Jiří Hermach

Jiří Hermach (born June 6, 1912 in Prague ; † October 5, 2011 there ) was a Czech philosopher . He dealt primarily with Marxism , the philosophy of the natural sciences and with overcoming the alienation of humans. In the 1950s he founded and headed a chair in Marxism at the Prague Technical University ČVUT , but later criticized the communist regime and took part in the Prague Spring . In 1976 he signed Charter 77 and later emigrated to Austria ; he also obtained Austrian citizenship. In 1990 - after the end of communism - Hermach was rehabilitated and taught at Charles University in Prague .

Life

Jiří Hermach's father was a national employee and from 1919 a porter in the Palais Thun , the seat of the Czechoslovak National Assembly on Prague's Lesser Town . The family lived in an official apartment in the palace. In his childhood years, Hermach noticed the contrast between starving demonstrators and the behavior of the members of parliament debating in the National Assembly. From an early age he was drawn to art, nature and social criticism and developed a critical attitude towards politics. These experiences led him to become interested in Marxist philosophy . During some visits to philosophical lectures he missed a connection to the exact natural sciences and therefore preferred to study mechanical engineering . and some chemistry too. As he had long suffered from an abdominal injury after an accident, he often had to interrupt his studies and was unable to complete it before the dissolution of the Czech universities in 1939. During the Second World War he married Vědunka Tůšová, worked as an aircraft designer in the Avia factory in Letňany and took part in resistance activities aimed at blocking rail traffic. He also developed a time fuse that was successfully used in the resistance . At the end of the war he had to witness atrocities by Wehrmacht soldiers , which had a strong influence on his later work. After the war Hermach graduated and got a position as an assistant at the Institute of Thermodynamics , Hydrodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Prague ČVUT .

In May 1945 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). After the February revolution in 1948, he had the choice of heading the Thermodynamics Institute or - also at ČVUT - establishing the Institute for Social Sciences and decided on the latter. In 1951 the institute was transformed into the faculty and later cross-university chair for Marxism at ČVUT, which was again headed by Hermach. In his philosophical lectures he always attached great importance to the connection between Marxism and the natural sciences. In 1952 he became a lecturer.

As early as 1952, however, under the influence of political show trials within the KSČ, Hermach joined the party opposition, which after Stalin's death in 1956 called on the Central Committee of the Communist Party to self-criticize. He was relieved of all his functions and dismissed from the Technical University, whereupon he found employment as a research assistant in the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences . There he published his most important works.

In 1965 he published an extensive essay on philosophy and leadership, in which he came out with criticism of "barracks communism". With this expression, borrowed from Marx, he evidenced the Czechoslovak regime at the time. He was able to present this criticism in front of an audience of one hundred members of the Central Committee of KSČ and managed to convince those present. He received enthusiastic applause and was invited to share his thoughts in a series of one-day, active leadership seminars held in almost every county capitol (except 2) in the country. During the Prague Spring , Alexander Dubček appointed three teams of experts to deal with the foundations of socialism; Hermach moderated the team “Understanding Socialism Newly”, which was supposed to develop a concept of a democratic socialist society (the other two teams dealt with economics and law). The team completed this work a few days before the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Jiří Hermach held his views after 1968 and therefore lost his job at the Academy of Sciences . After several years of looking for work, he found a job as an auxiliary heater in the Motol hospital in Prague . He signed Charter 77 in 1976 and emigrated to Innsbruck in Austria in 1985 due to ongoing reprisals against him and his family by the regime . After the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, he stayed in Austria with his second wife, Helena. From his place of residence in the castle of the small town of Gmünd , located in Lower Austria directly on the Czech border, he did not have to go far to Prague, where he worked as a lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University until 2000. At the age of 96, Helena divorced Hermach and he moved back to Bohemia - first to a friend from the war days and then to Hostivice west of Prague, where his daughter from his first marriage, the actress Jana Hermachová, lived. At the age of 98 he went on lecture tours and impressed his audience. Jiří Hermach died of an ischemic stroke at the age of 100 .

plant

Jiří Hemrach wrote numerous works in Czech, v. a. Essays (partly published in book form) and contributions in edited volumes, including:

• Dialektika výchovy (Dialectics of Education), Prague 1966;
• Problém kategorie hranice (The problem of the category of the border), 1967 (thesis on obtaining the candidate title)
• Uskutečnění současného člověka (Realization of the Present Man), Symposium Publishing House, Prague 1969
• K aktuálním otázkám naší filosofie (On current questions of our philosophy), in: Sborník marxistické filosofie (Writings of Marxist Philosophy), Prague 1959;
• Dialektický materialismus (Dialectical Materialism); Zákon, Příruční slovník naučný (scientific concise dictionary), Prague: I, 1962, IV, 1967;
• Filozofie a řízení (Philosophy and Management), nakladatelství politické literatury, Prague 1965 and in volume 4 of the Sborník ministerstva vnitra (series of publications by the Ministry of the Interior), Prague 1966;
• Problém podstatného rozporu socialismu, Další rozvoj socialismu a úkoly společenských věd (The Problem of the Essential Contradiction of Socialism; Further Development of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Sciences), Prague 1963;
• Problém racionalismu a jeho mezí, Metodologicképroblemémy společenskovědního výzkumu, (The problem of rationalism and its limits, methodological problems of social science research), Prague 1983;
• Intuice a holografický obraz světa (intuition and holographic worldview), in: Intuice ve vědě a filosofii (intuition in science and philosophy), Prague 1993.
• Přemítání o člověku, životě a době (reflections on man, life and time), nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, Prague 2006;
• Přemítání o člověku (Reflections on Man), Vodnář Publishing House, Prague 2009;
• Člověk - tvor sobě neznámý (Man, the being unknown to himself), book and CD, ISBN 8026080211 , Tom + Tom publishing house, posthumously edited manuscript edited by Tomáš Karhan, Prague 2015.

credentials

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} http://www.phil.muni.cz/fil/scf/komplet/hermch.html
2. ↑ ^{a b} http://publica.cz/index.php/tubepublica/hotspot/719-odesel-filozof-prazskeho-jara.html  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Český rozhlas 6, Pamětníci. Jiří Hermach, 1st díl (2005)
4. ^ Britské listy. [1] (2011)
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Český rozhlas 6, Pamětníci. Jiří Hermach, 2nd díl (2005)
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Český rozhlas 6, Pamětníci. Jiří Hermach, 3rd díl (2005)

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Jiří Hermach in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic