Dotknięcia historii

Bruno Schulz did not live in “good times,” but still history shows up in his legend and biography just once, as the Holocaust of which he was a victim. All his earlier life has been usually described as a relatively quiet existence in a small, provincial town forgotten by history. This is very misleading. Schulz personally experienced a lot of what the unquiet 20th century had in store. Without much effort, one may assemble a fairly long list of historical events that determined the course of his life, such as the bloody election campaign to the Austro-Hungarian Parliament of June 19, 1911 or the mass escape in 1914. After the Great War, Schulz’s world slowly came back to normal. Demons woke up again in the 1930s. Do the historical events discussed in the texts included in the present Schulz/Forum issue point to some biographical constant that was influencing Schulz’s choices? Or perhaps, like Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr Cogito, Schulz chose to play a minor part on the stage of history?