Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz: Cockroaches and Crocodiles

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories By Bruno Schulz Penguin Classics (New edition) 2008, $15.00, pp. 160

An American friend recently asked me a seemingly impossible question: “What would you recommend to a lover of modern literature if you had to name just one book of Polish fiction?” The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, I replied, the collected stories by a prose writer equal to Kafka. “Kafka?” My friend mumbled in disbelief. “Aren’t you exaggerating?” Not a bit. Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz are two outstanding citizens of the Republic of Dreams, to use Schulz’s beautiful metaphor, capable of transmuting acute observation into prophecy by circumscribing reveries and nightmares as precisely as if they were facts of life. Illuminators of human nature and visionaries of history, they complement each other in interesting and significant ways.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) were born into assimilated Jewish families of the multicultural and multilinguistic Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Kafka was from a well-to-do German-speaking family of Prague, Schulz from a modest Polish-speaking family of Drohobych. Kafka’s German, admired for its cool rigor, is indebted to Pragerdeutsch, the exquisite post-classical German spoken in Prague by the educated Jewish elite. It was a perfect medium for what Kafka had in mind. Employed by an international insurance company, he watched bureaucracy driven by capitalist efficiency operating in a moral vacuum and imagined how easily it could be turned into a totalitarian death machine. Bruno Schulz was as keenly aware of Europe becoming corrupt and criminal, but he had a different point of observation. A gifted painter and draftsman, he made his living as a secondary-school crafts teacher; after teaching, he illustrated his stories and drew self-portraits and portraits of friends. He worked in a rare technique known as cliché verre, printing from treated glass plates, and excelled in the grotesque and erotic in black and white. A follower of Goya, Aubrey Beardsley and other European fin-de-siècle artists, Schulz was fascinated by the human beast and inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian from Lemberg (in Polish Lwow), and his famous novel Venus in Fur (1870), the bible of masochism.

Unlike Kafka, a cosmopolite traveler, Schulz was firmly based in Drohobych, a medium-sized town with ties to international business, situated in the industrial oil district of Galicia, the eastern provinces of Austria-Hungary, which after World War I became part of Poland. Schulz’s poetic prose has its roots in Galician Polish, a language traced by the official Imperial Austrian German, fond of convoluted sentences and archaic-sounding Latinisms, yet rich and polyphonic, spiced with Yiddish wit, laced with Hasidic fantasy and echoing the musicality of Ukrainian, spoken in the countryside around Drohobych. Fluent in German, Schulz was equally familiar with the Polish modernists of Warsaw, Cracow and Lwow and the German-writing avant-garde of Vienna, Berlin and Prague, including Kafka, whose Trial he translated into Polish.

A father-son duo, symbolic of old and new power and evocative of the writers’ respective relationships with their own fathers, stands at the center of Kafka’s and Schulz’s writing. Kafka’s robust and successful father was a family tyrant who disapproved of culture and all things spiritual, including Judaism and his son’s literature. Jacob Schulz, on the other hand, was a lovable eccentric with bad health, bad luck and a passionate interest in animals. This passion was shared by his son and by Kafka, who wrote about an ape wiser than a human, and Josephine, the singer heroine mouse of his last story, which inspired Mauss. Both writers identified with the underdog and delighted in that innocent “crumb of life,” as Schulz calls the puppy Nimrod, named ironically after the Old Testament warrior and hunter.

Jacob Schulz, given to daydreaming more than to commerce or exercise of paternal authority, failed in business and as head of household. His textile store on Market Square, located in his family house and registered under the name of his wife Henrietta, burned soon after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Confined to bed and taken care of by Henrietta and his youngest son Bruno, Jacob survived the fire by only a few months. We find the writer’s father in many stories and most significantly in Birds, a counterpart to Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

In Metamorphosis, the victim is Son, the good son and breadwinner Gregor Samsa changed into a cockroach and killed by his family. In Birds, the victim is Father, deserted and derided by all, who in his agony probes to escape from humanity by trying to change himself into a bird. Father fails, yet he is remembered as a bird by his son: “Even the hands, strong in the joints, my father’s long, thick hands with their rounded nails, had their counterpart in the condor’s claws. I could not resist the impression, when looking at the sleeping condor, that I was in the presence of a mummy—a dried-out, shrunken mummy of my father. I believe that even my mother noticed this strange resemblance, although we never discussed the subject. It is significant that the condor used my father’s chamber pot.”

Father’s attempt at metamorphosis lacks the horror of Gregor’s transformation, yet both represent a victimized male. The good son is destroyed like a cockroach, the poor father is sick and tired of his degraded humanity. The two metamorphoses mirror the destinies of two generations and two moments in history. Kafka’s experience with his own father sharpened his vision of Father’s tyranny and its consequences: the mass massacre of Sons sent to World War I by Fathers, the old emperors, kings and tsars. Bruno Schulz, Kafka’s junior by nine years, witnessed the collapse of Fathers’ empires and watched the rise of Hitler and Stalin, the Sons. Thus Fathers, represented in Schulz’s stories by the old Emperor Franz Josef I—“an embittered fox” turned into a wax cabinet doll—appear in a milder light. They still belong to the generation of father Jacob, a sleeping condor and a man of The Book, as Schulz calls the Old Testament. With Fathers gone, the stage is swept clean for Son the crocodile and his prey, Son the underdog.

