Bruno Schulz’s image as resistance and existence: childhood, memory, absence and erasure

Abstract

This work aims to highlight the relationship between the narrative of Polish writer Bruno Schulz and the audiovisual production Finding Pictures (2012), made from his life and work in terms of the relationships established between childhood, memory, absence and erasure. To this end, it seeks support in the theory of Walter Benjamin and also in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan. Bruno Schulz is part of a list of writers, among them Ítalo Svevo, Robert Walser, Joseph Roth, Sándor Márai, Robert Musil and Walter Benjamin, who were born in Europe at the end of the 19th century and experienced, in their youths or at the end of their lives, the horror of the First World War, with some of them even going through the Second World War. When the Germans surrounded Drohobycz in 1941, Schulz, afraid of losing his work, packed it up and handed it over to non-Jewish friends for safekeeping. Most of it was lost. In November 1942 Bruno Schulz was assassinated by a Gestapo officer with a shot in the back. Before he died, he had made drawings, on the order of the German officer who protected him for a certain time, on the wall of his children’s room. The documentary Finding Pictures portrays the search made for these drawings by a film crew forty years after his death. We highlight the moment in real time in which the filmmakers find drawings below layers of paint. In this work, we talk about the search process, both in writing and in the documentary, which is a kind of memory game against oblivion, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, when saying that the search, even in vain, is as important as the happy finding.