish convert to Catholicism, Józefina Szelinska. Like Kafka’s fiancée Felice Bauer, she wanted to rescue Schulz from his misery, but he feared marriage would disturb his peace of mind and interfere with his creativity. In 1937 his indecision plunged her into despair and she attempted suicide by swallowing a handful of sleeping pills. Finally, he told a friend, she “grew tired of my hopeless situation”, lack of practical sense and unwillingness to join her in Warsaw. As Anton Chekhov wryly wrote about his own ill-fated engagement, “With my fiancée I broke off completely. That is, she broke off with me. But I still didn’t even buy a revolver” [to shoot himself].
Schulz’s art reverses Nietzsche’s notorious epigram, “Will you go to a woman? Then take a whip!” One of Schulz’s masochistic paintings portrays “a woman with a whip in her hand and a man perversely pleased with the blows given to him.” Another picture “depicted a nude woman stepping into a bath into which a black man was pouring blood from a headless body.” At her feet were the severed heads of Schulz and several friends. His greatest wartime fantasy was “to die at the hands of a female bombardier.”
Balint reproduces but does not discuss the important and revealing print “Procession”, in his collection of art The Book of Idolatry (1924). An impossibly tall woman with elongated legs, covered by black stockings held up by garters, wears black pointed shoes topped by a girlish bow. She has unusually high bouffant hair, long face, swan neck, serpentine arms and expansive white thighs. She covers her left side with false modesty while exposing her right breast, and her unseemly mass of pubic hair, at the same height as a kneeling bald man, rises like a forest toward her navel. She inclines her head and body as if she were standing onstage and bowing to an audience.
She towers over and is surrounded by a hideous, dwarfish mob of humiliated and tortured men, crouching ape-like or lying on the floor in slavish self-abasement, fantasise about having sex with their cruel goddess. One man wears a tall hat, others have thick spectacles or a skull-like head that resembles Schulz. The sexual power of the beautiful woman dominates the crowd of ugly men who emerge from the shadows in front of a large church with a black hole in the center. She seems ready to trample them, spike them with her heels and lead them to perdition. The effect is theatrical, self-degrading and grotesque. With Schulz, as with real insects, only females sting. He felt he was guilty and deserved punishment. He had a dead-end teaching job and was unable to support his sickly family; he could not commit to marriage, finish his novel Messiah or fulfill his artistic potential.
Schulz was not, as Balint claims, influenced by Albrecht Dürer or Lucas Cranach. His real master was the Belgian satirist Félicien Rops (1832-98), whose work he may have seen in art magazines or on his three-week trip to Paris in August 1938. Rops’ skeletal Dancing Death (1865) with flowered hat and swirling skirt and Pornocrates (1878), with a powerful Amazon leading a male pig on a rope, also portray extremely tall naked women. They have high hair, wear stockings, garters and high-heel shoes, and boldly display their breasts and pubic hair. Balint does not discuss the vital connection between Schulz’s writing and painting, and could have compared him to other author-artists: William Blake, Max Jacob, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones and E. E. Cummings.
Schulz continued to paint under strained conditions during the war. In September 1940, under Russian rule, his portrait of Stalin (like Picasso’s) was rejected by the authorities and he wittily remarked, “for once in my life the destruction of one of my own works has brought me real satisfaction.” During the Nazi occupation of Ukraine he had a soft job for a few months cataloguing and appraising 100,000 Jewish books and art looted by the Russian and Nazi invaders. He was then recruited by a Gestapo sergeant, Felix Landau, who recognized his talent and appointed him his personal and “Necessary Jew”. Schulz painted Landau’s portrait, Gestapo girlfriends and—most significantly—fairy tale murals for the children’s room in Landau’s house, stolen from executed Jews.
A surviving colored fragment of Schulz’s mural has the same costumed coachman driving two prancing horses as his “Bianca and Her Father in a Coach” (1936), which illustrated his second collection of stories. Landau, a passionate horseman, saved Schulz’s life by forcing him to practice and debase his art. But he also took sadistic delight in personally killing defenseless Jews and confessed, “Strange, I am completely unmoved. No pity, nothing.” (In 1962 the killer was finally tracked down and sentenced to life imprisonment; he was released after ten years and lived until 1983, 41 years longer than Schulz.
Friends in Warsaw had given Schulz forged Aryan documents, though he didn’t look Aryan, but he delayed his day of escape. On November 19, 1942 he was going to buy bread in the ghetto, 100 yards from the house where he was born, when he was shot twice in the head with a Browning pistol by a Gestapo sergeant, Karl Günther, an enemy of Schulz’s “protector” Felix Landau. Günther had personally murdered his daily quota of Jews and killed Schulz merely because he existed. His body remained in the street until dark when friends carried it to the local cemetery.
Balint’s Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton) is intelligent, clearly written and thoroughly researched with German and Polish sources. But he doesn’t discuss the writing and art in detail, and emphasises Schulz’s recently discovered and then stolen murals as much as his biography. The actual biography is only 124 pages long; the chapters on his posthumous life are 98 pages.
In a long comparison of Kafka and Schulz, Balint maintains, “both were sons of self-made fathers who went into the textile business and moved as young men from the countryside to the city.” But Kafka’s father was a powerful and hard-driving businessman; Schulz’s completely different father was a “maddened shopkeeper who imported birds’ eggs to hatch in his attic, believed tailors’ dummies should be treated like people and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches made him resemble one.” In “Visitation,” a story in The Street of Crocodiles, Schulz writes of the father, “Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community. What still remained of him—the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities—would finally disappear one day, as unremarked as the grey heap of rubbish swept into a corner, waiting to be taken by Adela to the rubbish dump.” At the end of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, the dead human insect Gregor Samsa, discovered by the cleaning lady, also ends up on a rubbish dump.
