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 People's 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. Schulz's 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 villa-the last traces of his vanished world-into multiple dimensions of the artist's 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 artist's 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.

About the author

Benjamin Balint is the author of Bruno Schulz and Kafka’s Last Trial, awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and is coauthor of Jerusalem: City of the Book. A library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, he regularly writes on culture for The Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications.

Summary

A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks

Product details

• Authors: Benjamin Balint, Benjamin (Van Leer Institute) Balint, Balint Benjamin
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.04.2023
• EAN: 9780393866575
• ISBN: 978-0-393-86657-5
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 239 mm x 28 mm
• Weight: 589 g
• Illustrations: 8 pages of color illustrations
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures, Biography: literary, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Jewish, Biography: general, PHOTOGRAPHY / Individual Photographers / General, PHOTOGRAPHY / Subjects & Themes / Architectural & Industrial, HISTORY / Social History, Individual architects & architectural firms, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / Jewish, ARCHITECTURE / Individual Architects & Firms / General, ART / Individual Artists / Monographs, Individual photographers, Social and cultural history, Individual artists, art monographs, Biography: writers, Relating to Jewish people and groups, Individual architects and architectural firms