DOCSLIB.ORG

Visionary Space, Haunted Landscapes, and Bruno Schulz

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Visionary Space, Haunted Landscapes, and Bruno Schulz LIKE THE MEMORY OF A DREAM THAT NEVER HAPPENED: VISIONARY SPACE, HAUNTED LANDSCAPES, AND BRUNO SCHULZ by Lauren Benjamin A thesis submitted to Sonoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF ARTS m English Dr. Thaine Steams, Chair Dr. Anne Goldman Date Copyright 2013 By Lauren Benjamin 11 Authorization for Reproduction of Master's Thesis (or Project) I grant permission for the print or digital reproduction of this thesis in its entirety, without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgment of authorship. Stgnahle• .... iii LIKE THE MEMORY OF A DREAM THAT NEVER HAPPENED: VISIONARY SPACE, HAUNTED LANDSCAPES, AND BRUNO SCHULZ Thesis by Lauren Benjamin ABSTRACT This thesis explores visionary experience and mythic landscape in the work of Bruno Schulz. By highlighting Schulz's use of sensory perception, the written word, and evocative landscapes-as well as a semi-autobiographic narrator prone to visionary episodes-I posit that Schulz speaks to the larger question of one's connection to the past and the (in)ability to render the ineffable in verbal form. In Schulz's tales, the historical past, primordial myth, and present each appear in tum. This amalgamation serves to raise the stakes for Schulz's fantastical narratives: In creating an alternative world replete with visionary elements and mythic landscapes, Schulz simultaneously allows for an alternate tract of existence. I argue that these features are fundamental elements of Schulz's work and suggest that such exploration will illuminate not just hidden aspects of Schulz, but will serve also to further our understanding of automythographies of all kinds. Chapter 1, "A Sensory Vision of the Word: Bruno Schulz, Martin Buber, and The Ecstatic Body," synthesizes Martin Buber's theories of the "ecstatic vision" and Michel Serres' philosophy of des corps metes ("mingled bodies") in the context of Schulz's tales of Ksiljga ("The Book"). In this chapter, I argue that Joseph is a visionary seeker, much like medieval visionaries of Buber's collection Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions). Chapter 2 utilizes Walter Benjamin's work in Passagen-Werk (translated as The Arcades Project) to discuss Joseph's relation to the mythic landscape in Schulz's story "Sklepy Cynamonowe" ("Cinnamon Shops"). I posit that the landscape facilitates Joseph's visionary experiences and serves as a vessel of the past in the present, or what Benjamin calls the dialectical wish-image. Signature MA Program: English Sonoma State University Date: Acknowledgements There are many people without whom this work would not be what it is. Firstly, many thanks are due to my generous advisors, Thaine Steams and Anne Goldman, who have seen the project from its humble beginnings through many incarnations and somehow never seemed bored. Thanks also to Sonoma State faculty with whom I have discussed this project and who have acted as a support, including Brantley Bryant, Mira-Lisa Katz, Cathy Kroll, Scott Miller, Christine Renaudin, and Suzanne Toczyski. Karen Underhill at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Benjamin Paloff at the University of Michigan, and David Goldfarb at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York have all given me much fodder for my discussions here, both in person and in print; thank you for inculcating me with the wide world of Schulzania. Thank you to all of my Sonoma State colleagues, in particular Emily Hostutler, who helped plot the direction of this thesis (probably without knowing it), and Loriann Negri, who managed to keep me sane. Beetle, Squirrel, Goose, and Bear also participated in managing my sanity. I am grateful to my parents and in-laws for clapping for me through this, even if they weren't particularly sure what they were clapping for. And to Aleta Drummond and the kickstarter community, who helped fund the research that fueled this project. I also owe an immense amount of gratitude to Reh Irwin Keller and Rabbi Ted Feldman. Thank you for your kind talks, your honest words, and your understanding hearts. v For Adam, obviously. VI Table of Contents Chapter Page Introduction: The Secret Stays in A Tangle ........................................................................ 2 I: A Sensory Vision of the Word: Bruno Schulz, Martin Buber, and The Ecstatic Body........................................................ 11 II: Landscaping Memory: Bruno Schulz, Walter Benjamin, and the Dialectical Myth-Image .................................. .33 Epilogue ............................................................................................................................. 5 5 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................... 59 vu Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit. Sollte man ihn nicht nennen bodenlose? {Deep is the well ofthe past. Should we not call it bottomless?] -Thomas Mann, Die Geschichten Jaakobs (The Tales ofJacob) Introduction: The Secret Stays in a Tangle In 2004, Benjamin Paloff published an article in the Boston Review entitled "Who Owns Bruno Schulz?: Poland Stumbles Over its Jewish Past." The focus of the article is as tricky as its title suggests: in it, Palo ff recounts the 200 I discovery of Polish-Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz's frescos in modem-day Ukraine and their controversial removal to Jerusalem by Yad Vashem. The debate that erupted over Schulz's "true" homeland pitted Jews against Poles and sparked a controversy over who, exactly, has the right to Schulz's legacy. 1 Y ad V ashem' s actions, which culminated in the destruction of portions of the artwork, suggest that "Poles [and Ukranians] are not worthy stewards of their own Polish-Jewish heritage," while Poles who wish to claim Schulz's art as exclusively Polish run the risk of ignoring his Jewish identity, as well as the forced circumstances of his murals' production (8). Each side is not without its merits, as Paloff rightly notes, but neither are they without their blind spots. Perhaps equally interesting are the comments Paloff' s article received on the Boston Review website in 2011, proving that this heated debate is far from closure many years after the article's original publication. One commenter, offering resounding evidence for Paloff's claim that both sides of the debate cannot disentangle themselves from their individual politics, chastises the author for his misunderstanding of Polish culture, suggesting that he seeks to "blame Poles for the fact that there are few Jews 1 Ultimately, the Ukrainians agreed to gift the murals to Y ad V ashem after the fact; however, this did not stop Ukrainians from repeatedly referring to the murals as "stolen" when I visited Drohobycz in June of 2012. 2 living there [in Poland] today" (8-9). Another claims that "[Schulz's] religion makes no difference." as he was "a Polish citizen, and created his masterpieces in the Polish language, in Poland" (9). Following this, a posting entitled "One of the Loathome [sic] and Unprofessional Examples of Holocaust Research I Have Encountered" expresses extreme dissatisfaction with what the author labels as a "deJewification of Schulz" (9). In a surreal twist of reinterpretation, it seems that for some readers, Paloff's concentration on Polish ties was not enough; for another it is so central as to be offensive. Brian R. Banks, author of the Schulz study Muse & Messiah, comments that ''the only current [Schulz] sought" was art, but that "he chose Polish, and thus his identity" (9). This quick and easy solution to the debate is perhaps a bit too neat: can one really choose an identity in the same way one chooses a brand of toothpaste or college major? Is it simply a matter of what Schulz "chose"? I posit that identity is bound up in things seen and unseen, both chosen and inherited. Schulz's identity is not simply a matter of what Schulz intended or believed; nor is it a case of nationality or religion above all. Rather, each untangling of the threads of Schulz's life and art only reveals more knots. In an artful commentary on modem life, Schulz presents a constant push and pull between the quotidian and the mythic to the degree that the modem world is figured as irrevocably tied to the unconscious past. Born in 1892, Schulz lived in an Eastern European town with constantly shifting borders. At the time of his birth, Drohobycz was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a seat of newly emerged Hassidic Judaism; by the time of his death in 1942, it had weathered the collapse of the empire, its reintegration into the Second Polish Republic, and ultimately Nazi and Soviet rule. Each of these elements can be explored with relation 3 to Schulz's work, but none can be said to be the center. Schulz's work is a meeting point of many disparate centers; although his stories would bend to almost any critical reading, the larger truth is the confluence of existences and interpretational possibilities. The town of Schulz's narrator Joseph resembles the author's hometown ofDrohobycz as much as Joseph resembles Schulz, but it would be too neat to call these tales a roman a cleftout court. Rather, they play with history, memory, tradition, modernity, and identity in the same perplexing way that Schulz's biography does. Embracing everything, they embrace nothing. In truth, determining the strange interlacing of history, identity, and selfbood is a much more onerous task than Paloff' s commenters on The Boston Review website would suggest Much like art, the task of the critic and reader is not to "answer" the question of the work, so to speak, but to follow one question-which, ideally, only leads to more questions-among many. For his part, Schulz notes that art (and, I would add, art criticism) "does not resolve that secret [of breaking down insights into meaning] completely. The secret stays in a tangle. [Pozostaje on nierozwiklany.]2 The knot the soul got itself tied up in is not a false one that comes undone when you pull the ends.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Jerusalemhem QUARTERLY MAGAZINE, VOL
    Yad VaJerusalemhem QUARTERLY MAGAZINE, VOL. 53, APRIL 2009 New Exhibit: The Republic of Dreams Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting Under Coercion (p. 4) ChildrenThe Central Theme forin Holocaust the RemembranceHolocaust Day 2009 (pp. 2-3) Yad VaJerusalemhem QUARTERLY MAGAZINE, VOL. 53, Nisan 5769, April 2009 Published by: Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority Children in the Holocaust ■ Chairman of the Council: Rabbi Israel Meir Lau Vice Chairmen of the Council: Dr. Yitzhak Arad Contents Dr. Israel Singer Children in the Holocaust ■ 2-3 Professor Elie Wiesel ■ On Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, The Central Theme for Holocaust Martyrs’ Chairman of the Directorate: Avner Shalev during the annual “Unto Every Person There and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2009 Director General: Nathan Eitan is a Name” ceremony, we will read aloud the Head of the International Institute for Holocaust New Exhibit: names of children murdered in the Holocaust. Research: Professor David Bankier The Republic of Dreams ■ 4 Some faded photographs of a scattered few Chief Historian: Professor Dan Michman Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting Under Coercion remain, and their questioning, accusing eyes Academic Advisors: cry out on behalf of the 1.5 million children Taking Charge ■ 5 Professor Yehuda Bauer prevented from growing up and fulfilling their Professor Israel Gutman Courageous Nursemaids in a Time of Horror basic rights: to live, dream, love, play and Members of the Yad Vashem Directorate: Education ■ 6-7 laugh. Shlomit Amichai, Edna Ben-Horin, New International Seminars Wing Chaim Chesler, Matityahu Drobles, From the day the Nazis came to power, ,Abraham Duvdevani, ֿֿMoshe Ha-Elion, Cornerstone Laid at Yad Vashem Jewish children became acquainted with cruelty Yehiel Leket, Tzipi Livni, Adv.
    [Show full text]
  • The Schizomorphism of the World of Visions in Bruno Schulz’S Prose
    ACTA UNIVERSITATIS LODZIENSIS FOLIA LITTERARIA POLONICA 6(44) 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.44.01 Marzena Karwowska* The Schizomorphism of the world of visions in Bruno Schulz’s prose In this article I shall undertake to interpret Bruno Schulz’s prose using the methodological proposals introduced in the discourse of humanities by Gilbert Durand, a French anthropologist of the imagination. Based on the implemented research perspective, the aim of the hermeneutics of The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass will be to unveil and discuss the ima- gined figures which form the anthropological network of meanings. The metho- dological basis for the hermeneutics of the literary material will contain Durand’s theory of the extra-cultural unity of imagination and the concept of a symbolic uni- verse as an area of representation of anthropological imagination constructs1. The purpose of the array of anthropological and myth-criticism research tools used for analysing and interpreting the literary works, which constitute the core of Polish literature, is to define the author as an imagination phenomenon that seems to fill the research gap visible in Polish Schulz studies2. The process of the analysis and * Marzena Karwowska, Ph.D., Chair of Polish Literature of the 20th and 21st Century, Institute of Polish Philology, University of Lodz, 171/173 Pomorska St., 90-236 Łódź, marzenakarwowska @poczta.onet.pl 1 In Bruno Schulz’s metalinguistic artistic manifesto entitled Mityzacja rzeczywistości (Mythi- cisation of Reality), the theoretical discussions revolved around notions which today are key for con- temporary myth-critical and anthropological research and which describe man’s symbolic universe: “Each fragment of reality lives because it shares some universal m e a n i n g.
    [Show full text]
  • Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)
    Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) writer, visual artist, teacher 1902-1910: high school graduation, studies, lung disease, longer stays at health resorts 1915: stay in Vienna, Academy of Arts 1920-1923: graphic cycle "The book of idolatry", first exhibitions 1924-1941: drawing and handicraft teacher in Drohobycz 1930: Solo and group exhibition (Lviv and Krakow). The Jewish author and philosopher Debora Vogel encourages him to write 1932: Permanent employment as a teacher. After the death of his parents, he takes care of the family 1933: Story collection "Sklepy Cynamonowe " (published in English under the title „The Street of Crocodiles“) 1936-1938: More short stories, some with own illustrations; "Golden Laurel“ award of the Polish Academy of Literature 1939: writing ban in the Soviet Union - his writings do not correspond to "Socialist Realism"; bread and butter with propaganda paintings 1941: German occupation of Drohobycz: beginning of the "Final Solution“ 1941-1942: As the "personal Jew" of SS-Hauptscharführer Felix Landau he has to paint murals in the riding school, casino and the nursery of Landaus son 19.11.1942: On the planned escape day, on "Blood Thursday" in Drohobycz, shot by an SS man in the middle of the street Bruno Schulz was one of the most celebrated writers in Poland. In Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz was best known as an odd, introverted art teacher who knew how to captivate his students with fantastic stories. "Even the most notorious trouble-makers in class kept quiet, enchanted by his tales … For me his stories were an experience, a fantasy … I not only liked them, I waited expectantly for them" Ze'ev Fleisher, Drohobycz survivor Sources: Sandkühler, „Endlösung”; Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles; Geissler, Finding pictures (Video).
