In Search of a Creative Light ...

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
November 18, 2002
In Search of a Creative Light the Nazis Tried to Blot
Out
By CELESTINE BOHLEN

So much about the life of Bruno Schulz, the elusive
Jewish writer and artist from Poland, was lost or
destroyed in the years after a Gestapo officer shot
him dead in the street in 1942 that it is something of
a miracle that even fragments have survived at all.

Schulz wrote several thousand letters, of which only
about 150 are preserved. Most of his artwork
disappeared after it was consigned by Schulz to an
unidentified friend for safekeeping. The manuscript of
his unfinished novel, "Messiah," has never surfaced,
despite several intriguing leads followed by Jerzy
Ficowski, a Polish poet and the leading authority on
Schulz.

Even the fragments of a legendary wall painting, done
by Schulz under Nazi duress and discovered in February
2001, have been dispersed. In May 2001 a crew from
Israel chiseled five patches off the wall of a pantry
in the Ukrainian city of Drohobych and took them to
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

The deed was done without public debate or scrutiny,
but a furious international debate erupted soon after
over where the pieces of Schulz's shattered legacy
would best be honored....

[...]

In New York the debate picks up again tomorrow at the
Center for Jewish History, where a documentary by the
German filmmaker who discovered the wall paintings is
being presented on the 60th anniversary of Schulz's
murder, along with two recently translated books, one
by Mr. Ficowski.

[...]

The film cuts from the search to the discovery, from
the past to the present, from the story of Felix
Landau, the Nazi officer who put Schulz to work
painting murals and other pictures for him, to a
transcontinental dialogue about the hasty removal of
the wall fragments, which became known as filming was
under way.

[...]

Filmed in six countries with interviews done in
various languages of the Jewish diaspora, the film is
a montage without a narrating voice, punctuated with
readings from Schulz's published works.

"In the film, I have put together fragments and
associations in the style of Schulz — in his phrase,
`the crosstalk of birds' — which means that the
viewers have to make up their opinion of what they
see," said Mr. Geissler, who has come to New York from
Hamburg for the world premiere of "Finding Pictures."

The filmmaker argues that the drawings found in what
had once been the nursery of the Landau children are
not simply renderings of Grimm fairy tales, as many
believed. He points out that the face of a red-coated
coachman resembles that of Schulz himself and that the
face of the queen — one of the fragments taken to
Israel — is remarkably similar to that of Landau's
mistress.

Furthermore, he argues, the faint remains of a
painting of a forest, found above the door of the
pantry-nursery, could well be a haunted reference to
Bronica, the site of a mass grave dug for Jews and by
Jews outside Drohobych.

"The double sense of the picture is that he tells the
real story of what is going on, but as a fairy tale,"
Mr. Geissler said. "He knew then that every day of
those days could be the last day of his life. When you
are an artist, you want to leave a message."

[...]

In his book "Regions of the Great Heresy" (W. W.
Norton), a biographical sketch now updated with an
account of the recovery and, in his view, loss of the
Drohobych wall paintings, Mr. Ficowski recounts
Schulz's poignant and ultimately tragic attachment to
his hometown.

"Only Drohobycz and its environs inspired Schulz to
recreate the charm of myths encountered in childhood,"
Mr. Ficowski wrote in the book, which is being
presented in tomorrow's event at the center. He added:
"For Schulz, drawing upon his imagination was at the
same time a process of drawing upon memory — not what
he termed `biographical' memory, whose lack he felt in
himself — but an emotional `memory of climates.' "

[...]

As the tale of the Drohobych wall paintings proves,
even the process of putting together the fragments of
that memory is still painful, but the resulting debate
has added new life to Schulz's reputation. "What is
important now," Mr. Geissler said, "is that people
speak of Schulz."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/18/arts/18SCHU.html

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