“The Street of Crocodiles” existed. That’s how Schulz renamed his town’s main street as it was turned into a shopping mall, modest and discreet by today’s standards, yet in its essence the same: stuffed with mass-produced rubbish and pornography and run by “moral dregs” whose only goal is to consume and make others consume. Therefore they multiply enticements, devise new sales strategies and tempt clients with tricks and fantastic transformations. What begins as a shopping spree ends in The Street of Crocodiles in confusion and depravity: “It then appeared that the outfitter’s shop was only a façade behind which there was an antique shop with a collection of highly questionable books and private editions. The servile salesman opened further store rooms, filled to the ceiling with books, drawings and photographs. These engravings and etchings were beyond our boldest expectations: not even in our dreams had we anticipated such depth of corruption, such varieties of licentiousness.”

But that’s not the end of the metamorphosis. The antique store changed into a peep show, and the salesgirls and boys assumed the roles of entertainers, demonstrating the obscene “poses and postures of the drawings on the book jackets.” Then they turned their backs on the clients and “adopted arrogant poses, shifting their weight from foot to foot, making play with their frivolous footwear, abandoning their slim bodies to the serpentine movements of their limbs and thus laid siege to the excited onlooker whom they pretended to ignore behind a show of assumed indifference. This retreat was calculated to involve the guest more deeply, while appearing to leave him a free hand for his own initiative.”

In The Street of Crocodiles, modern advertising is already at work, providing the shopper with hallucinating inventions and sexual stimulations, exploiting infantile appetites and grown-up greed and getting people involved in an artificial new reality “as thin as paper” and as seductive as “a screen ironically placed to hide the true meaning of things.” The Street of Crocodiles frees us from all obligations and all decency by “breaking down the barriers of hierarchy” and returning us to the primordial “shallow mud of companionship, of easy intimacy, of dirty intermingling,” the paradise and breeding ground of “crocodiles.”

In his Penal Colony, Kafka describes a modern monster: an extermination camp operator so wildly in love with the death machine he personally runs that he prefers being destroyed by it to giving it up. Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of an Hourglass, where Father finds himself put away to die, is run by the godlike bureaucrat Dr. Gotard (from “God” in German), a forerunner of Beckett’s Godot.

In Drohobych every Gestapo official had his Jew, Alfred Schreyer, a musician and pupil of Bruno Schulz, told me last year. He is the last surviving Jew of a town whose population was 40 percent Jewish in June 1941, when Galicia, annexed by Stalin after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, was invaded by the Nazis. A Jew survived, Schreyer continued, as long as he could be exploited. One was a slave dentist, another a slave tailor. Once the teeth were fixed or the suit sewn, the owner who at breakfast had chatted amiably with his slave took out his pistol and finished him off before lunch. That’s how Bruno Schulz ended. He was owned by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer from Vienna proud of having a real artist paint pretty fairy tales on the walls of his children’s room. Landau happened to kill a dentist owned by his fellow officer Karl Günther. In retaliation, Günther shot Bruno Schulz in the head on November 19, 1942, a date remembered by Schreyer, then 12, as Black Thursday. He survived that particularly savage Jew-killing spree because his mother kept him at home, just around the corner from where Bruno Schulz was killed.

Bruno Schulz was admired by the Polish literary avant-garde and treasured by the leftist intelligentsia, including my father, Karol Kuryluk, to whose Lwow cultural magazine The Signals (1934-1939) Bruno Schulz contributed. During the Nazi occupation, my father worked for the underground and was involved in rescuing Jews. He told me of an attempt to save Bruno Schulz and how his escape from Drohobych and his hiding in Lwow had been prepared. On Black Thursday, Bruno Schulz presumably already had the necessary “Aryan papers” and a loaf of bread.

Drohobych was taken by the Nazis effortlessly. Living comfortably in Jewish homes and enjoying slave labor, they planned to stay for good and did not destroy the town. Even the biggest synagogue of Galicia, though turned into a ruin during the Soviet regime, still stands next to the Market Square, and at 10 Florianska Street is a modest house, as if taken from the suburbs of Vienna, where Bruno Schulz lived with his widowed sister’s family until the German occupation.

Drohobych, now in Ukraine and again as easily accessible as before World War II, is a new destination on the map of European literature. Every spring, the International Bruno Schulz Festival brings together his scholars and lovers from all over the world. Available in every language, Schulz reads particularly well in the English translation by Celina Wieniewska used in this latest edition of Schulz’s collected stories. It was impossible, she realized, to find equivalents for some of Schulz’s “Galicisms” and thus omitted Latinisms, and she occasionally smoothed out convolutions. The single greatest contributor to Schulz’s world fame since 1963, when her translation of The Street of Crocodiles was first published by Walker & Co and later by Penguin, Wieniewska gave us a Schulz in English which is a sheer pleasure to read, while enabling us to discover him as Kafka’s equal.

Ewa Kuryluk is the author of over 20 books in Polish and English. Her essay on the art of Bruno Schulz is included in The Drawings of Bruno Schulz.