COURAGE

connecting collections

György Bp. Szabó was one of the movers and shakers of the Hungarian underground scene of the ’80s both as a graphic designer and a musician. He was born in Budapest in 1953 and studied typography at the Hungarian University of Arts and Design, from where he graduated in 1982. He studied under Sándor Ernyei, János Kass, Ernő Rubik, and Péter Virágvölgyi. As a graphic designer he mostly worked on posters. In his works, fine art and music complement each other closely: he was always interested in how the two can naturally connect.

During the ’80s, his main interests were industrial music and graphic design: he played in the band Electric Petting with György Soós, and from 1983, he started Bp. Service. They played industrial music composed of electronic and acoustic noises, “with a great energy, and an even greater uproar.” In their performances, visual effects also played an important role. The goal was to transform the sounds of the city into a kind of “noise music”: among other creative solutions, they were using aluminum foil and shopping carts as instruments. One of their concerts was recorded by the radio in 1986, and even more extraordinarily, they actually broadcasted 15 minutes of the material. Their posters were made by Bp. Szabó, and he decided to preserve copies of them. As they were always playing with at least 4–5 other bands, he also had easy access to their posters, and eventually, he started to ask around among his graphic designer friends for additional ones. He also wanted to create a music voice archive, and while this latter plan could not be realized, his poster collection eventually included 5–600 pieces. Because of their rapid accumulation, it also became evident that they should do something with the posters. However, this was only possible after the transition: after several separate displays, they held a joint exhibition in 2017 using the collections of György Bp. Szabó and Tamás Szőnyei. They also published a book featuring these posters, titled Pokoli Aranykor (Infernal Golden Age, after an URH song). Fourteen of them total, and eight by Bp. Szabó, even made it to MoMa (New York), and are now part of their collection.

Meanwhile, Bp. Service remained active during the ’90s, when their records were released by Bahia, Weast, and the Tone Casualties. In 1992, Bp. Szabó became a co-owner of A.R.C. Studio, and in 1994, he started his own graphic studio (Bp. Studio). In 1996, he moved to Los Angeles, where besides doing concerts, he was a graphic designer at the animation studio Klasky Csupo. He also worked as an art director, first in 2004 at the Crew Creative, and from 2005 at Cleopatra Records. In 2015, he moved back to Budapest, where he works as a fine artist.

Vratislav Brabenec is a Czech musician, poet, saxophonist and member of the underground music group “The Plastic People of the Universe” (PPU). Before becoming a member of PPU, he was a member of the group “Sen noci svatojánské band” in the first half of the 1970s. He worked as a gardener and park designer. He left the Evangelical Theological Faculty in 1969 before completing his studies. He became a member of PPU in 1972 after he was introduced to the band by Ivan Martin “Magor” Jirous, a theorist and leading figure in the Czech underground. Vratislav Brabenec was one of those imprisoned after a well-known trial involving the Czech underground in 1976. Based on international obligations on human rights, agreed by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic at the Helsinki conference (CSCE) in 1975, the trials involving members of the underground scene led to the foundation of the opposition initiative Charter 77. After his release from prison, Vratislav Brabenec signed the charter as well. He was the victim of police repression, aimed at forcing him to leave Czechoslovakia. In 1982, after the feigned abduction of his four-year-old child, he emigrated with his wife to Austria and later to Canada. Brabenec is the author of several collections of poems, and his poems appeared in many samizdat anthologies. He returned from exile in 1997. In the same year, the PPU reformed; Brabenec is still a member today.

Mykhailo Braichevsky was a historian, archaeologist, philosopher, artist, and poet from Kyiv, Ukraine. He was born in Kyiv in 1924 and died in his home city in 2001. He graduated from Kyiv State University in 1948 with a degree in history and archeology and then worked as a researcher at the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. After obtaining his PhD degree from the Institute of Material Culture in Moscow he began to work at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He became well-known in Ukrainian shestidesiatniki underground circles for his writings and public lectures in which he openly expressed his independent and nonconformist views on the history of Ukraine and the origins of Ukrainian statehood.

