Bruno Schulz and the Crimes in the Shtetl

Following an overview of Bruno Schulz’s work in the visual arts and literature last saturday by Rainer Beuthel, Norbert Weber will place Bruno Schulz’s work in the context of his time this Saturday, May 9, 2026, at 12:30 p.m.

“Shtetl” is the term for settlements with a high proportion of Jewish residents, particularly for Yiddish settlements in Eastern Europe, which were widespread there until their systematic destruction during the Shoah.

Unlike in the big cities, Jewish residents in the shtetls were not merely tolerated but, despite the pogroms that occasionally occurred, were largely accepted. The shtetls were not ghettos: “… but, both in essence and by definition, the exact opposite. A shtetl was not an appendage of a Christian community within the ban, not a discriminated-against foreign body within a higher civilization, but on the contrary, a sharply defined, autonomous community rooted in its foundations and possessing a unique culture.

It was a thoroughly Jewish cosmos, yet economically closely linked to Polish-Lithuanian aristocratic society. The Ashkenazi Jews of the shtetls mostly spoke Yiddish in everyday life. They generally adhered to their religious traditions to a far greater extent than their co-religionists in Central or Western Europe.

While parts of the new Jewish intelligentsia, from the 18th and especially the 19th century onward, viewed the culture and way of life of the shtetl—sometimes with a certain contempt—as backward and a result of the discrimination and ghettoization of Jews that needed to be overcome, and regarded Yiddish as a backward jargon, around 1900, some Jewish intellectuals and writers came to appreciate this culture and eventually developed a positive, often romanticized image of Jewish or Yiddish shtetl culture, now perceived as “authentic.” Life in the shtetl was often immortalized in literature

1939: Hitler’s invasion of Poland: The Holocaust. The Wehrmacht first occupied western Poland. Subsequently, the SS and SD began the extermination of the Jewish inhabitants. The Einsatzgruppen were paramilitary death squads that followed the Wehrmacht and the SS on their advance into enemy territories in Eastern Europe. They were first deployed during the invasion of Poland in September 1939.

We examine the events from the shtetl perspective of the artist Bruno Schulz and the SS occupier Felix Landau from Vienna as they meet in Drohobych, a small town in Galicia.