[Peace-discuss] News-Gazette obituary: Marianne Brun

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.news-gazette.com/obituaries/2014-01-15/marianne-brun.html

Marianne Brun

URBANA – Born Nov. 29, 1929, in Berlin, then capital of the Weimar Republic
of Germany, as the daughter of prominent stage and screen actors Fritz
Kortner and Johanna Hofer, Marianne Kortner Brun entered political exile
early, in 1933, via Austria, Czechoslovakia, to Great Britain, from where
four years later her family immigrated to the United States. In later
years, when asked if there was one nation where she felt more at home than
in others, she said, "no."

In the U.S., "Manni," as she preferred to hear herself called, attended
more than 30 different schools in New York, New England and Los Angeles.
She lived and worked independently in New York City from age 16 at multiple
jobs, including assistant to a dietetical chemist, before returning with
her parents to a defeated and divided Germany in 1948.

Manni worked then as an assistant to Bertolt Brecht, prominent playwright
and poet, first in Zurich, Switzerland, and later with the Berliner
Ensemble in the eastern German Democratic Republic (1949-50) before moving
to Munich in the western Federal Republic of Germany.

In Munich, she worked at theater and radio station assignments and became a
live-television editor at the newly established Bavarian Television
Network. From early on, Manni was active in the campaign for a united,
disarmed and neutral Germany - which grew out of her lifelong active
pursuit of peace, and her untiring determination to help build a society
focused directly on meeting needs.

In 1955, Manni met Herbert Brun, a composer. They married, began a family,
and in 1963 came to Urbana-Champaign, where he was employed at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Manni undertook multiple
assignments, including research, translation, editing and writing articles
for West German Radio and Encyclopaedia Britannica. At the same time,
largely via correspondence, she received a bachelor's degree from Antioch
College of Ohio, and then a master of arts degree in social change from
Sangamon State College (now University of Illinois at Springfield).

Manni was active in the growing campaign to end the war in Vietnam. She
became a member of the local chapter of the Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom. She also counseled numerous young men in the
application of theater arts to avoidance of the military draft, as they
applied to obtain conscientious objector status from their draft boards.

Following two years' employment as assistant to the head at the Urban and
Regional Planning Library at UIUC, Manni helped found, form and became
director of the Artist-In-Residence Program at Unit One in Allen Hall until
1986.

During her decade at Unit One, she also taught numerous courses, including
"Designing Society," which invited participants to share intelligent
imagining of a new social order by first specifying fundamental features to
be changed, and by then researching the world and logic. The technique, now
better known than it was back then, was to work backward from the
specifications to deduce required conditions as consequences, instead of
working forward from currently given conditions to figure out what
specifications are reasonable. Traces of this class over several years, and
of discussions toward what she then, long before the Internet, called a
"socially beneficial information processor," were published in "Princelet
Editions 1985," as "Designing Society: Marianne Brun and respondents."

After retirement from the university, Manni continued to exercise her
widely known ability to give valued criticism and support that improved and
encouraged, and never discouraged the work of innumerable writers, artists,
composers and political activists. She once again established a residence
in Berlin and participated in the campaign for a third alternative to
either the divided Germanys or their eventual subsumption into the current
Federal Republic of Germany. She divided her time and residencies between
Berlin and Urbana until 2010, when she returned to Urbana permanently.

Manni passed away Monday, Jan. 6, 2014. She was preceded in death by her
brother, Peter Kortner of Los Angeles and Sonoma, Calif., and by her
husband, Herbert Brun of Urbana.

Survivors include her two sons, Michael Brun, m. Meadow Jones, of Urbana
and Stefan Brun, m. Jenny Magnus, and granddaughter Lena Luna Magnus Brun
of Chicago.

Cremation rights have been entrusted to Sunset Funeral Home and Cremation
Center, 710 N. Neil St., Champaign, from whom this information is available
online atwww.sunsetfuneralhome.com, with room for additions or responses.

The family requests no flowers or gifts; please save the time and expense
to do something you otherwise wouldn't.


-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898, extension 1
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