The pinnacle was at the beginning
Milan Horáček was born October 30, 1946 in Velké Losiny near Šumperk. His father came from Moravia and his mother was a German, but she was allowed to stay in Czechoslovakia after the end of the war. They spoke Czech at home, but in spite of this little Milan still experienced ever-present anti-German sentiments. He learnt the electrical fitter‘s trade. Already while he was a young man he criticized the communist regime and the closed country borders. As a politically unreliable he was assigned to work in the road construction squad, the former Auxiliary Technical Battalions, in place of his compulsory military service. In 1967 he was accused of staging a revolt that was motivated by shortage of proper food, and he spent several weeks in solitary confinement. After the Soviet invasion in August 1968 Milan and his friend František decided to escape to West Germany, where his mother and his two sisters had already emigrated earlier. Both of them worked in a factory for upholstered furniture there for some time, and then they moved to Frankfurt to start a better job. Milan Horáček became involved in exile work there, and he was publishing the German version of Pelikan‘s Listy. At the end of the 1970s he was present at the formation of the German Green Party, he was elected to the Frankfurt municipal council for this party in 1981, and two years later he became a deputy in the Bundestag. In January 1990 he accompanied Václav Havel on his first presidential trip abroad to Germany. He was a member of Havel‘s broader advisory team. He established the Prague office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and he was its leader for many years, and he also contributed to the development and policy of the Czech Green Party. In 2004-2009 he was a deputy in the European Parliament elected for the German Green Party. He lives in Prague and in Germany.