Otokar Simm

* 1946

  • "To those books in the Jizera Mountains yesterday and today: I had such an idea for several years before it was published. I naively thought that we could create such a book with photographer Siegfried Weiss. So I once suggested it to him in a friendly way, but he told me, 'You know, this is not for me, I'm photographing a landscape, I'm a landscape painter.' He flatly refused. I quickly realized that this was not his field of expertise. But then, after a few years, we got together with Honza Pikous. He was also fascinated by the idea. He perfected the matter. It consisted in the fact that a pile of postcards was picked up and he went around the places. He photographed absolute details them from the same places, he made just the same shots. And he brought it to a stage that perhaps it was not published in such detail nowhere else, comparing the past and present of the landscape. Sometimes it's very sad, but there are also times when it's happy that something worse has improved."

  • "I experienced all three stages of the Jizerka transformation. I experienced the Jizera as they probably were before the war. The forests were little affected, there was a network of walkways that made it possible to walk. Those cuts were drawn in old maps. Then suddenly the forests began to disappear hopelessly, it was rather overwhelming for us, it was a disaster, literally. Suddenly the Jizerky were bare, without forests. In the beginning, the first big clearings were formed around Jizerka and Smrk. It still seemed that nothing much was happening, for ordinary people it looked like not much was happening. Of course the foresters, suspected it. What happened next was something terrible, it was a disaster."

  • "And so in 1974 we crossed the ridge of the Polish Jizera Mountains from Piechowice to the Jizera Stack and down to Świeradów. It was still a great adventure then, because there were no wide roads, the Hřebenovka, where you can drive today, it was just a breakthrough. You walked through the woods for long hours and didn't meet anyone. Such an incident stuck in my memory. We spent the night in our tents on the Jizera Stack, and we had no idea that there was a fireman who was reporting down to Świeradów to the border guards that there were some people. So they came to check on us. Then we were already joking about the heater when we discovered who it was. So we told him to report it quickly. The border guards never forgot to come, checked our papers and left again. It all happened in a friendly spirit, you could say."

  • "Parents remembered that they lost most of their friends by the so-called expulsion. And then they stayed in the region, where they had little left of those friends who were mostly Germans. They were people like my dad, they were anti-Nazi and had nothing to do with Nazism. They tried to do as much damage as possible, especially in the pre-Hitler era, when the Henleins came here and their various actions took place. Dad always remembered painting their black socks in black. Interestingly, I have encountered a similar experience with other people for doing the same. That was probably popular at the time."

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    Liberec, 23.07.2020

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The father blackened the Henleins‘ stockings. The son saved a piece of Sudeten history

Otokar Simm with his parents Max and Emily in the Peace celebration near Jablonec dam in 1957
Otokar Simm with his parents Max and Emily in the Peace celebration near Jablonec dam in 1957
zdroj: archiv Otokara Simma

Otokar Simm was born on September 25, 1946 in Jablonec nad Nisou. Věra‘s mother, née Votočková, was Czech and came from Roztoky near Jilemnice, Max‘s father was a Sudeten German from Jablonec. The family could stay in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War also because the father was one of the anti-fascists. Otokar Simm‘s uncle fled from eastern to western Germany after his deportation. Because of this, Otokar Simm did not get into high school specialising in foreign trade. In 1968 he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked in the District Housing Company in Jablonec nad Nisou. In the 1960s, he began to discover the Jizera Mountains and became interested in the history of the Germans there. Since 1974, he and his friends have been traveling to the Polish part of the Jizera Mountains, where the Sudeten Germans have also left their mark over the past centuries. He became one of the witnesses of the ecological disaster that occurred in the Jizera Mountains in the 1980s. After 1989, Otokar Simm began publishing books that recalled the past of the Jizera Mountains, which was associated primarily with the German population. It is the groundwork of literary works Album of old postcards of the Jizera Mountains, two parts of the book Jizera Mountains yesterday and today, Reminders of bygone times - Monuments of the Jizera Mountains, Three Iserines - Jizerka, Velká Jizera, Orle, Jizera Mountains - climbing guide, Ještěd flowers, Poetry of Jizera granite. He collaborated with photographers Jan Pikous or Siegfried Weiss, writer Miloslav Nevrlý, climber Wolfgang Ginzel, Marek Řeháček or Marek Sekyra. He translated texts written in a peculiar Sudeten German dialect. He devoted himself to the work of Sudeten German writers from the Jizera Mountains. He went on expeditions to the European and world mountains. In 2018, he prepared a publication of a unique, detailed Czech-German map of the Jizera Mountains. Otokar Simm is married and has one son. In 2020 he lived in Jablonec nad Nisou.