Everyone needs to find a way how to live their life
Vladimír Herman was born on the 18th November in 1955 into a family of teachers. His father Arnošt Herman was the Headmaster of the basic school in Bynina where the family lived. Until he was thirteen, Vladimír Herman was not aware that he was living in a totalitarian state. His father was a sincere Communist but during the night, he used to listen to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Vladimir considered it hypocrisy and he started to think about the ruling regime more critically. When he was still at the basic school, he discovered the Western culture. He loved to listen to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. In 1970, he started to study at the secondary technical school in Vsetín and he met schoolmates with similar opinions which made him realise that he would never be able to accept the Communist party and regime. The breakthrough point was a meeting with Jaromír Čechura, a dissident from Valašské Meziříčí. They, along with other people, copied anticommunist flyers and retyped samizdat texts. After 1977, Vladimír Herman distributed copies of the Charter 77 but he was afraid to sign it. He signed a later document, Several Sentences. As a great fan of Western music, he organised rock music disco parties in Valašské Meziříčí and surrounding villages. In 1989, he and his wife participated at the Festival of Czechoslovak Independent Culture in Wroclaw in Poland. During the revolution, he joined the budding Civic Forum and when the Civic Democratic Party was established, he immediately became a member. After several years he started to feel discontent with frauds and scandals and he chose to leave the party with the feeling that the “old structures”, the people who had held their offices before the Velvet Revolution, have kept their posts in the state administrations.