Their fathers did not move from the countryside to the city. In 1900 Prague, third largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had a population of 500,000; Drohóbycz, an obscure provincial town, had 40,000. Kafka, a handsome and successful lawyer for an insurance company, was ironic, even comic, about himself. Schulz, a short, unattractive and miserable teacher, was suffused with self-pity. Both had broken engagements, but Schulz never had the fulfilling love that Kafka finally achieved with Milena Jesenská. His letters to Milena survived; Schulz’s love letters were lost.
Balint states that “like Kafka, [Schulz] strips his stories of most ethnic and historical markers.” But unlike Schulz, Kafka toward the end of his life studied Hebrew, and became interested in Jewish mysticism and the Yiddish theater. Kafka alluded ironically to his ancestry, asking, “What do I have in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, confident that I can breathe” — a process essential for life but difficult for a person dying of tuberculosis. His last, agonised, words to his doctor in the sanatorium outside Vienna, where he died in 1924, were: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer!”
The stories in The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), whose title alludes to Kafka’s death and suggests time running out for both authors, were Schulz’s only published works in book form. Kafka’s influence on Schulz was indeed overwhelming. The main characters in The Trial and Crocodiles are named Joseph. The narrator of Schulz’s “Loneliness” says, as in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” “Like a mouse, I thought, ‘What can hunger do to me?’ ” Like Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis,” the first-person narrator of “Undula at Night” says, “It must’ve been weeks now, months, since I’ve been locked up in isolation.” In “Father’s Last Escape” his dead parent metamorphoses into a scorpion; in “Cockroaches” the father turns into a helpless cockroach.
Schulz’s meagre literary remains consist of only two books and a few works published in journals in his lifetime. He gave his unpublished manuscripts and art to gentile friends for safekeeping and they vanished with those friends. In his story “The Age of Genius”, the Messiah arrives by mistake and is not noticed. His unfinished or scarcely begun novel Messiah, his love letters to Józefina and even his grave were all lost in the war. Elizabeth Bishop wrote bitterly in “One Art”—“the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Schulz never learned to master loss in life but used it in his art.
Though Schulz was praised by the Jewish authors Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth, Balint, like many writers, overrates his subject to justify his book. Schulz’s posthumous reputation, like those of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, was greatly enhanced by biographical factors: his wretched life, miserable death, lost works and lack of recognition in America; the postwar search for new discoveries, controversy about his hidden murals and fashion for magic realism. Singer, with Polish chauvinism, unconvincingly claimed , “He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached.” He even absurdly declared, “he’s better than Kafka.” But Schulz’s derivative stories would not exist without Kafka. He is a good but not great author, though Czeslaw Milosz considered him “one of the most important prose writers between the two wars.”
One and a half million Ukrainian Jews were killed by 1945, a quarter of all the victims of the Holocaust. Rabid anti-Semitism continued after the war, and in 2020 only 90 Jews out of their original population of 32,000 were left in Drohóbycz. It’s important to remember, during the West’s current sympathy for war-ravaged Ukraine, that many Ukrainians fought with the Nazis during World War II, and (after centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms) cruelly collaborated with them by murdering more than a million Jews. In August 1966, when I visited a synagogue in the old ghetto in Warsaw, the caretaker told me that the Communists hated the Jews as fiercely as the Nazis. He’d survived by walking for several months to Central Asia and working in the cotton fields until the end of the war. When he walked all the way back, there were few Jews left in Warsaw. Most of the Holocaust survivors including his children had emigrated to Israel.
Schulz’s posthumous fame, like Kafka’s, is far greater than when he was alive. In February 2001 Benjamin Geissler and Christian Geissler, documentary filmmakers from Hamburg, were searching, 60 years after his death, for Schulz’s lost art. Following a tip they went to Landau’s old home in Drohóbycz, now divided into flats. They found, covered over in a narrow pantry, part of the murals he’d painted for Landau’s children. Three months later, Balint writes, “three Israeli secret agents—aided by bribery, spycraft and diplomatic immunity—chiseled five fragments from the walls.” They secretly spirited them across the border into Poland, flew them to Israel and deposited them in the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. Since so little of Schulz’s art has survived, this commonplace mural has more symbolic than artistic value.
The theft and repatriation caused an international controversy and scandal. The Israelis had bribed the local mayor to agree to the removal, bribed the Ukrainian police officers to escort their truck to the border and bribed the border guards to allow it to cross into Poland. The alleged bribes amounted to $900,000. The elderly present owners of the flat received no money, but were glad to get rid of the murals and be left in peace.
The contentious issue was whether the Israelis had committed cultural vandalism or had saved the deteriorating murals from destruction. The outraged Ukrainians were eager to extract some prestige from their by now famous dead Jew. But most people argued that “no one in Drohóbycz was interested in the murals until they landed in Jewish hands,” and that it would be obscene to build a museum in the house where the mass murderer Landau had lived and shot Jews from his balcony.
Yad Vashem offered a persuasive justification for the rescue:
The sketches from the Drohóbycz villa were removed with the full cooperation of the municipality. They were in a state of severe deterioration, having been neglected for over 55 years and since their arrival in Jerusalem are undergoing a process of restoration and preservation. Bruno Schulz, a Jewish artist, was forced to illustrate the walls of the villa under duress, and was killed by an SS [sergeant] for the sole reason that he was a Jew. As [Schulz was] a victim of the Holocaust, we believe that housing the sketches at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, is fitting and proper. Here the works will be preserved for generations and may be viewed by the millions of tourists from all over the world who visit Yad Vashem each year. . . . Therefore Yad Vashem has the moral right to the remnants of those fragments sketched by Bruno Schulz.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had 33 of his 54 books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.
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