Miroslav Mlynář

* 1938

  • "In 1968, when things were changing a bit, I received an offer to create a medal for the fifty years of the republic. I said, 'Well, that's beautiful! That's what I'll do! 'So I started working on it, and when I came up with first suggestions, I still... January, February, March, April 1968, well, it was beautiful, many things were possible already, but still, when I brought the first suggestions, the reproach was, 'Well, it is nice, but look, we need to put a little bit of our symbol there, a star, a sickle and a hammer, a little bit.' I said, 'Well, wait. So, should I make a medal for the fifty years of the republic, or a medal for some of our inclusion in the European communist world? Well, no, I can't do this, I couldn't do this! 'And I was lucky. One of the First Republic painters sat in the Central Committee of the National Front, his name was Mr. Puchmertl, I think Vladimír or Jaromír Puchmertl, he was a good painter. And he said, 'Look, I will defend this, I will defend it!' And he defended it. He just said that it's really a medal for the fifty years of the republic and it's not just the part that is appropriate at the moment... there was also the first republic and so on, and that it needs to be done in a general way."

  • "So, I came there and I really thought it was a misunderstanding. I sat there and with such a mild humor I was saying: 'So what do you have on me, what's going on, what's happened? We have an exhibition ready and now I got a message like that.' And he looks at me like that, he was a gentleman, a bit overweighted, he had braces. I remember him like I would see him now, he was holding the braces with his thumbs, that's how he was stretching them and said: 'Comrade, it is not funny!' And I said, 'Well, I guess not, then.' I still thought it was a misunderstanding. And I said, 'And what's the problem then?' - 'Well, comrade, do you know what period it is now? And you exhibit such an abstraction there! ‘And now I stared at him again. I said, 'Wait, what abstraction?' I wasn't a representative of any purely abstract direction; I didn't even provoke anyone in any way. Actually, it is a question what abstraction really is. This would have to be discussed very broadly. So I said to the officer: 'Well, wait, where did you see the abstraction?' - 'Well, for example, your wife – the jewelry! Well, that's unsocialistic! ‘I looked amused, I laughed a little, he had a stone face and said, no well, well, well! Well, it is just not possible!'

  • "And the parents always said that there were no problems with the Germans, with the neighbors. They were friendly during the First Republic and somehow it did not differentiate, the Czech family, the German family. However, already at the end of that year, 1938, due to those promises and the story-telling... he and Hitler, in fact, danced to the tune of people by building roads, building tracks, building a lot. The employment rate was high, people often ascribed it to him and sometimes they were lured and began to believe that they would one day have a great homeland. Hitler had not yet said that he would murder half of Europe. But the things were already somehow suspected, and Dad said, 'Well, as we're sitting here like that, here is Helmut and here is the other friend, so in the evening...' people were leaving pubs around 7pm because dinners in those families took place everywhere at seven o'clock. It used to be that way, and when one didn't come at seven o'clock, for example the children, that we didn't come, there was no dinner. Dinner was simply served at seven, otherwise you were unlucky and you had bread there and you could spread it with jam or something. And Dad said, 'We go home at half past six...' and at half past ten, Helmut, who was sitting next to him playing the cards, during that friendly conversation, he was shooting at us with a German army nine gun from the opposite bank... we lived on that one bank and on the opposite bank behind the stream he was shooting at our windows."

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Live in such a way that you are able to deal with your conscience at the very end

Miroslav Mlynář, 1953.
Miroslav Mlynář, 1953.
zdroj: archive of Miroslav Mlynář

Miroslav Mlynář was born on October 10, 1938 in the village Neratov in the Orlické Mountains into the family of a member of the Financial Guard, Josef Mlynář. Shortly after his birth and the occupation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany, the parents moved to nearby Kunvald, where the witness spent part of his childhood, the World War II and the liberation. Wounded soldiers of the Soviet army were moving around their house towards inland. In 1947, his father was placed in Hrádek nad Nisou in northern Bohemia, where the whole family moved. He was attending there a scout unit, which after 1948 functioned illegally for some time. In Hrádek, the witness‘s artistic talent began to show, which he decided to develop further at the Secondary Glass School in Železný Brod. After graduating, he joined the a production team Znak in Malá Skála, from which he eventually received a factory scholarship to study at a university and successfully passed the admission procedure to the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. Among his most famous works are medals for the 50th anniversary of the republic and especially the medal for the 25th anniversary of the World Peace Council, for which he was one of the few artists to be allowed to immortalize the dove of peace by Pablo Picasso. He never joined the Communist Party, so he often struggled with the ban on exhibiting his works in Czechoslovakia, and until the Velvet Revolution, much of his work was known only abroad. He has devoted himself to art to this day, as a sculptor, painter, jeweler and a medalist.