    [Show full text]
  • 1 International Design Competition for the Sites of Jewish History in Lviv
    1 International Design Competition for the Sites of Jewish History in Lviv / Competition for the Yanivsky Camp Memorial Site COMPETITION FOR THE YANIVSKY CAMP MEMORIAL SITE 2 International Design Competition for the Sites of Jewish History in Lviv / Competition for the Yanivsky Camp Memorial Site ORGANIZERS Executive Committee of Lviv City Council Department of City Development of Lviv City Council Rynok Square 1, 79000 Lviv, Ukraine Rynok Square 1, Office 435, www.city‐adm.lviv.ua 79000 Lviv, Ukraine Head of the Department: Andriy Pavliv Office for Culture and Tourism Office of Historical Environment Preservation of Lviv City Council Department of Humanitarian Policy of Lviv City Council Valova Street, 20 Rynok Square 1, Office 321 79008 Lviv, Ukraine 79000 Lviv, Ukraine Head of the Department: Lilia Onyshchenko‐Shvets Head of the Office: Andriy Voronovsky www.cultureandtourism.lviv.ua/en/ Lviv Organisation of National Union of Architects of Ukraine “Municipal Development and Rehabilitation of the Old City of Lviv” Pidvalna Street 4, 79008 Lviv, Ukraine www.nsau.org/orgs/lviv/ Ukrainian‐German Project of the Lviv City Council and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH Akad. Bohomoltsia Street, 6, Office 6 CONTACT INFORMATION 79005 Lviv, Ukraine Project Manager: Iris Gleichmann Sofia Dyak (competition secretary) www.gtz.de Center for Urban History of East Central Europe Akad. Bohomoltsia Street, 6 Center for Urban History of East Central Europe 79005 Lviv, Ukraine Tel. +38 032 2751734 Akad. Bohomoltsia Street,
    [Show full text]
  • Interview with Bruno Schulz," Encounter Illustrated Weekly, 1935
    On the Margins of Time The Map “A good way to the south, where the mapped land shifts – fallow from the sun, bronzed and singed by the glow of summer like a ripe pear – there it stretches like a cat in the sun, that chosen land, that peculiar province, the town unique in all the world. There is no point in speaking of this place to the profane – no point in explaining it is from that long tongue of rolling land over there lapping up breath for the countryside in the summer conflagrations, that boiling island of land facing south, that lone spur sticking up among swarthy Hungarian vine- yards, that this one particle of earth detaches out of the collective landscape, and tramping along down an untried path, attempts to be a world in itself. Sealed in a self-sufficient microcosm, the town and its countryside have boldly installed themselves at the very brink of eternity.” The Republic of Dreams [Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz] ery, the city rose and grew towards the center of the ternoon which steeped all corners and recesses in “Hung on the wall, the map covered it almost en- map, an undifferentiated mass at first, a dense com- the deep sepia of shade. The solids and prisms of tirely and opened a wide view on the valley of the plex of blocks and houses, cut by deep canyons of that shade darkly honeycombed the ravines of River Tyśmienica which wound itself like a wavy streets, to become on the first plan a group of single streets, drowning in a warm color here half a street, ribbon of pale gold, on the maze of widely spreading houses, etched with the sharp clarity of a landscape there a gap between houses.
