Bruno Schulz by Benjamin Balint

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History
By Benjamin Balint
WW Norton 2023

One of the bleakest, saddest little side-stories from the million born of the Second World War is the subject of Benjamin Balint’s new book and its melodramatic subtitle, Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History. Balint’s book Kafka’s Last Trial was a hard marvel of compressed, sardonic anger, and his new book is every bit as moving.

Its subject is the writer and artist Bruno Schulz, author of Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and The Street of Crocodiles and an array of short stories and literary essays. Schulz had been born in 1892 in Drohobycz, in modern-day Ukraine, and by 1938 he’d won wide critical acclaim. 

Acclaim or no, he ended up penned into the Nazi ghetto Drohobycz became and reduced to the same desperate existence as all his countrymen. That desperation took many forms; with Schulz, it came in the form of a baleful serendipity. He encountered a Nazi officer named Felix Landau and learned that his artistic ability (very like his literary ability in scope and skill) could answer a deep need in Landau’s heart. Balint describes this relationship with the combination of anger and sympathy that runs through the book:

The masochistic, female-worshipping aesthetics of Schulz’s artworks caught the eye of Felix Landau, a sadist beyond Schulz’s imaginings who feared becoming engulfed by his own stifled sexual proclivities. Schulz’s images did more than attract – his drawings and etchings prompted in Laudau something like a rapturous return of the repressed … Here the imagination  of masochism – the fantasies of expatiating some indefinite guilt by means of unconditional obedience – met the actuality of sadism. The need to provoke punishment met the uninhibited powerful punisher … with Landau, the Nazi art of power met Schulz’s power of art.

Landau boasted to his friends and comrades that he was keeping his “house Jew” alive with extra rations (a daily slice of bread and bowl of soup) at a time when twenty to thirty Jews were dying of starvation every day in Drohobycz. Schulz made sketches, etchings, and murals for Landau (their complicated postwar fate forms a large portion of Balint’s book), and in exchange, he gained a small scrap of personal advantage, a slight bit of added security.

It didn’t end up mattering, of course. Schulz was still murdered. Balint gives his readers all of the known accounts of his subject’s death, in all of their greatly-varying details. Who shot Schulz? When? Why? The various accounts differ on almost all these elements, but Balint concentrates fixedly on the thing they all share:

Of one thing we can be sure: neither Schulz’s artistic achievements nor his formal renunciation, six years earlier, of his belonging to the Jewish community carried any weight for his murderer. Recall Józefina’s observation that Schulz saw in every person some resemblance to animals. The end of Schulz’s life was determined by people who behaved like predatory beasts.

Balint shrewdly shapes his book as equal parts biography and a kind of heartbreaking psalmody on the variability of legend. It’s all written with a subtlety and lean beauty that perfectly befits the doomed figure at its center. And if it wins Bruno Schulz more readers, there’s at least a sad gesture at permanence in that.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.