Among his most important works was Priednannia chy voz’ednannia? (Annexation or Reunification?) written in 1966 in which he openly criticised the Theses on the 300^th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia (1654-1954), a document imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1954 as the only permitted interpretation of the events of 1654 in Ukrainian history, namely, the Pereiaslav Council and the Treaty of Pereiaslav, after which Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire. Braichevsky’s Annexation or Reunification? was widely circulated in Ukrainian samizdat and was later published in Canada. As a result, Braichevsky was fired from the Institute of History. In the next decade he was oppressed by the Soviet authorities and the Communist Party that demanded his public “repentance” and acknowledgment of his research “falsities”, and they did not allow him to officially continue his research career. All his works were labelled "nationalist" and were banned during the Soviet period. In 1968, Braichevsky was among the 139 Ukrainian activists who signed an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting against political repression in Ukraine and in the entire Soviet Union.

Miroslav Brandt was born at Cerić near Vinkovci in eastern Croatia on 2 March 1914. His family already left in the following year and resettled in Zagreb, where Brandt attended elementary school and completed the real gymnasium in 1932. He initially studied medicine, but then dedicated himself to the study of world and national history, geography and Latin at the end of the Second World War. In 1948, he was hired as a curator of the Historical Museum of Croatia. He became a librarian in the National and University Library in Zagreb in the next year, and then he became an assistant in the History Institute at the Yugoslav Academy of Science and Arts in 1950. Two years later, Brandt began lecturing on medieval world history at the Faculty of the Humanities in Zagreb. He departed for the College de France and Archives Nationales in Paris in the same year. After working at the archives in Zagreb, Paris, London and Oxford, he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the economic-social history of medieval Split. Later, he also wrote about the heresy of John Wycliffe and social movements in Split at the end of the 14^th century.

The first phase of Brandt's involvement in historiography and his public work clearly demonstrated his Marxist orientation. In the second phase in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved away from a such an approach in his most important work, Srednjovjekovno doba povijesnog razvitka  (The Medieval Era of Historical Development) in 1980, in which he offered a synthesis of the general history of the medieval period from different research angles, and in his studies of Russian medieval history and the history of heretical movements, with less emphasis on its social dimension, and more on an analysis of the theological and philosophical character of Gnostic/dualist beliefs. The change in political attitudes left a mark in his historiographic work. Brandt explained that his orientation toward world themes in medieval history was due to the fact that he could not deal with medieval Croatian history because of political concerns. His other colleagues were willing to write in the political line with the Communist Party, about which he wrote in his autobiographical work under the title Život sa suvremenicima (Life with My Contemporaries). Brandt's subjective stance was that work could serve as a historical source for researching relationships in socialist Croatia between the regime and the “dishonest” intelligentsia, to which he had alluded. However, the breadth of Brandt's interests was not limited to the sphere of historiography, for he was also interested in literature and translation, so that he translated some German and French books on history and literature. He was the translator of some historiographic classics in Croatian, such as the work of well-known Belgian historian Henri Pirrene A History of Europe: From the End of the Roman World in the West to the Beginnings of the Western States, and also the book of French historian Marc Bloch Feudal Society and the novels of Marcel Proust, such as  Combray and Swann’s Way.

Brandt was a professor of medieval world history at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Zagreb from 1957 to 1984. His period of dissent began when he was vice president of Matica Hrvatska  from 1963 to 1971. Brandt entered the heart of events during the national movement in the 1960s when he made a significant contribution to the writing and composition the text of the Declaration on the Name and Status of Croatian Language in 1967. After the fall of Croatian Spring in 1971, Brandt was practically removed from public and cultural life due to his dissent against the regime. In the same period, he began to suffer from the consequences of a heart-attack which he endured as a result of the atmosphere of persecution and intimidation by the regime against the Croatian intelligentsia of the Croatian Spring (1967-1971). Thereafter, Brandt appeared to forsake the socialist ideology in his manuscripts since 1971, and in a particular the Yugoslav version of socialism and its solution to the national question. At the end of 1989, Brandt returned to public life when he insisted on organizing Matica Hrvatska again, whose work was prohibited by the regime since 1971. In the meantime, Brandt secretly wrote a critical response to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts in 1986 in which he opposed the Serbian policy of securing Serbia’s predominance in the Yugoslav federation after Tito's death. The final epilogue of his criticism of communist ideology was his last work, Triptych, an historical-polemical book which was published in 1992. He died in Zagreb on 21 July 2002 at the age of 88. 

