"You have to realise what the situation was like in Germany at that time. That was the time when the Red Army Faction existed in Germany. The Baader-Meinhof, as the great left-wing extremism of the German youth, the studying youth. I experienced it firsthand when I went there afterwards. That was their motto: 'Destroy what destroys you', was finally understandable even to me. But of course, when Baader-Meinhof then started not only to set fire to department stores, but also to destroy people's lives, I could no longer agree with that. Mína, that was her name, even worked as a secretary for Heinrich Böll, the German writer who was then known as a dangerous leftist because he stood up for these so-called terrorists. He demanded from the government that their detention should be humane. The German police really did not treat them kindly. It was a real battle at the time. Mína was marked by leftist thinking. Determined by the attitude of Heinrich Böll, who [participated] very actively. She had this ideal that she would burn all the bridges behind her and live with us in Na Jedlové in a people's democratic Czechoslovakia."
"Life was basically modest, although SIAL had two service Simca cars. One green, one white. Since we were far away, Hubáček had an office in Liberec, so he left one of the two cars at Jedlová as a company car. Of course, we drove it around the world. So we would go to the Golden Lion for breakfast, like big guys, and buy Benson & Hedges English cigarettes in a red tin at the reception. These were the kind of things that, if you projected back to the period of normalization, were actually hard to understand today. I always say that it was an interregnum when almost everything was possible and nothing was possible. In this very indifferent space SIAL was able to manoeuvre wonderfully and in a way we adapted to it and enjoyed it in our own way. Although it shouldn't give the impression that we were slacking off. Our great privilege was that we didn't have to go to work. We were at that job, and whether someone was sleeping, or listening to the radio, or reading a book, or sitting at a board and working... it didn't matter to anyone. That was their own decision. Each of us had a job to do. When he did it and how he did it was his business. That was wonderful."
"There was no great homogeneity of opinion, but it was all the more exciting because there was a very lively discussion. It never led to any rivalry, of course, that there was anything like animosity or envy. There was no basis for envy either, because we were working for free. Basically, our only reward was to please Hubáček and Masák. That was enough for us. We ate out of the same pot, cooked in the same kitchen and listened to the same music. The common bond was very strong. For me, it is still perhaps one of the strongest experiences in my biography. Actually, something like my own family, or parallel family."
"The Russian delegation arrived and meters were installed on Jested to measure the activity of the pendulum. It's still blowing fiendishly on Ještěd, but at that time there was absolutely no wind. The Russian delegation could not be disappointed. That would have been a big failure. Hubáček somewhere with his old boys club got rockets from the soldiers, which they put on the top of the last gallery. So they lit them in the windless night, the tower deflected, and when it stopped burning, it started to oscillate. The meters started working, the Russian delegation was delighted to see it working. And I think that was the first vibration damper ever in the Eastern Bloc, made in a primitive way on his knee and invented by Zdeněk Patrman, who has at least as much to do with Ještěd as Karel Hubáček."
Mirko Baum was born on 12 November 1944 in Mladá Boleslav. He literally felt the end of the war firsthand when his mother Věra smuggled food from a nearby farm in his pram. His father Rudolf worked as an engineer in ČKD, from where he had to leave for forced labour in Germany. He was involved in the development of the tank chassis. Mirko Baum loved technology from childhood and met it at the Mladá Boleslav airport, where he used to play as a boy. He did not get into a military school where he could have studied aeronautical engineering, so on the recommendation of his mother he went to Prague, where he began studying at the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University in 1963. After graduation, he was interested in the work of architect Karel Hubáček together with his classmate John Eisler and became one of the members of the School of Architects within the SIAL in Liberec. It was there that he met his first wife Mína, a German student then marked by the radical leftist Red Army Faction. After she became pregnant, she went to Germany to give birth and Mirko Baum followed her. After a brief working episode in Cologne, their home became Schwickering Castle, the headquarters of the studio of architect Josef Paul Kleihues, where Mirko Baum worked until 1993. After teaching at the Summer Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Salzburg, he discovered how much he enjoyed working with students, and he ended up getting a professorship at the Rhineland-Westphalian Technical University in Aachen (RWTH Aachen), where he taught until 2013. At the time of the interview, in 2024, he was living in Roetgen near Aachen, Germany.
Mirko Baum in 2002 at the handover of the RWTH student studio building in Aachen (from left to right:
Dean of the Faculty of Architecture Prof. Curdes, architect Mirko Baum, construction manager
Alexander Voigt, Ministerial Officer Joachim Koch)
Mirko Baum in 2002 at the handover of the RWTH student studio building in Aachen (from left to right:
Dean of the Faculty of Architecture Prof. Curdes, architect Mirko Baum, construction manager
Alexander Voigt, Ministerial Officer Joachim Koch)