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| HARRY BRAUNER 22/02/2008 |
| (2008-02-22) |
| Last updated: 2008-02-22 14:37 EET |
Romanian culture celebrates the 100th anniversary of Harry Brauner’s birth on February 24th. Brauner was one of the famous researchers of Romanian folk music in the mid 40s, alongside another renowned Romanian musicologist, Constantin Brailoiu. Harry Brauner was born in Piatra Neamt (Eastern Romania) in 1908, into a family of Jewish intellectuals originating from Romania. He was the younger brother of Victor Brauner, a famous avant-garde painter and one of the prominent representatives of surrealism. Harry Brauner emerged as a student and disciple of sociologist Dimitrie Gusti, one of the founders of the Romanian School of Social Sciences.
The cosmopolitan cultural climate in Romania at that time explains the fact that a number of intellectuals were attracted by folklore studies. William Thoms founded the discipline in the mid 19th century. “Folklore” thus developed into a study of the artistic creations of a traditional spiritual culture. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that information was arranged, classified and studied in a systematic way. As a self-contained field of research and study, folklore was an interdisciplinary area, and Brauner was attracted by the universality of the human spirit. The folklorists’ eventual aim was to discover forms of folk creation, to test the existence of a national specificity, especially in rural areas.
Just as traditionalists used to say, national specificity could only be found in rural areas, and the city only perverted the soul of a nation through its cosmopolitan character and absence of community spirit. That was precisely why the study of folk culture attracted the traditionalists, whose main concern was to identify and cultivate national specificity, but also their staunch opponents, who seriously questioned culture’s ethnic purity, favoring syncretism and cultural exchange. Little wonder, then, that Harry Braner’s colleagues were so different from one another in terms of ideological orientation: Mircea Vulcanescu was a conservative, while Henri Stahl shared socialist values.
Dimitrie Gusti’s monographic campaigns between 1927-1928 were meant to offer clear answers to those who studied folklore. But his were also sociological and demographic studies, the latter being supervised by statistician Sabin Manuila. Brauner took part in those campaigns and took an interest in folk costumes, folk music patterns, folk dance, such as a form of Morris dance that is currently included on the UNESCO world heritage list. Famous folk songs, such as “Who Loves and Leaves” were collected by Harry Brauner and capitalized on by such famous folk music singers as Maria Tanase. In one of his field campaigns, Harry Brauner met his future wife, the painter Lena Constante, and the two of them counted among communist lawyer Lucretiu Patrascanu’s circle of close friends. Patrascanu would become a victim of the Stalinist cleansings initiated in the 1950s.
The late 1930s brought the first hardships for Harry Brauner. The Nazi’s ascent to power in Germany, the degradation of the climate of tolerance, and growing anti-Semitic attitudes had a strong influence on Harry Brauner’s fate. The Jewish minority in Romania suffered from the persecutions mounted by Antonescu’s regime. Harry Brauner, alongside other Jews, was marginalized by the authorities of that time. But the nightmare went on. The communist regime, instated in Romania after WW II, did not mean that things would get better for those who suffered under Nazi and war crimes.
Lucretiu Patrascanu was one of the very few genuine communist Romanian intellectuals in the mid 40s; his personality attracted intellectuals who were not very happy with Romania’s pro-Soviet trend at that time. The so-called Patrascanu group was arrested and ousted from Romanian politics by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Patrascanu’s all-time rival. As he was part of Patrascanu’s circle, Harry Brauner was arrested together with his wife and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Poet Nichifor Crainic and Harry Brauner had neighboring cells. In jail the poet would communicate with the great folklorist through the wall separating the two cells. Crainic dictated his poems, while Harry Brauner provided musical arrangement in the folk-style.
A few years after he was released from prison in 1968, when the Patrascanu case was reopened, Harry Brauner and his wife Lena Constante pleaded not guilty. On March 11, 1988 Harry Brauner passed away at the age of 80.
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