Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian Peoples Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived. Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulzs art became the currency in which he bought life. Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villathe last traces of his vanished worldinto multiple dimensions of the artists life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furore summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter. By re-creating the artists milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.