Miroslav Brandt

Miroslav Brandt (1914–2002) was a Croatian historian, writer, publicist and polymath. He contributed to disparate areas ranging from politics to history of religions and literary translation. His polemical works helped preserve the national identity of Croats under Yugoslavia.

Brandt was born in Cerić near the Croatian town of Vinkovci. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb in 1948, specializing in history, geography and Latin. In 1954, he obtained his Ph. D. from the same university with the thesis Development of Economic and Social Relationships in Split until the End of the 14th century. (there are indications that Brandt personally wrote the text of the Declaration). As the Declaration went against the Yugoslav policy, Brandt became "undesirable": he was not given any serious punishment (neither were the other authors of the Declaration), but his field of activities was restricted. Brandt's most significant polemical work is the Antimemorandum, a vehement response to the claims of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In it, Brandt posits that Serbs controlled the military, the political system, and the economy leading to "Greater Serbian centralisation" in Yugoslavia, with the Croats being exploited and oppressed as a result. Later he was the initiator of the collection Sources of Greater Serbian Aggression (1991), translated into English and French, which included his AntiMemorandum.

In his old age Brandt turned to literature. He wrote an autobiography, Living with Contemporaries, where he paints a pessimist image of his life, with not much good to say about his colleagues historians, primarily Jaroslav Šidak and Nada Klaić. Brandt's claim that his bourgeois origins developed national consciousness and non communist worldview made him incompatible with the ideological framework of his profession which went against his whole being, is not easy to verify or evaluate. In his memoirs, he explains why he did not deal with Croatian themes (except marginally), instead using his erudition and interests to write about European and world history. Brandt's polemical statement is that Croatian historiography under Yugoslavia purposely reduced the national element to a minimum, claiming to destroy myths and create critical historiography as represented by Nada Klaić (whom Brandt accused of being protected by the communist regime only because he considered her work ultimately destructive for the Croatian national pride). Aside from the mentioned memoirs, he wrote a novel, Triptych, where he attacked communist totalitarianism. Brandt spent the last years of his life in resignation and pessimism. The available sources indicate that not even the creation of a sovereign Croatian state (which he embraced) managed to pull him away from the lethargy and the feeling of pointlessness as seen from his autobiographic works.