{"id":27459,"date":"2015-09-25T18:05:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T16:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=27459"},"modified":"2015-09-22T06:28:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T04:28:09","slug":"27459","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=27459","title":{"rendered":"Bruno Schulz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Art & Design Behind Fairy Tale Drawings, Walls Talk of Unspeakable Cruelty<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

ETHAN BRONNERFEB<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nOne of three sections of wall paintings by Bruno Schulz on display at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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JERUSALEM \u2014 He occupies the driver\u2019s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white steeds under his command and a sly smile across his lips. Bruno Schulz looks out at the world from his painting as if he owns it. But like much else in his life, cut short by a Nazi bullet, this is pure fantasy.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The work and story of Schulz, a Jewish writer and painter in Poland who was forced to illustrate a children\u2019s playroom in a Nazi officer\u2019s home and then killed, have long attracted literary attention. There was something about his humility, talent and fate that captivated writers like Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and David Grossman, who all made him a character in their works.<\/span>
\n Yet until the wall drawings for children were discovered in 2001 by a documentary filmmaker, fading and peeling like ancient Roman frescoes, they were thought to have been destroyed. Spirited out of Schulz\u2019s hometown in what is now Ukraine under contested circumstances by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel, they have been painstakingly preserved and put on view here for the first time.<\/span>
\n And while this haunting show, a permanent exhibition titled \u201cWall Painting Under Coercion,\u201d will not end the lingering controversy over whether Schulz belongs more to Polish than to Jewish culture, or whether the wall drawings should have remained in Ukraine rather than go to Israel, it offers a poignant example of artistic defiance in the face of overwhelming cruelty.<\/span>
\n There was something very Kafkaesque about his abhorrence of bureaucracy and authority,\u201d said Yehudit Shendar, senior art curator at Yad Vashem. \u201cHe is sometimes called the Polish Kafka. He took courage with a brush in his hand. It became a weapon of rebellion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bruno Schulz in 1934<\/em><\/span>
\n\"\"For example, the Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Hansel and Gretel that Schulz created for the officer\u2019s children\u2019s playroom bore the faces of real people: Schulz himself, his father and other members of the Jewish population in their town, Drohobych. Putting himself at the reins in his drawing struck a note of defiance, since Nazi law forbade Jews from riding in or driving carriages.<\/span><\/p>\n

His face is also that of the witch, a reference, curators believe, to the witch hunts that Jews faced in eastern Galicia, then part of Poland, in those months after the Nazi conquest of his town in June 1941.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instantly, some 900 Jews were rounded up and shot. Most of the rest were pressed into forced labor before being killed. Schulz was a sickly man and a talented one, and the Gestapo sergeant in charge of Jewish laborers, Felix Landau, held him aside and ordered him to decorate a riding school and his children\u2019s nursery. It seemed to be his salvation.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The house of the Nazi officer Felix Landau and, below, <\/em><\/span>
\nthe walls where Schulz drew his murals.<\/em><\/span>
\n\"\"Marila B., who was 11 at the time and lived in the house next to the riding school, eventually escaped through the forest with her family and lives today in Israel. She remembers the Nazi sergeant and the wall drawings because she was ordered to baby-sit for the officer\u2019s children, aged 4 and 2.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI would play with the children in the garden and then take them up to the playroom, and there I saw the drawings,\u201d she said in a brief interview at the opening of the exhibition at Yad Vashem this month. Loath to be obliged to repeat her story, she asked that her full name not be published. \u201cLandau used to walk around with a pistol in one hand and a whip in the other. He was the very embodiment of evil.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Landau did save Schulz for more than a year, until November 1942, by providing him with work and the means for minimal sustenance. Schulz, whose literary reputation as a short-story writer had already been established, had obtained false Aryan papers and was about to escape when another Gestapo sergeant, Karl G\u00fcnter, angry that Landau had killed his Jewish dentist, put a bullet in Schulz\u2019s head. He is said to have told Landau: \u201cYou killed my Jew. Now I\u2019ve killed yours.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Schulz was 50 and a bachelor, and though he had published only a handful of works, he was viewed as brilliant by those who mattered most in Polish literature. His reputation later grew immensely. As Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, \u201cWhat he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Always rooted in Drohobych, his work had a magical vitality to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Foto: Associated Press<\/em><\/span>
\n\"\"As one of his famous lines reads, \u201cMy colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Grossman, the Israeli author, says he discovered Schulz when someone told him that Schulz\u2019s influence was evident in his own first novel. He had never heard of Schulz, but he picked up his stories and felt a chill of admiration and recognition. Upon learning of the infamous line about Nazis\u2019 killing each other\u2019s Jews, Mr. Grossman was filled with the ambition to write about the Holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his widely admired novel \u201cSee Under: Love,\u201d a character named Bruno escapes a ghetto under Nazi occupation and jumps into a river, joining a school of salmon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of Schulz\u2019s artwork has not survived but was also esteemed by his contemporaries. Expressionist in the way of Middle European artists of the interwar era, it mixed dreamlike fantasy with a touch of erotica. Because he was an assimilated Jew who wrote in Polish and whose hometown is now in Ukraine, the discovery of the murals was greeted in Eastern Europe as the retrieval of a piece of national heritage.<\/span><\/p>\n

For officials at Yad Vashem, however, Schulz was killed for being a Jew, and his work belonged here. When they learned of the discovery, they negotiated with the family living in the house and the municipality to get permission to rescue the paintings from their neglected circumstances.<\/span><\/p>\n

What happened next is disputed, but most of the paintings were removed and taken to Israel without the Ukrainian government\u2019s permission. After years of bad feelings, a deal has been struck whereby the murals belong to Ukraine but are on long-term loan to Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian deputy culture minister attended the exhibition\u2019s opening.<\/span><\/p>\n

So did Mr. Grossman. He told the audience an anecdote from Schulz\u2019s childhood. His mother caught him feeding sugar water to flies one autumn day, and she asked him what he was doing. \u201cHelping them get through the long winter,\u201d he replied.<\/span><\/p>\n

That, Mr. Grossman said, is what Schulz\u2019s work does for us all.<\/span><\/p>\n

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twoje uwagi, linki, wlasne artykuly, lub wiadomosci przeslij do: webmaster@reunion68.com<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Art & Design Behind Fairy Tale Drawings, Walls Talk of Unspeakable Cruelty ETHAN BRONNERFEB One of three sections of wall paintings by Bruno Schulz on display at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. JERUSALEM \u2014 He occupies the driver\u2019s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27459"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27487,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27459\/revisions\/27487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}