Bruno Schulz

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Self-portrait (1920/22)
The great Jewish painter and writer, the master of the Polish word Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) lived and worked in this house from 1910-1941. (Memorial plaque for Bruno Schulz in Drohobycz)
Bruno Schulz: Spotkanie (1920)

Bruno Schulz (born July 12, 1892 in Drohobycz , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; died November 19, 1942 there ) was a Polish writer , literary critic , graphic artist , illustrator and victim of the Holocaust .

Life

Bruno Schulz was the third child of Jakub and Henrietta Schulz. The Jewish family was based on Polish culture; Bruno Schulz grew up speaking Polish , and through his mother he came into contact with the German language at an early age. The father's silk and textile goods store was on the ground floor of the house where the Schulz family lived. Due to his serious illness and competition from wholesalers, the business was closed in 1910.

After graduating from high school, Schulz began to study architecture at the Technical University in Lemberg in 1910 , which he broke off in 1914 because of his father's illness, his own poor health and as a result of the First World War . Retired from the Austrian army, Bruno Schulz spent the war in health resorts and for a longer period in Vienna , where he was enrolled at the Academy of Arts. The family house, which had been destroyed by acts of war, had to be sold while the father was still alive. The impoverished family moved into the house of their daughter Hania Hofman, whose husband was employed in the Drohobycz-Boryslav oil industry. Some time later, he committed suicide. Jakub Schulz died in 1915. Bruno Schulz returned to Drohobycz after the First World War, which he never left until the end of his life, with the exception of stays in Warsaw, trips within Poland, a trip to Paris and a boat trip to Denmark.

After the war, Schulz taught himself painting and graphics. In the period between 1920 and 1922, the series of graphics Xięga Bałwochwalcza ( The Book of Idolatry ) was created. Schulz made the acquaintance of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz , got to know the philosopher and writer Debora Vogel through him and, in correspondence with her, began to devote himself more to linguistic design. It is thanks to your support that the stories were discovered. Schulz worked as a drawing teacher from 1924 to 1941, and only got a permanent position in 1932. In letters to friends, Schulz repeatedly complained about the boredom and excessive demands of this job, which left him little time to write. However, after the death of his mother in 1931 and three years later of his older brother, Schulz was dependent on this occupation, as he was responsible for family maintenance.

In 1933, on the intercession of the Polish poet Zofia Nałkowska, the short story series Die Zimtläden was printed. The publication of his stories quickly made him known within Poland. Attempts to translate them into other European languages, however, failed during his lifetime. Contrary to other sources, Schulz was only involved in the translation of Kafka's novel The Trial into Polish as an advisor to his fiancée Józefina Szelińska . She translated, he provided his name to speed up the publication of the translation.

After the Red Army marched into eastern Poland in September 1939, Schulz earned his living by, among other things, painting propaganda pictures for the new rulers. For a while he worked in the library of the former monastery in Chyrów (ukr. Chyriv ). When the German army advanced as far as Galicia after the attack on the Soviet Union, Schulz had to move to the Drohobycz ghetto in 1941 .

As a painter and draftsman, he found a protector, albeit a dubious one, in SS-Hauptscharführer Felix Landau . Schulz was forced to paint the children's room of a villa that Landau had confiscated with frescoes showing scenes from German fairy tales. They were discovered in 2001 by the German documentary director Benjamin Geissler . The search for the murals and the affair of their illegal export to Yad Vashem are documented by Geissler's film Finding Images . On November 19, 1942, shortly before his planned escape from the ghetto, Schulz was shot in the street by Landau's SS colleague Karl Günther, probably out of displeasure against Schulz's patron, who had previously shot Günther's personal dentist Löwe. Günther zu Landau is said to have said afterwards: "You killed my Jew - and I killed yours!" It is difficult to reconstruct the circumstances of death precisely because of contradicting oral testimony. His grave is not known.

memory

In Drohobycz no major efforts were made to keep the memory of Bruno Schulz alive for a long time. His parents' house is no longer there and the Villa Landau he painted is in very poor condition. At the place where he was murdered, there was a memorial plaque until 2008, which has since been renewed (as of 2014). The Jewish cemetery in Drohobycz was destroyed after the war and had to make way for a new housing estate. A memorial plaque was attached to the house where Schulz lived. In 2003, a Bruno Schulz Museum was opened in the Pedagogical University and Schulz's birthday was officially celebrated for the first time. The Bruno Schulz Festival has been taking place in Drohobytsch every two years since 2004, in which well-known writers and artists, especially from Ukraine and Poland, take part.

In 2013 , as in other places before, a virtual reconstruction of the pictures that Geissler had taken was shown in Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau .

The Austrian rock band “Nebenjob” wrote the song Who shot Bruno Schulz? In memory of Bruno Schulz. dedicated, which was presented for the first time in 2011 in a live concert in Vienna.