    [Show full text]
  • A Carnivalesque Reading of Bruno Schulz's a Street of Crocodiles and Guy Davenport's a Table of Green Fields
    Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 5-14-2013 12:00 AM Through the Carnival Looking Glass: A Carnivalesque Reading of Bruno Schulz's A Street of Crocodiles and Guy Davenport's A Table of Green Fields Tamara A. Kowalski The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Comparative Literature A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Tamara A. Kowalski 2013 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kowalski, Tamara A., "Through the Carnival Looking Glass: A Carnivalesque Reading of Bruno Schulz's A Street of Crocodiles and Guy Davenport's A Table of Green Fields" (2013). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 1275. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1275 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THROUGH THE CARNIVAL LOOKING GLASS: A CARNIVALESQUE READING OF BRUNO SCHULZ’S THE STREET OF CROCODILES AND GUY DAVENPORT’S A TABLE OF GREEN FIELDS (Thesis format: Monograph) by Tamara Anna Kowalski Graduate Program in Comparative Literature A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Tamara Anna Kowalski 2013 Abstract Bruno Schulz’s A Street of Crocodiles (1934) and Guy Davenport’s A Table of Green Fields (1993) feature a collection of short stories whose depicted events occur within the realm of dream and nightmare.
    [Show full text]
  • ECHOES of MEMORY | MEMORY of ECHOES Echoes of Memory Volume 10 Volume 10
    ECHOES OF MEMORY | Echoes of Volume 10 Memory Volume 10 Volume UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, DC 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 Tel 202.488.0400 AEM.01530E.BKS Echoes of Memory Volume 10 Contents Jacqueline Mendels Birn Louise Lawrence-Israëls How to Educate the Young Generation About the Bosnia 2016............................................................... 32 Atrocities of World War II .................................2 Money.......................................................................34 Risks of Motherhood during World War II ........... 3 Then and Now Migrants ..........................................4 Michel Margosis Decamping France ..................................................36 Ruth Cohen A New Era ..................................................................6 Harry Markowicz My Grandparents ......................................................7 On Becoming an American ....................................40 Silence ......................................................................... 7 The Unspeakable .................................................... 41 Marcel Drimer Alfred Münzer Trip to Drohobycz ....................................................9 Brothers....................................................................46 Echoes in the National Museum of African Albert Garih American History and Culture ........................48 My Father in Aurigny (Alderney).................................13 Why I Feel that We Must Move On with the Halina
    [Show full text]
  • Marcel Drimer August 9, 2016 TRIP to DROHOBYCZ My "Pilgrimage
    Marcel Drimer August 9, 2016 TRIP TO DROHOBYCZ My "pilgrimage" to Drohobycz started a few days after the Holocaust Days of Remembrance, my own First Person interview and talks to High Schools students and synagogues about the Holocaust. This turned out to be a kind of preparation for the exhausting, moving, and emotional trip that awaited me. After 13 days in Israel it was time to begin the most exciting part of our trip. In the late evening of May 31 we met at the Ben Gurion Airport with members of the Drohobycz-Boryslaw group to participate in a "Roots trip Drohobycz, Boryslaw and Vicinity." The plane took off at midnight and landed in the Lviv (Ukraine) airport at 2:30 AM. Our wake up time was 7 AM. I could not sleep, being both excited, and at the same time, anxious, wondering what the next few days would bring. I left Drohobycz in December 1945 as an 11 years old child and was coming back as an 82 years old man. Our group was not a typical tourist group, and the sightseeing was strictly limited to sights of Jewish suffering. In the group there were four survivors, many children of survivors (second generation), and even some third generation. Milek, the oldest survivor at 87, showed the group the still existing house of his grandparents located near a forest where many Jews were murdered. Yael, the youngest survivor, was born during the war. She was saved by a Polish (or possibly Ukrainian) woman and remembered only her first name: Jadwiga.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Abroad
    In RevIew LIteRatuRe In tRansLatIon Reading Abroad Visiting poet Piotr sommer suggests • My Century and With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat by Aleksander Wat some not-to-be-missed modern Polish literature. “Wat is one of the three or four best Pol- ish poets of the 20th century, and he seems By Kathleen McGarvey to translate well. He was born in 1900 and died by suicide in 1967. He’s one of the few Polish poet Piotr Sommer—editor of who’ve been able to connect the existential the Warsaw-based international writing and the linguistic so phenomenally, and to magazine Literatura na Świecie (World preserve a light touch, too. Wat began as a Literature)—has been guiding Rochester Dadaist, and was able to preserve that spir- students on a tour through 20th-century it even in the poems he wrote in the Gulag, poetry in translation this semester as a vis- where he spent a few years. Poet and fellow iting scholar in the English department, in Pole Czeslaw Milosz invited Wat to Berke- a new course called Studies in International ley in the early 1960s; Miłosz taped his con- Literature. The author of a dozen volumes versations with Wat, a kind of intellectual of poetry in Polish, Sommer has also pub- odyssey, and years after Wat’s death pub- lished essays and interviews, translations, lished them as My Century. It’s a classic.” and literary anthologies. He returns to Po- • Lodgings by Andrzej Sosnowski land in May. “Sosnowki’s first book translated into His most recent work available in Eng- English—a collection of 100 poems—will lish is Continued, a book of poems pub- be published in March by Rochester’s own lished by Wesleyan Press.
