Bruno Schulz - Biography

Biography

Bruno Schulz was the son of cloth merchant Jakub and Henrietta Schulz née Kuhmerker. At a very early age, he developed an interest in the arts. He attended school in Drohobych from 1902 to 1910, after which he studied architecture at Lviv Polytechnic. His studies were interrupted by illness in 1911 but he resumed them in 1913 after two years of convalescence. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna.

After World War I, the region of Galicia, which included Drohobych, returned to Poland. Schulz taught drawing in a Polish school from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a teacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole source of income.

Schulz developed his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities; a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, immersed in Jewish culture, yet unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to two states: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Second Polish Republic (during World War II occupied by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany). His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit; uneventful and enclosed.

Schulz was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. However, his aspirations were refreshed when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his family and fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction. They were published as The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) in 1934. In English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of its chapters. The Cinnamon Shops was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were illustrated by Schulz; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations were often left out or poorly reproduced. In 1936 he helped his fiancée, Józefina Szelińska, translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.

In 1939, after the Nazi–Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II, Drohobych was occupied by the Soviet Union. Schulz is known to have been working on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of the manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew, he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobych, but was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Nazi Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobych. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was walking home through the "Aryan quarter" with a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. Günther was a rival of Landau, who had killed Günther's "personal Jew." Subsequently, Schulz's mural was painted over and forgotten for a long time to come.