Bruno Schulz

An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

By: Benjamin Balint

Narrated by: Jamie Renell

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.

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.

Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa 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 furor summoned broader perplexities about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

By recreating 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.

©2023 Benjamin Balint (P)2023 Tantor

Bruno Schulz is stories needed to be told

The life of Schulz is more than the reason for his death. Fortunately, the narrative outweighs the narrator’s obvious laziness respecting the pronunciation of Hebrew words. It would have taken very little effort to learn how to pronounce VaShem as it is spoken so many times. Similarly with Knesset, etc. That though is a frequent cringe but it does not overshadow the story of this great artist’s cut short life.