Born in Dąbrowa Tarnowska on the 1st of September, 1901. His parents were well-known social workers: his father, Karol Braun, was the chairman of the ‘Falcon’ Gymnastic Society, and his mother, Henryka Braun (nee Miller), was active in Kraków Girl Guide movement. Jerzy Braun himself, already as a pupil, belonged to the 3rd Michał Wołodyjowski Scout Troop and edited the ‘Młodzież sobie’ magazine. In 1919 he began to study Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University, only to leave the academy one year later and volunteer to the Polish Army in order to take part in the Polish-Soviet war. Later he refused to accept the Cross of Valour, since he thought he had merely done his duty. After the war he made his debut as a poet in Kraków with a volume called Najazd centaurów and edited “Gazeta Literacka”. In 1929 he moved to Warsaw, where he issued the “Zet” biweekly. It was then that his Messianic views crystallized and he began to study, in detail, the thought of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński, which he then disseminated till the end of his life. Besides, he co-chaired the Anti-Masonic Agency and spoke up as an anti-Communist and anti-Soviet publicist; but he also wrote dramas (such as Europa or Rewolucja), fantasy novels (Kiedy księżyc umiera, Hotel na plaży), and movie scripts (for instance, to Huragan, featuring Aleksander Zelwerowicz). In 1939 he took part in the defence of Warsaw and after the city’s capitulation he entered in close contact with various underground organizations, including the New Poland. In 1940 he assumed the leadership of the Christian Union and initiated the creation of the Rhapsody Theatre in Kraków, the one with which Karol Wojtyła – later the Pope John Paul II – was associated. In 1943 the Union merged with the Labour Party and Jerzy Braun became a member of the latter party’s leadership and also belonged to the Council of National Unity. At that time he edited the underground magazine ‘Kultura Jutra’. In 1945 he headed the Council of National Unity and became the last Government Delegate for Poland. On the 1st of July, 1945, he also drew up the Testament of the Fighting Poland and the Manifesto to the Polish Nation and the United Nations in order to protest against the Soviet subjugation of Poland. After the war he was arrested for a short space (1945-1946), but managed to regain his freedom thanks to an intervention of his friends. In 1948 he received the title of Master of Philosophy. At that time he wrote for “Tygodnik Warszawski”, a magazine of moderate opposition circles. But the rigged elections of 1947 changed the political situation and the environment of “Tygodnik Warszawski” assumed a decidedly critical attitude towards the Communist authorities. In 1948, by order of Colonel Julia Brystygier from the Ministry of Public Security, the weekly’s editors and collaborators were arrested. Braun was the last one to be apprehended on the basis of a national arrest warrant and sentenced to life imprisonment. While in prison, he lost an eye and had a heart attack twice. Released in 1956, he was rehabilitated two years later. He then entered into collaboration with Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, becoming an informal leader of the laity, which remained loyal to the Church. In 1965 Braun went to Rome where, as an expert, he participated in the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. He never returned to Poland and died in Rome on the 17th of October, 1975, during the International Congress of Philosophy at which he was supposed to deliver a paper on the Wisdom of the Cross. In his publicism, Braun was guided by an apocalyptic foreboding of the decadence of our civilization, which was steering the world as we knew it towards its end. He suspected that the source of that decadence was the crisis of philosophy. At the same time, he was convinced of the superiority of philosophical reflection and of it being discredited and compromised in its contemporary version. The philosophy of our time, Braun believed, had diverged from the truth, choosing scepticism and practicism instead. Therefore he criticized the spirit of irrationalism and false mysticism – everything that carried man away from reason. Corrupted by the modern culture, man was subject to atomization, losing his ability to look at himself and the surrounding world in an integral and synthetic way. Thus the world, ungraspable by reason, became strange and unfamiliar to the subject and started to arouse fear. Braun even compared that fear to the emotional state rats might experience before escaping a sinking ship. Though very intense, this fear itself would be unable to save man. The corruption went deep and was connected with the reductionist anthropology through which the subject degraded himself to the role of homo oeconomicus, or of homonculus, thus alienating himself from his own roots - metaphysics and history. The modern alienated subject forgot his destiny, which was Messianic in its nature and consisted in ushering the truth and right to the world in synergy with God. Such views were connected with Braun’s belief in an undetermined future and his vision of man as a creative subject (homo creator). His standpoint made Józef Łobodowski call him the last Messianist of the 20th century. Maciej Urbanowski observed that although Braun was very much at one with the catastrophism typical of a significant part of the elites of the first half of the 20th century, the originality of his thought sprang from its rootedness in his personal experience acquired – it should be added here – mostly during the Polish-Soviet war. Taking part in that struggle, Braun realized what the decadency of the contemporary world consisted in and, at the same time, how dangerous the latest technology could be when used to eliminate the enemy physically. His catastrophism and anti-Bolshevism – but also his criticism of modern art – brought Braun closer to Witkacy. The latter published several important essays in the “Zet”, too. Yet, contrary to Witkacy, Braun saw a chance for postponing, or perhaps even avoiding, the ultimate catastrophe in the elites’ return to Christianity. It was precisely in such a return that Braun scented some opportunities opening before the Polish culture, which had not severed its ties with religion during the crisis of Romanticism but embraced, instead, Messianic ideas, taking up the struggle for the realization of the principles of Christian faith in social life.
