František Černý (diplomat)

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František Černý (born June 8, 1931 in Prague ) was the ambassador of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic in Berlin . The efforts for reconciliation and understanding between Czechs and Germans shape his life. He is the bearer of the unit price and the great cross of merit.

Life

František Černý was born in Prague on June 8, 1931. From early childhood he lived and experienced the multicultural connections in what was then the First Czechoslovak Republic. Some of his relatives are Czech, others are German or Austrian.

His grandmother was the eldest of nine siblings, eight men and two of which in the First World War have fallen. The survivors were scattered far over the area of ​​the Habsburg Empire at that time and the majority were active in forestry. The extended family met in Prague at least once a year. Černý grew up multilingual. Since he came from a middle-class family, his maternal grandfather was a high official during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and later in the First Czechoslovak Republic, he and his family were considered politically insecure by the new rulers, which initially prevented him from studying .

Only after he had worked on a lathe in a factory for three years and had completed military service as a construction soldier, as he was classified as unreliable, did he start studying German and Bohemian Studies at Charles University , which he did in 1963 with a dissertation on Erich Maria Remarque . During his student days he started working as an editor for the Czech radio, first in the youth program and then in the international broadcasts. In addition to his work for the radio, he was committed to remembering the cultural heritage of the Germans in the historic Bohemian lands and actively campaigned against the homogenization of the Czechs. In 1963 he took part in the Kafka conference in Liblitz . In addition to rehabilitating Franz Kafka , who had been taboo in socialist countries until then, the conference is considered to be one of the most important forerunners of the Prague Spring 1968. Many intellectuals not only from the Czech Republic but from all over Europe controversially discussed the possibilities of socialism with a human face.

With the end of the Prague Spring , the freedoms gained also ended. Many reformers were driven into emigration or, whoever stayed, persecuted. František Černý had to leave the Czech radio and was banned from working as a journalist. Until 1989 he earned his living as a German teacher and interpreter. It was only after the fall of the Wall that there was again the opportunity to further advance his vocation, the German-Czech understanding. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution, at the urging of Václav Havel and Jiří Dienstbier , he entered the service of the Foreign Office and until 1995 remained envoy and head of the branch office of his country's embassy in Berlin. In 1998 he was appointed sole ambassador to the Czech Republic. He held this position until 2001. After his active political days he devoted himself entirely to German-language literature in the Bohemian countries. Together with the Prague German-speaking author Lenka Reinerová and the chairman of the Franz Kafka Society , Kurt Krolop, he is one of the founders of the Prague House of Literature , which is dedicated to preserving the common cultural heritage in the Bohemian countries.

Awards

Web links

Newspaper articles

  • Landeszeitung edition 24/2011
  • Die Zeit edition 45/2008
personal data
SURNAME Černý, František
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech diplomat, ambassador in Berlin
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague