Michal Brummel

“Then we enter the rooms that belonged to Hedvika Liebsteinova. The so-called yellow room is very colourful. Expressive. She loved van Gogh, which at the time wasn’t usual. So Loos made it very colourful. In … yellow, blue. It’s interesting that such an old lady was far more progressive in her – let’s say – taste and lifestyle than the younger generation. They had such a conservative living room - in 19th-century English style, the bedroom is conservative as well, in comparison, she had it made very colourful.”

“Mrs Behalova was an art historian. I don’t know if by training originally, or if she studied Philosophy. She was a woman who was locked up for a long time after February 1948, because, I think, she was a Catholic activist. I think she came from the Ostrava region. After she was released, she came to Pilsen, where she worked at the heritage department. And she registered and documented all interiors by Adolf Loos. On that occasion, she became close to Jana and mother – Valerie – and visited us often. In ’68 she left for Austria.”

“Loos was according to my non-expert opinion a genius; he was able to recreate everything pretty – or what he liked – in the world. Starting with Crete, the Minoan civilization, which – when you visit Crete and the palace in Knossos – you immediately see Loos and Raumplan. That is so interesting. I don’t even know if Loos could have … you know the excavations happened sometime in the 30s or at the end of the 20s, I don’t know if Loos knew about it, but it is precisely Loos. What you can see there. I don’t know if that’s what inspired him, but everything he did had some grounding. It could be American armchairs from the American West, or an Egyptian tripod from a British museum, or it’s Biedermeier armchairs from 19th century Vienna. That apartment of ours, it has that living room, that is an English room from the end of the 19th century”

“On Chodske namesti, which wasn’t far away from where we lived, there were German barracks, actually, it was a school where the Germans resided. When the Americans came, they stayed there also, African Americans. Back then, there was segregation in the US army. There was a white unit and a black unit. We liked the black people better than white people. They were nicer.”- “You liked black people better?” – “Yeah, because they were somewhat nicer to us. We were always begging. The first English words I learned was when we were saying ‘saramabeč’, which was in fact ‘son of a bitch’. We used to say ‘goddamn – fucking – son of a bitch’, those were the first English words we knew. And the Americans had a few Czech sentences typed up on a typewriter. One of them was ‘Máš sestru?’ (‘Do you have a sister?’). And whoever had a sister had an advantage, because they brought the American home. And that was a benefit for the family since the Americans didn’t just have an interest in the sister, they were happy to be in a family, they would bring them food. So having a sister was advantageous.”

“When mum wanted to marry dad, it was not received well on either side of the family. In Austria, in some village...she is supposed to marry some Jew – it was viewed as little offensive. Even worse in the Jewish family – dad’s. So she converted before she married my father, she converted to Judaism. (This is very important.) This is important, but these days, as I’ve heard, it’s a very difficult ceremony. Back then, not so much. They did it sort of quickly. So she was Jewish when I was born. Only when grandmother died did she convert back to Catholicism and was very devout.”