    [Show full text]
  • Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Ghent University Academic Bibliography Keeping History at Bay: Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels. The origin of a story is always an absence. Jonathan Safran Foer Born into a family started by the children of survivors, we talked about life. What came before was not so much unspoken as it was relegated to all that was past. And yet somehow, despite this, I cannot recall a time when I did not understand in my blood, that above all else the one thing I must do was remember. But remember what? Nicole Krauss The painful ramifications of the Holocaust, as a watershed event in human history, extend well beyond the generations that actually lived through it – or perished because of it. Much groundbreaking research has already been done on the psychological condition of the children of Holocaust survivors – the so-called ―2Gs‖ (members of the second generation) in the words of Melvin Jules Bukiet.1 However, what few commentators have considered so far is the impact of the Holocaust on the later generations – those who were neither themselves, nor their parents, directly affected by the war, but who nevertheless seem to carry the burden of this traumatic past. While their existential position could be construed – rather facilely – as merely the next step in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, their ontological status is sufficiently different from that of the second generation to require a different terminology if one wishes to describe their cognitive and affective situation.
    [Show full text]
  • Who Owns Bruno Schulz? the Changing Postwar Fortunes of Works of Art by Jewish Artists Murdered in Nazi-Occupied Poland1
    Who Owns Bruno Schulz? The Changing Postwar Fortunes of Works of Art by Jewish Artists Murdered in Nazi-Occupied Poland1 by Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz The documentation of works of art and culture destroyed and looted in German-occupied Poland (1939-1945), as well as the active search for these works abroad and the restitution of recovered objects have ranked among the key priorities of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage since the early 1990s. In regard to questions of restitution, the Ministry of Culture is in constant competition with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: every recovered item is widely presented as a great victory for justice, while at the same time it is presented as a victory for the ministry involved. However, what is never mentioned is the fact that after the war, national institutions and private individuals often became the new owners of objects that had once belonged to private people or organizations persecuted by the Nazis. In the majority of cases, this affected Jewish individuals, Jewish communities and Jewish institutions. This attitude of silence contradicts the 1998 Washington Conference Principles, confirmed by the Terezín Declaration in 2009. It prevails despite the fact that Poland has signed both documents and benefits from them in cases of foreign restitutions.2 This double standard was blatantly evident during the international conference organized in November 2014 in Kraków entitled “Looted/Recovered. Cultural Goods - the Case of Poland”.3 The conference took place under the auspices and presence of the then Minister of Culture. The necessity for provenance research, supervision of the art market, and the implementation of restitution procedures were underlined within the context of the Polish authorities’ efforts to recover looted art taken out of the occupied country.
    [Show full text]
  • INTRODUCTION Żaneta Nalewajk
    INTRODUCTION Żaneta Nalewajk Witkacy – Schulz – Gombrowicz Translated by Tomasz Wiśniewski The way in which the works of three eminent Polish writers – Stanisław Ignacy Wit- kiewicz (Witkacy), Bruno Schulz, and Witold Gombrowicz – reached the canon of Eu- ropean and world literature was neither short nor easy. What is more, their prominence in the circles of Polish literary and artistic elite was not immediately, or easily, recognized as unquestionable. Because of the outbreak of World War II, and, then, the decision of the Congress of Polish Writers, held in Szczecin in January 1949, to pursue the doctrine of socialist realism in art, the reception of the works of Witkacy in Poland (including the theater) was almost completely blocked as one not conforming to the new doctrine, or even as challenging what was seen as the new political mission of literature. This is why, even though Witkacy wrote most of his mature prose, drama, and philosophy in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the prominence of his work was fully appreciated only more than twenty years after his death, after the fi rst publication of his collected plays, edited by Konstanty Puzyna, and released in 1962. During his lifetime, the legend of Witkacy was less related to his oeuvre than to his personality, and to a large extent it was shaped by gossip and antagonistic critics. Thus, Witkacy was regarded as an eccentric degenerate, drug addict, and alcoholic. The following excerpt from the Preface to his novel Insatiability (1930) well illustrates some of the implications of this image and its consequences: “To poke around an author is, by the way, inappropriate, inquisitive, ungentlemanly (…) Unfor- tunately, I live, and I still write.
    [Show full text]