Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and The Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint
Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and The Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint
by Barbara Morris
Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, and are complimented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually-charged imagery inflected with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint, an Israeli author immigrated from the US, presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and The Hijacking of History.
Schulz many have been small in stature and unimposing in aspect, but was expansively gifted. The success of his literary debut, Cinnamon Shops (1934), was followed by an equally impressive Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), his only other surviving book. Although he remained a high school teacher in Drohobych for seventeen years, and a quirky, self-abnegating guy, he was profoundly aware of his own gifts as a writer, building on the legacy of role models—such as fellow Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka.
Cinnamon Shops, known in English as The Street of Crocodiles, revealed Schulz’s already depressive nature, rooted in his claustrophobic childhood home, with a tubercular father and other invalid relatives crammed into a flat above the family’s fabric shop in the drab oil town Drohobych. An eccentric cast of characters, notably Joseph, a stand-in for Schulz, the father, and the formidable housekeeper Adela, wander at will through convoluted dimensions, heightened by experiments in breeding exotic birds, metaphysics and necromancy.
Schulz’s own personal travails would quickly be eclipsed by the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust, a subject that Balint depicts in unflinching detail. An SS officer, Felix Landau, was attracted to the overtones of S & M in Schulz’s artwork, often submissive figures groveling at the elegant feet of imperious women, and took the artist on as his Leibjude, “personal jew,” which ostensibly gave Schulz a protected status, belied by his eventual murder. He painted portraits of the Gestapo’s girlfriends, and completed a number of murals around town, for the SS casino, and even a whimsical fairy-tale scene for Landau’s children’s nursery.
With colorful scenes from tales like Hansel and Gretel, or a sultry Snow White surrounded by seven devoted, gnome-like dwarfs, the works cast a bit of light into some very dark recesses. Here the twisted fate of these murals takes an unexpected turn—to Israel. For Yad Vashem, the institution of Jewish remembrance located in Jerusalem, the murals represent an important piece of the history of the Holocaust. Yet their use of the term “repatriation” in reference to the action carried out in Drohobych in May 2001, where Israeli operatives surreptitiously chiseled the frescoes right of the walls, seems strained, at best. With repatriation of artworks at the forefront of ethical considerations in the global museum community, Balint’s work raises complex issues about conflicting rights of ownership.
Balint’s overarching theme of loss persists, touching on “The cold case of the missing novel, one of the literary world’s greatest unsolved mysteries…” the fate of the lost manuscript of his final work, Messiah, remains to this date unknown. Balint offers a gripping, nuanced portrayal of Schulz’s world.
Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and The Hijacking of History was originally published in the JulyAugust 2022 issue of Artillery.