Harry Brauner (b. 24 February 1908, Piatra Neamț – d. 11 March 1988, Bucharest) was a respected sociologist, folklorist, and ethnomusicologist, who underwent the experience of communist prisons. His family of Jewish origin also included other well-known intellectuals: the surrealist painter Victor Brauner and the photographer Teodor Brauner were his brothers. Above all, his professional life was connected to music. A student of the Bucharest Conservatoire between 1925 and 1929, Harry Brauner was appointed in 1928 secretary of the newly founded Folklore Archive of the Society of Composers. In parallel with his activity connected to music, he also attended courses in aesthetics and sociology. The latter had a great influence on his intellectual development and his later career, owing to Professor Dimitrie Gusti, whose lectures he attended. From 1929, he was coopted into one of the multidisciplinary monographic teams for research on Romanian villages initiated and coordinated by Gusti. It was on the occasion of these team research projects that he met Lena Constante, with whom he was to share a destiny marked by much turbulence. In the ten of musical field research, he managed to store, usual special apparatus, recordings of some 5,000 folk melodies.

For a few years after the end of the Second World War, his career was on the ascendant. He became director of the Folklore Archive and department head at the Conservatoire, and founded the Institute of Folklore, where he served as director until 1950. In that year, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced as part of the “Pătrăşcanu batch,” so called after the communist leader Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, who was purged in 1948 and after a notorious trial was executed in 1954. Along with him, Lena Constante was also implicated, as, like Harry Brauner, she was very close to the Pătrăşcanu family. In spite of his innocence, on the basis of false testimony forced out of some members of the group, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, of which he served twelve. After his release in 1962, he lived for two years in forced domicile in a locality on the Bărăgan plain, an arid and thinly populated region, a sort of Romanian Siberia. In 1964, he married the love of his life, Lena Constante, who had been released from prison in 1962. The way in which Harry Brauner speaks of the traumatic experience that he shared with Lena Constante is moving. From the squalid accommodation in which he lived during his period of house arrest, he wrote the following to her: “Understand that for a long, unspeakably long time I have carried you in my soul, not just as a friend, but as a being who is an integral part of myself. I have lived only in the hope of seeing you again; I have survived only because I wanted to see you at least one more time; I have spent with you the days, the nights, the weeks, the months, the long and far too heavy years; moment by moment I have held your holy icon in my soul… Come, my dear, and bring comfort to my pains; let us be together; let us find each other again, and it will be good beyond all measure” (Nicolau and Huluță 1999). Harry Brauner, together with all those who made up the “Pătrășcanu batch,” was rehabilitated by the communist regime in 1968 and declared innocent.

After prison, he published numerous studies on Romanian folklore and became a key name in Romanian ethnomusicology. About his 1979 book Să auzi iarba cum crește (To hear the grass growing), Constantin Noica, a Romanian philosopher who had also been a political prisoner under communism before going on to become an important link in the informal transmission of the cultural values of the interwar generation, wrote to the author: “It is crazy book and a true one, just as your life has been. Your book has neither head nor tale, but it has a core” (Ornea 1999). It is worth mentioning that Harry Brauner was the inspiration for one of the characters in Marin Preda’s novel Cel mai iubit dintre pământeni (The most beloved of all mortals), which offers a social fresco of communist Romania under its first dictator, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, and which became famous because it was withdrawn from bookshops just a few weeks after its publication in 1980, but continued to circulate clandestinely. Preda presents the character as follows: “A Jew with a passion for Romanian folklore, a refined man of culture, who strove almost daily to convince us of what treasures lay in our folk songs. He knew laments of a beauty that sent shivers up your spine, tragic songs of parting, of longing, wedding songs, some sublime, others brutal and grotesque, the like of which no one had ever heard” (Preda 1980).