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. 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, Erwin Wexberg, 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).