On Nov. 19, 1942, at the age of 50, Bruno Schulz, writer, artist, and idiosyncratic dreamer, was murdered in the ghetto of Drohobycz, Galicia. Earlier that month, Felix Landau, the SS officer who forced Schulz to produce works of art for him, had shot a Jewish barber enslaved by Karl Günther, another SS man. “You killed my Jew, I killed yours,” Günther said to Landau after murdering Schulz. At least, that’s the version of Schulz’s death that David Grossman recounts in his virtuosic novel See Under: Love.
In his new book, Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (W.W. Norton, April 11), Benjamin Balint explains that Schulz’s death is highly disputed. He was certainly murdered on Nov. 19, but there are at least five different versions of what happened. According to various witnesses, he was killed by Landau himself, by Nazi gendarmes, by a Gestapo officer named Fritz Dengg, or by another Gestapo man who saw him feeding pigeons. That day was called Black Thursday in Drohobycz. A Jewish pharmacist had gotten hold of a pistol and shot a Gestapo guard’s finger, and in retaliation, the Germans were shooting hundreds of Jews in the streets.