The literary work

Bruno Schulz wrote autobiographically inspired narratives which, according to his own statements, he wanted to transfer into a “mythological” dimension. The stories largely revolve around the character Jakub , who takes refuge in a world of the spirit , based on his father Jakub Schulz, and his antagonistic and erotic interactions with Adela , the housekeeper who is oriented towards practical life. The narrative perspective is assigned to Jakub's son Józef , who in a peculiar mixture of childish-intensive perception (sensitivity for colors, moods, search for secret meaning) and a demanding reflexive level (high frequency of foreign words, integrated theoretical fragments) is not clearly identified as a "child" or "Adult" can be recognized.

Bruno Schulz made his debut in 1933 in the newspaper Wiadomości Literackie (German literary news ) with the story Ptaki (German birds ); shortly afterwards his first volume appeared in the Warsaw publishing house Rój with stories Sklepy Cynamonowe ( Eng . The cinnamon shops ). In 1936 the second volume Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą (Eng. The Sanatorium for the Hourglass ) was published by the same publisher .

Stylistically, Schulz's stories were already described as “complicated” in contemporary reception, and in some cases they were also criticized politically because of their lack of clarity. “Left” critics accused Schulz of his infatuation with the formal, or the dimension of temporality, while some “right” critics rejected his work as “Jewish” and “degenerate”. The wealth of metaphors, the extensive, e.g. Descriptions with a partly symbolistic touch and the ironically broken excursions into the genre of the fantastic make his stories, in spite of their historical charge, actually partly hermetic .

Typical are the grids of dualisms named by the Polish-Jewish literary critic Artur Sandauer in the preface to the Polish post-war edition . Sandauer classifies these dualisms in a fundamental antagonistic relationship between the 19th and 20th centuries that Schulz invokes:

  • Father figure - mother figure
  • Past present
  • Province - industrial city
  • Tradition - progress
  • Childhood - adulthood
  • Innocence - sin
  • Man Woman
  • Soul - body
  • Spirit - matter
  • Dream - reality
  • Original kitsch

From here it is not far to an assessment that the stories by Bruno Schulz contain a cultural criticism (e.g. in the sense of Oswald Spengler ), a line of interpretation that was often represented in Polish reception in the 1970s to 1980s.

Other attempts at interpretation make greater efforts to classify them in terms of epoch or genre history and discuss Schulz's relationship to symbolism, expressionism or surrealism. A third strand of reception is the autobiographical-reconstructive one, which comes particularly from the school of Jerzy Ficowski . Another approach tries to classify Bruno Schulz's work in the Jewish tradition, especially in currents of heretical messianism (Władysław Panas).

Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 work “Tree of Codes” also belongs to the expanded reception history : Foer took a copy of “The Street of Crocodiles” (an English-language edition of the “Cinnamon Shops”) and cut gaps in the text through which one could write a new one Can read history from Schulz's original text.

Works

  • The sanatorium to the hourglass. Translated from Polish by Doreen Daume . Hanser, Munich 2011.
  • The cinnamon shops. New translation by Doreen Daume. Hanser, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-446-23003-3 .
  • The graphic work. Edited by Wojciech Chmurzynski. dtv, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-12823-2 .
  • Collected Works. Hanser, Munich 1992.
    • The cinnamon shops and all the other stories. German by Josef Hahn. ISBN 3-446-17055-3 .
    • Reality is the shadow of the word. Essays and letters. German by Mikolaj Dutsch and Josef Hahn. ISBN 3-446-17056-1 .
  • The book of idols. Interpress, Warsaw 1988, ISBN 83-223-2420-0 .
  • The republic of dreams. Fragments, essays, letters, graphics. Edited by Mikołaj Dutsch. German by Josef Hahn and Mikołaj Dutsch. Hanser, Munich 1967.
  • The cinnamon shops, with an afterword by Anrdzej Wirth. German by Josef Hahn. Hanser, Munich 1961.
  • The cinnamon shops and other stories. With an afterword by Jutta Janke, German by Josef Hahn. Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1970.

Radio play adaptations

How Jakub, my father, turned away from us. Radio play after the cinnamon shops and other stories by Bruno Schulz. Translated from the Polish by Josef Hahn / Mikolaj Dutsch. With Walter Renneisen , Horst Bollmann , Grete Wurm , Werner Wölbern, Gabriela Maria Schmeide. Music collage, arrangement and direction: Heinz von Cramer . Hessischer Rundfunk 1998.

Film adaptations

The Polish director Wojciech Has filmed The Sanatorium on the obituary notice in 1973 (Polish original title: Sanatorium pod klepsydrą ). In 1986, a 20-minute adaptation by the American brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay ( Brothers Quay ) appeared under the title Street of Crocodiles .

