30 November, 1914, Monday

Vienna. After almost three months in the Hungarian town of Szerelmes, Bruno Schulz reaches Vienna.

He alighted at the North Railway Station (Nordbahnhof)* surrounded by hundreds of war refugees from Galicia and Bukovina. After the defeats of Austria-Hungary and the other Central states1 in the Lviv district, the inhabitants of the eastern regions of the monarchy left their homeland en masse, fearing Cossack persecution2. According to official data, tens of thousands of forced migrants were already seeking shelter in Vienna3. While most of them, deprived of their livelihood, end up in the barracks or quarters in the Jewish district of Leopoldstadt, Schulz passed the mandatory inspection procedure and on the same day is registered in the ninth district (Alsergrund) at Seegasse 3*4.

He received the apartment no. 7 on the second floor of the tenement house perhaps ex officio: the registration form filled in by Schulz lacks the obligatory signature of the person with a legal title to the rented premises. Moreover, vacant accommodation in Vienna* during the war was reserved for senior officials and authorities of newly established military institutions, and in the ninth district (also known as the medical district), accommodation was additionally reserved for students who joined the ranks of the Academic Legion (Akademische Hilfslegion)5. It is therefore possible that Schulz was required to provide sanitary service*. The most famous university clinic in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (AKH – Allgemaines Krankenhaus) was located there, and two tenement houses divided Schulz’s apartment from the hospital of the Israeli Religious Community (Rothschild-Spital) at Seegasse 9.

The choice of the place was hardly accidental. The metropolis with over two million inhabitants had been struggling with a difficult housing situation for years; many families, often multi-generational, havd to fit into one room, with a kitchen and a toilet in the yard. Most of the houses had no sewage system and no heating at all, and there was no law protecting the tenant6. Meanwhile, Schulz moved in with his older sister and nephew to a historic tenement house7, lived in close proximity to Dr. Sigmund Freud8 and the baroque Lichtenstein Palace*9, which contained one of the most valuable art collections in the world. It is not known what the no. 7 apartment on the second floor looked like – and whether, apart from his sister and nephew, he had to share it with other tenants10 – but taking into account the location and size of the house with a total area of seven hundred metres, it can be assumed that it should have been equipped with at least a living room, a dining room, a library and a toilet in the corridor typical for this building, intended for use by all residents.

Alsergrund was a district of wealthy bourgeoisie, the annual price for renting a luxury apartment there could even reach 25,000 krone11. It is impossible to determine the amount of Schulz’s rental fee, but there is no doubt that someone had to support all three financially. Izydor, his elder brother – an officer of the Imperial-Royal army who supervised the construction of fortifications12 – resided in the Gross-Jedlersdorf district13, and his mother’s cousin, uncle Jonasz – the owner of a sawmill in Truskawiec and co-manager of the spirits company in Drogobych – lived in the nearby Karolinagasse. Presumably only thanks to their help, Schulz’s fate as a refugee was incomparably better than that of thousands of other people. (js) (transl. ms)

  • 1
    During the First World War, this alliance connected Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and in 1915 it was joined by Bulgaria.
  • 2
    More than 90 percent of them were Jews, particularly vulnerable to repressions by the tsarist Russian authorities (Die Akten der Polizei Direktion, Krieges-Tagesereignisse, November 1914).
  • 3
    Police reports showed that about 3,000 war refugees reach Vienna every day, at the end of November their approximate number was estimated at 90,000 (ibid.).
  • 4
    According to the regulation of the Imperial-Royal Ministry of the Interior from 15 September 1914, only refugees performing public functions or having financial resources were entitled to unlimited rental rights in Vienna (Instruktion des kk Ministers des Inneren betreffend die Beförderung und Unterbringung von Flüchtlingen aus Galizien und der Bukovina. MI 11854/1914; Zenon Lasocki, Polacy w austriackich obozach barakowych dla uchodźców i internowanych, Kraków 1929, p. 11; Roman Taborski, Polacy w Wiedniu, Kraków 2001, p. 191).
  • 5
    According to a document held in the Austrian State and War Archives (refugee card from 1915), Schulz served as a paramedic in the Academic Legion (Akademische Hilfslegion). It was a student organization operating at the College of Technology in Vienna and at the Lviv Polytechnic School (its sister counterpart). The tasks of the Academic Legion included, among others, assistance in the transport of wounded and sick soldiers transported from the front to hospitals. Schulz is not listed in the archival documents of the College of Technology from that period, so shortly after the outbreak of the war against Russia in late summer 1914 he must have performed sanitary service in a field hospital established at the Lviv Polytechnic School.
  • 6
    Edgard Haider, Alltag am Rande des Abgrunds, Wien – Köln – Weimar 2013.
  • 7
    It was once the property of Ludwig van Beethoven’s dear friend, Johann Baptist Freiherr von Pasqualati (www.ig-immobilien.com).
  • 8
    The apartment, and at the same time the office of the founder of psychoanalysis, is located at Berggasse 19, about eight minutes away from the tenement house in which Schulz lived.
  • 9
    The private collection of the family has been available to visitors since 1805.
  • 10
    The registration cards of the inhabitants of Vienna from the period of the First World War, kept in the Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna, are sorted by surnames, not addresses. For this reason, it is impossible to determine whether, apart from Schulz and his relatives, anyone else occupied the quarters at Seegasse 3/7.
  • 11
    The subsistence minimum was then around 1,600 krone per year (Edgard Haider, Alltag am Rande des Abgrunds, Wien – Köln – Weimar 2013, p. 43).
  • 12
    “Leutant, k.u.k. Landsturmingenieur bei der k.u.k. Befestigungsbau Direction Wien”.
  • 13
    Currently Großjedlersdorf, Vienna’s 21st district. The archival excerpt containing the registration data of Izydor Schulz shows that he previously stayed in the commune of Gerarsdorf, and not “Gerardsdorf”. It is likely that Paolo Caneppele, from whom I received the extract, made a typographical error in the text devoted to the registration cards of Bruno Schulz and his family found by him (Paolo Caneppele, “Bruno Schulz w Wiedniu” [in:] W ułamkach zwierciadła. Bruno Schulz w 110 rocznicę urodzin i 60 rocznicę śmierci, Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, Władysław Panas, Lublin 2002).