Alfred Brauner

Alfred Brauner (3 July 1910 - 1 December 2002) was an Austrian-born French scholar, author and sociologist, who was a volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and an Austrian Resistance member during Occupied France. He has devoted his life to educating refugee, displaced and maladjusted children, participating in the welcoming of Jewish child survivors of the Kristallnacht and of the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz from 1939 to 1946. An early writer on infantile autism, he also pioneered the analysis of children's drawings in war, creating from 1937 the first collection of drawing-testimonials to offer a unique perspective of the major conflicts of the 20th century through the eyes of children.
Background in Austria and education.
Born on 3 July 1910 in Saint-Mandé to Austro-Hungarian parents spending two years in France for professional purpose, Alfred Brauner grew up in Vienna, Austro-Hungary. His maternal uncle, , was an Austrian-born American neuro-psychiatrist and one of the pioneers of individual psychology. In Vienna, his family held private classical music concerts at the Palais Esterházy, where Sigmund Freud was an invited guest. In his childhood, he experienced himself the repercussions of the war and witnessed his father leaving for the First World War to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army. To save him from the epidemics, during the World War I, his parents sent him to a family in Moravia. In 1928, in a summer camp for students in Austria, he met his wife Fritzi Erna Riesel whom he married in 1936. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna in 1934, entitled ""The Unanimism of Jules Romains"," a correspondence starting between the young Viennese doctoral student and Jules Romains. Brauner served in the French army from 1939 and was awarded the Croix de Guerre 1939-1945, mentioned in dispatches by his division. In 1946, he defended a thesis at the University of Paris on "The Psychic Repercussions of Modern War on Childhood" and the same year presented a complementary thesis entitled "Plan, Organization and Results of the Rehabilitation Center for Juvenile Offenders in Kaiserebersdorf near Vienna (Austria)." His younger brother William emigrated to the United States after Kristallnacht and died on 6 October 1948 in the 1948 Georgia USAF Boeing B-29 crash, which resulted in the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Reynolds.
Life and career.
Alfred Brauner began his professional activity as an educator in a rehabilitation center for juvenile offenders at Kaiserebersdorf in Vienna from 1928 to 1933. During the Spanish Civil War, he volunteered in the International Brigades and was placed by Luigi Longo at the head of a committee to help evacuees or refugees, because of his previous experience with at-risk youth. It is a home for children evacuated from Madrid and Asturias after the bombing of Guernica, the goal being to help the Spanish children of Republican territories, in the country and in the combat zone. Finally, Alfred returned to France after the defeat of the Spanish Republic.
In 1937, Alfred Brauner and his wife Fritzi discovered the trauma of child victims of war after receiving a set of drawings from a class in Barcelona. In addition to Catalan schoolchildren who were fortunate enough to stay in their school, they were refugees from Madrid who had witnessed tragic events. The Brauners made a psychiatric analysis of the children's drawings, which was for them a privileged mode of graphic expression of the young child. They highlighted what seemed to them characteristic of the child's drawing in the war, taking notes, creating medical records and questionnaires. The drawings and writings of children of the Spanish Civil War were the result of a contest organized by Alfred Brauner among the children of Barcelona on three themes: "My life Before the War - What I Saw from the War - How I See My Life after the War." It was then the beginning of their work on children caught in the middle of war. 4,000 drawings of refugee children and numerous essays were collected in Spain, which later, along with other drawings of children in war, offered a unique testimony of the conflicts of the 20th century through the eyes of children. Their project to publish drawings and testimonies of children in war received the support of Ilya Ehrenburg and Romain Rolland who "regarded this collection as of considerable educational, historical and human interest."
In 1939, Alfred Brauner welcomed 130 Jewish children from the Palatinate, Berlin and Austria, survivors of the Kristallnacht at the Château de la Guette owned by the Rothschild family and made available by Baroness Germaine de Rothschild. Brauner's intention was to analyze the problems posed in working with children traumatized by their experiences and by separation from their families, with the aim of adapting them to a new life and preparing them for integration into France. Some of the children had lost their parents; others had witnessed the atrocities of persecutions and were incapable of depicting their experience in their drawings until Brauner suggested the writing of a "book" about two children called "Peter and Liselotte", to which everyone was to contribute. Alfred Brauner then described this educational experience in his D.Litt. dissertation, defended in 1946, entitled "The Psychic Repercussions of Modern War on Childhood."
