Art’s tragic tug-of-war

Mark Glanville

BRUNO SCHULZ WAS BORN in Drohobych, then part of Austrian Galicia, in 1892. Following the Treaty of Versailles, the town became Polish. It was annexed by Soviet Ukraine in 1939 before being occupied by the Nazis in 1941. Schulz (in a self-portrait, above) frescoed the children’s room of an apartment commandeered by the SS officer Felix Landau, a sadistic, conscienceless brute. Landau’s surviving diary is the quintessence of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”. “I’m fine, the Jews take care of me. That’s why I send them to heaven,” is Landau in lyrical mode. Schulz’s art is filled with images of men performing obeisance before women. A fetishist with a castration complex, his masochistic aesthetic intersected with Landau’s sadistic psychosis. Like Scheherazade, Schulz traded his art (in this case, murals) for life.…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2023

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