Tobiáš Jirous

* 1972

  • „I don’t recall a feeling of some continuity [of peace], no relief, the pressure, the pressure was there all the time, it continued from one day to another. When we lived in Ječná [St. in Prague], it was far away from perfect but there was a plenty of people so it was always busy. Later, we lived nearby in Navrátilova St. and I was sometimes sad because I was there all alone. I said: ‘I want never to be alone at home.’ And the houses, it was always a bit of chaos, a bit of circus, so to say. All sorts of odd characters who, when they saw a small child who had no father around, they had their own divergent ideas how to raise me. At the end, it was not easy to submit to authority of strangers. They said: ‘You will do this, you will do that.’ Why? Kostelní Vydří, calmer, calmer than the houses, but a lot of work and need to provide for. Hardly ever we had some money, in order to have something for heating, I spent my summers going to the woods with a backpack to gather cones. I would bring a whole backpack of cones and we’d burn them in the stove. In summer, whenever we could, we would go mushrooming so that we would have mushrooms, one can cook decent meals from them. When the agricultural co-op planted potatoes behind our house, I obviously went to steal potatoes. Because it was needed… or corn. It was not easy to get by only at this very basic level.”

  • „And when they rang at your door, those guys stromed in, it was practically like a police raid, out of sudden, we had the evil right in our home, we could look right at them… It was plain scary. Suddenly, in a place where I was supposed to feel safe, in my room, there was an undercover cop rummaging in all sorts of things, throwing them all over the place. There was this house search and then a week of tidying and putting things back followed. We gelt the disgust as if something gooey dripped on us. The way they talked to us, such as, when they talked to us, they laughed and said: ‘ Mrs. Jirous, you thoiught we would not find it under the table top?’ We had a nice dining table with a stone top under which one could slide some thin Infoch [clandestine newsletter]. Mom said: ‘The table top was clicking when it moved, I just put something there to stop it, I have no idea what it was.’ I think she was pretty well able to keep cool.”

  • „First and foremost, I wanted to say, for people who know this time only for movies which were filmed in that time, during normalisation, some of the films were great even though they had the normalisation air. Some of the comedies were cute but in hindsight, one feels that there was a bit of lack of freedom but on the other hand, it was actually a pretty relaxed time. If someone is going to watch this, who likes the TV series, such as Arabela… I liked them as well, I watched them, or the other Czech comedies, the world is shown in entirely different colours. There were people who did not want to cause even a minor damage, nor to subvert the régime, there’s no way they would want to be subversive. Only because they signed a document called Charter 77, nowadays everyone can find it and read it and they would find out that anyone would sign it, that there was nothing radical. So, only such a tiny bit of resistance shifted you to the slippery slope. They started to treat you like… I don’t know, like to some sort of criminals, maybe even worse.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 13.04.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 02:01:08
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I lived through a lot of fear; I saw the world without embellishments

Tobiáš Jirous. Middle of the 1990's
Tobiáš Jirous. Middle of the 1990's
photo: archiv pamětníka

Tobiáš Jirous was born on the 3rd of May 1972 as the son of art historian Věra Jirousová and philosopher Jiří Němec. His mother was however married to Ivan Martin Jirous who wanted to be entered as the child’s father. All of them were a part of Prague dissent and all of them later signed the Charter 77. These circumstances formed Tobiáš’s childhood and youth when he lived in constant fear. The family life was complicated and it lacked any financial security. At school, he felt not accepted by both teachers and schoolmated who often harassed him. Until he was twelve, he lived mostly in Prague, he spent some time in the so-called underground houses. He likes to recall the holidays spent with the Havel family in their house in Hrádeček. When the State Security pressed his mother to emigrate during the Operation Clearance, they moved to the countryside, to Kostelní Vydří in Southern Bohemia, where his younger sister, Sára, was born. They were not left to live in piece, though. Tobiáš Jirous recalls ruthless house searches and a constant worry that his mother would be imprisoned and he would end up in institutional care. In this situation, he couldn’t even think about going to a secondary school so he started his apprenticeship at a gardeners’ trade school. At the time of the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he was in his last year and he started his work career as a gardener, factory worker and a night guard in Prague. Long after the revolution, he still helped to provide finances for his family and to care for his sister. Later, he became aware that he had an issue with living in some order and accept that even he could have the options he wouldn’t have had thought about. In 1998, he started to study at the Academy of Fine Arts but after two years, he decided to leave because he did not like the atmosphere of the school. Gradually, he was establishing himself in arts and the list of his vocations is long: writer, journalist, drummer in the DG 307 group, frontman in the groups Juniors, Ultrasweet, Hifi Heroes, and The Models, as an independent DJ, nowadays he owns a recording studio. At the time of recording in 2022, he and his wife lived in Prague.