Bruno SchultzPreliminary agreements have been signed in Warsaw for the creation of a film about Bruno Schulz, the so-called “Polish Kafka” who was shot by a Gestapo officer during WW II.
The movie, which will be a Polish-Ukrainian-Israeli-German co-production, will be filmed in the author's fabled home town of Drohobycz, which has been a part of Ukraine since World War II.
The directorial baton has been taken up by multi-talented Serhiy Proskurnia, an irrepressible force in Ukrainian film and theatre.
Proskurnia says the film, which has a working title of Waiting for the Messiah, could be ready for 2012, which marks the 110th anniversary of Schulz's birth and the 70th of his death.
Street of Crocodiles
According to the director, Waiting for the Messiah will focus on the last years of Schulz's life.
An assimilated Polish Jew, the writer was forced into the newly-created ghetto following the Nazi invasion of his native town.
Although literary friends in Warsaw had attempted to spirit Schulz out of the ghetto via the Polish underground army, fate intervened.
Accounts hold that the author had a Gestapo protector, Felix Landau, who was entranced with Schulz's artistic talents (Schulz was an accomplished painter who had taught at the local school).
However, in an apparent act of revenge, Schulz was gunned down on the street by another Gestapo officer, Karl Gunther, who had a grudge against the artist's “protector.”
To this day, many Schulz aficionados hold out hope that lost masterpieces will resurface. The author had published two collections of short stories in Polish prior to the war, later released in English as The Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. It has been posited that Schulz had been working on a full-blown novel called The Messiah.
In 2001, Benjamin Geissler, a German documentary film-maker, discovered whimsical murals in a Drohobycz townhouse. The paintings had apparently been created for Schulz's German protector. An international scandal ensued when the portions of the murals were removed by Israel's Yad Vashem Institute in a deal that seemingly bypassed the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture.
The matter has now been partially settled, but it highlighted awkward questions regarding who were the rightful heirs to Schulz's legacy.
Born in 1892 into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Schulz was of Jewish parentage, yet grew up speaking Polish, which had recently become the official language of the Habsburg province of Galicia.
After completing his studies in Lemberg (Lviv, Lwow) and Vienna, he rarely ventured beyond his hometown of Drohobycz, a multicultural town which became part of the reborn Poland following World War I. Following the Second World War, Drohobycz was absorbed into Soviet Ukraine. (nh)