Epic

literature

  • Bruno Schulz. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 11, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1999,ISBN 3-7001-2803-7, p. 342 f. (Direct links on p. 342 , p. 343 ).
  • Jörn Ahrens: Fantasy and death in the narrative work of Bruno Schulz. In: Z. Journal for cultural and human sciences. H. 14, Fosse, Hannover 1997, ISSN  0945-0580 ; again in dsb., strikethroughs. Essays on Death and Literature. Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3826020626 , pp. 41–55 (readable online in Google books )
  • Czeslaw Z. Prokopczyk (Ed.): Bruno Schulz. New documents and interpretations. Lang, New York 1999, ISBN 0-8204-3367-5 .
  • Claus Stephani: "Not to live life ..." Encounter with Bruno Schulz in Munich. In: Israel Nachrichten (Tel Aviv), No. 10121, July 5, 2002, pp. 6-7.
  • Claus Stephani: The greatest misfortune - not living out life. Exhibition about the writer and painter Bruno Schulz in the Munich Polish Cultural Center. In: Kulturpolitische Korrespondenz (Bonn), No. 1153, July 30, 2002, pp. 18–21.
  • Claus Stephani: Code of a vanished world. “Encounters” with Bruno Schulz on his 100th birthday. In: David. Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift (Vienna), Vol. 15, No. 54, Sept. 2002, pp. 18-19. ( online )
  • Włodzimierz Bolecki, Jerzy Jarzębski, Stanisław Rosiek (eds.): Słownik schulzowski. słowo / obraz terytoria, Gdańsk 2003, ISBN 83-89405-80-6 .
  • Jerzy Ficowski : Regions of great heresy. Bruno Schulz, a biography portrait. Norton, New York 2003, ISBN 0-393-05147-1 .
  • Lukasz Kossowski (Ed.): Bruno Schulz, the word and the image. Exhibition catalog. German Poland Institute , Warsaw 2003, ISBN 83-89378-03-5 .
  • Claus Stephani: The image of the Jew in modern painting. An introduction. / Imaginea evreului în pictura modernă. Introductiv study. (Bilingual edition, German-Romanian. Ediţie bilingvă, româno-germană.) Editura Hasefer, Bucureşti 2005. ISBN 973-630-091-9 .
  • Günter Blöcker: Bruno Schulz - The cinnamon shops. In: Günter Blöcker - critical reading book. Literature of our time in sample and report, Leibniz-Verlag Hamburg 1962, pp. 88–91
  • Jörg Schulte: A poetics of revelation. Isaak Babel, Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-447-04846-8 .
  • Brian R. Banks: Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz. London 2006, ISBN 978-09551829-5-2 .
  • Roman Lach, Thomas Markwart: Ghost Landscape Galicia. Karl Emil Franzos, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Joseph Roth, Alfred Döblin, Bruno Schulz. ( PDF file; 198 kB )
  • Bruno Schulz: 1892–1942. An artist's life in Galicia. Translated and edited for the German edition by Friedrich Griese. Hanser, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-446-23014-9 .
  • Janis Augsburger: Masochisms. Mythologization as a crisis aesthetic in Bruno Schulz. Wehrhahn, Hannover 2008, ISBN 978-3-86525-085-8 .
  • Paolo Caneppele: The Republic of Dreams. Bruno Schulz and his world of images. Clio, Graz 2010, ISBN 978-3-902542-13-7
  • Benjamin Geissler: Bruno Schulz's picture chamber: the last work of a genius. - Exhibition catalog , Hamburg: Benjamin Geissler, 2012
  • Juraschek, Anna: The salvation of the picture in the word. Bruno Schulz's picture idea in his prosaic and pictorial work. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-525-30085-5

Web links

Wikiquote: Bruno Schulz  - Quotes
Commons : Bruno Schulz  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual references / comments

  1. ↑ cf. Doreen Daume: A bridge abroad. Epilogue to The Cinnamon Shops . Hanser, Munich 2008, p. 213.
  2. ↑ Alexander Emanuely : The three musketeers in the dead class. Gombrowicz, Schulz, Witkacy, cantor. (No longer available online.) In: Context XXI. Archived from the original on March 24, 2016 ; Retrieved May 7, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.contextxxi.at
  3. ↑ Jewish, German, Austrian / A literary search for traces in the Ukraine shows what all this may have been, but above all what is no longer. ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. At www.ostdeutscher-kulturrat.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ostdeutscher-kulturrat.de
  4. ↑ Bruno Schulz Museum opened in Drohobytsch. On WeltOnline
  5. ↑ http://www.brunoschulzfestival.org/
  6. ↑ The fairy tales in the SS playroom. In FAZ of May 13, 2013, page 30.
  7. ↑ Part-time job - the band. Retrieved December 28, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Video recording on YouTube
  9. ↑ Marta Kijowska: “Wilde aberrations of time” , review of “The Sanatorium of the Hourglass”, on Deutschlandradio , June 1, 2011
  10. ^ Review of the cinnamon shops in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  11. ↑ Review Die Zimtläden Die Welt
  12. ^ Street of Crocodiles. IMDb.com, Inc, accessed January 30, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Schulz, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish writer, literary critic, graphic artist and draftsman
DATE OF BIRTH July 12, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Drohobych , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 19, 1942
Place of death Drohobych , Poland