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)