In 1940, Alfred Brauner and his wife Fritzi attempted to hide about 10,000 children's drawings when the German army invaded Paris, but almost all were discovered and destroyed by the Gestapo. From January 1941, the Brauners entered the French Resistance and welcomed the Austrian resistance’s leadership to their Rue Bonaparte apartment in Paris. With members of the Austrian Freedom Front arriving every morning at a specific time, Alfred Brauner decided to open a German Language class as a cover from Gestapo.
In 1945, the Brauners helped welcoming 444 surviving boys from the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, aged 8 to 16 years old, in the scope of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) in Ecouis, France. The children being in a physical and moral state defying description, the Brauners did not ask them to draw their past experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. Most of the children, however, turned to handwork and drew posters for the events in the home. Only one of the boys depicted his past experience in a carving of two children coming through a barbed wire fence, given to the Brauners as a gift. This welcoming of Buchenwald's child survivors in children's homes inspired the script of the film Nina's House, as well as the documentary The Boys of Buchenwald.
Alfred and Fritzi Brauner have analyzed children's drawings collected from around the world from children in about 20 countries at war, including the Boer War, WWI, the Spanish Civil War, Nazi Germany, Poland 1939, concentration camps, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Polisario, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the Lebanon War, Algerian War, Western Sahara War, El Salvador, Afghanistan, the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Chechnya. The Brauners compared their work with refugee children to "saving someone from a fire" and exhibited these children's drawings as part of their anti-war efforts, in the hope that atrocities will not be repeated. According to them, in countries where violence is prevalent, children's drawings are characterized by their realism and their substance owes nothing to the imagination. The Brauners' aim was to show that children are not blind and feel deep resentment toward the person who started the fire to torture human beings.
In 1950, Alfred Brauner created the "Practical Research Group for Children," which brings together professionals of childhood in order to develop medico-pedagogical methods intended for the education of children with mental disabilities. In 1955, he founded a day hospital for mentally and physically handicapped children located in the center of Paris, then transferred to Saint-Mandé, and worked on the rehabilitation of these children, giving priority to their education. He helped families of children who are handicapped from birth to lead lives as normal as possible, without sacrificing the whole family's well-being to that of the child's. Alfred Brauner was the ambassador of the association "Children Refugees of the World," as well as the only non-physician Chairman of the "French Society of Psychopathology of Expression and Art Therapy". He was awarded the Hans Prinzhorn medal of the "German-speaking Society for Art and Psychopathology of Expression" (DGPA) in 1976. In 1986, Jacques Chaban-Delmas presented him with the medal of the city of Bordeaux.
From 18 January to 10 February 1999, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, an exhibition was held with more than 200 drawings of children who lived through war. Entitled "I’ve Drawn the War. A Century of Drawings of Children in Wars (1900-1999)", under the high sponsorship and under the patronage of Simone Veil, these drawings-testimonials belonging to the Brauner collection revealed the impact of the extreme violence of war for the child. This exhibition, which was considered part of the "World Heritage," was then shown in Hiroshima, Jerusalem, Budapest, Vienna just to mention a few and more than 40 cities in Germany.
From 7 to 9 December 2011, a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alfred and Françoise Brauner was organized at UNESCO Headquarters, with the organization of an international colloquium entitled "Childhood in War. Testimonies from Children about War."
Honours and awards.
Major works by Brauner.
The titles of the following publications have been translated from German or French into English and have been put in brackets.
Collective work.
Spanish translation: (1981), "Vivir con un nino autistico", Barcelona: Paidos Iberica Ediciones S A, 
Italian translation: (2007), "Vivere con un bambino autistico", Florence: Giunti Editore, 