MEETING OF THE MINDS

Maxim Biller’s reflection on Bruno Schulz offers a total work of art in a slim 96 pages

Germans are still Germans, the Pragueborn German- Jewish writer Maxim Biller says every opportunity he gets, and Jews are still Jews. There is nothing more boring than anti-Semitism, he has written in Germany’s biggest weekly, Die Zeit, especially for Jews. A few years ago, Biller told The New Yorker, which was publishing one of his stories, that Germany still longed for a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all- encompassing, total work of art, like The Ring Cycle or a Thomas Mann novel, that if someone were to come up with a way to give a novel a soundtrack, the Germans would lick it up.

With his latest book to be translated into English (the last one was a collection of stories in 2008 called Love Today), Biller accomplishes something unusual. He has created a damning and sympathetic portrait of Germans, of the Poles who took their incursion as an excuse to be even more enthusiastic in their anti-Semitism than the Nazis. In the process, he’s introduced several generations of readers to a writer they’ve almost certainly not heard of and created a sort of egoless Gesamtkunstwerk, linking his fiction with that of Bruno Schulz, as well as to his own political columns. The result is a work as complex, as beautiful and as straightforward as a fibre- optic network, each little luminous thread separate but when bundled together capable of carrying immense amounts of information.

The book is an odd one, and probably perfect as an introduction to Biller and Schulz as you could want. Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz is just 96 pages long — as unlikely a Gesamtkunstwerk as ever there was — of which 56 pages are by Biller, the rest being two of Schulz’s stories.

Biller’s story starts with a letter the Jewish- Polish Schulz is writing to his hero, the very German Thomas Mann. A writer known for the gorgeousness of his prose, Biller’s Schulz stumbles trying to get the tone right. “My highly esteemed, greatly respected, dear Herr Thomas Mann,” he starts, and stops. “My dear sir,” he tries again, then immediately re-stumbles into a description of Mann’s “wonderful, world-famous novels.”

The impetus of the letter is that there is a man in town who is claiming to be Mann, a man the small Polish town’s grandees are treating as if he were Mann, so enraptured they are by even the possibility that the great German might have come to town. Schulz himself is not at all sure. “As I, like all of us in Drohobycz, know you only from newspaper photographs, I cannot say with complete certainty that he is not you, but the stories he tells — not to mention his shabby clothing and his strong body odour — arouse my suspicions.”

We slowly learn than the probably ersatz Mann has been living in grand style in a hotel manager’s bathroom, which is funny in just the way Biller can be funny, until Schulz transforms it in his letter, which is slowly morphing into a story, into a scene where Mann is beating a bathroom full of naked Poles as his metallic blue cigar smoke slowly fills the room before it lifts, disappearing “with a loud hiss into the jets of the showers — thus revealing a great heap of naked bodies lying lifeless around the false Thomas Mann as he knelt there, exhausted.”

Over the course of the 56 pages, the various fictive layers of Schulz’s letter begin to leak off the page and into his life. Two of his art students appear to him as doves, calling him to a punishment of a possibly sexual nature by a fellow teacher, a furry-faced woman and the writer’s only fan. This happens at the school at night, a place he tries to reach while naked, on his knees. The skies turn red, loud orders are given in the distance, and the doves are consumed by fire.

The story of Schulz’s death says that he was spared the initial German purge of his town’s Jews when a soldier, who had seen some of his painting, hired him to draw a mural on the walls of his apartment. He was then killed on the street in 1942, by a bullet in the head from another soldier who was upset that his own special Jew had been killed by Schulz’s patron.

A combination of this story, the contents of the two collections of stories that have survived, and the mystery around his novel, The Messiah, which did not, have turned Schulz into a sort of Keats figure for Jewish writers who have followed him — Philip Roth and David Gross among them — if Keats meant something more than unrealized potential, his unheard melodies not writ in water so much as smothered in a pit of saponified people.

In this book, Biller does nothing less than incorporate Schulz into himself, and by extension a 21st century in a Europe that is once again or possibly still embroiled in its boring, terrifying, circular anti- Semitism, at the same time smudging himself into Schulz’s world.

I’ ve never abnegated my critical responsibility of composing my own last words on the subject of whatever book is at hand, but in this case, I’d like to. Gross, the Israeli novelist whose own masterpiece, See Under: Love was inspired by the story of Schulz’s death, writing about Schulz in a piece translated from Hebrew for The New Yorker, is as apt for Biller’s latest as it is for the work by Schulz it initially described and better, I’m both sorry and pleased to say, than anything I could have given you.

“Sometimes,” he writes, “there are such moments of grace: you open a book by an author you don’t know, and suddenly you feel yourself passing through a magnetic field that sends you in a new direction, setting off eddies that you’d barely sensed before and could not name. I read Schulz’s stories and felt the gush of life. On every page, life was raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of its name; it was taking place on all layers of consciousness and subconsciousness, in dreams, in illusions, and in nightmares. I felt the stories’ ability to revive me, to carry me beyond the paralysis and despair that inevitably gripped me whenever I thought about the Holocaust or came into contact with the aspects of human nature which had ultimately allowed it to happen.”

The Germans are still German, anti- Semitism is boring, and Biller has given us a tiny and total work of art.