"[At the kovolis] worked one Venca Boček, who was an SSM employee. And I think that when the unionists understood that the regime was beginning to unravel, they tried to find a place of their own. They tried to please us a little bit and actually they made a kind of a favour for us. And so we were very lucky to get in as a medical faculty. We said, 'Look, you just have to make it available to us, we'll use it. And Vaclav Bocek, who is now the printer there, he's going to do it. And they were like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do it.' He was like, 'Well, okay, I'll work with you.' He had this weird lifestyle, he basically lived there in the printing house. So that was fine. I don't know if they had any plans in the background to start manipulating it, to start controlling it, to dictate to us what should be printed there, to save themselves as unionists... I think there was some kind of calculation like that in the background, but we didn't let ourselves be [swayed] by it. We were so confident and so self-assured that we didn't let it affect us at all. We just started publishing the Pilsner Student there every day. [So] that's how the Pilsner Student came into being. And we went until the thirtieth or thirty-first [December], just [roughly] until the moment when Václav Havel was elected president of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic."
"We started doing this kind of activity in the college radio studio. We lived in the dormitories in Bolevecka Street in Lochotin. It was L1, L2, L3 and there was a college radio station. It was organised by the SSM, that there was a radio there and that they were doing some programmes there. And my classmate and roommate Karel Moravec and I understood that we could use the dormitory radio to do some programmes there, which would be a bit politically engaged within the framework of the glasnost. But it was a bit of a game of fire. I was very lucky in my life that we didn't go for it. But the fact is that they had already, to put it perhaps a little badly, castrated the communists. It wasn't the same persecution anymore, you couldn't compare it at all with the fifties or the beginning of normalisation - the seventies. They were already completely degenerated. So it was good for us. And we started doing shows like that in the 1988, 1989. The acronym is KRS - college radio studio."
"My paternal grandfather's name was Zdeněk Podlipný. He was an important actor. It should be said that he was at the Emil František Burian Theatre. There he had such a, one could say, stellar period in the second half of the 1930s. And then in 1941, when [the Germans] closed the [Municipal] Theatres of Prague, he was in other engagements around Prague. But then the important thing happened in 1945, when he decided, essentially activistically, to found a Czech theatre in Opava. So he went to Opava with my father, his five-year-old son, who was born in 1940, and his wife. But unfortunately he only managed one season there, because he died of an illness, thromboembolism. He is buried in Opava. I read a book about him, that he was popular in Opava. I don't know how that's possible in one year. I guess it was very easy then, because it was a very German town and most of the population was expelled in that forty-fifth year. So some of the Czech minority that was there, and then those who came to the Sudetenland, they had one theatre season together. So he's named like that as the founder of the Czech Silesian Theatre in Opava."
Jiří Podlipný was born on 9 September 1969 in Pilsen to Květoslava Podlipná, maiden name Hodanová, and Jan Podlipný. His grandfather was Zdeněk Podlipný, an important actor and director of the interwar avant-garde. Both parents graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Pilsen. His father had worked before, and thanks to him Jiří Podlipný acquired a working-class background. After his birth, he grew up in Karlovy Vary and made friends with several Sudeten Germans of all generations at a cottage in Krušné hory. After studying at the local gymnasium, he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Pilsen. He and his classmate Karel Moravec created politically engaged programmes in the college radio studio. He signed a petition for the publication of Charter 77, which was organised by his classmates at the medical faculty. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he became a member of the strike committee at the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Pilsen, and also served on the editorial board of the magazine Plzeňský student. After working in the tourism industry, in 1994 he began working professionally at the University Hospital in Pilsen and as an assistant professor at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. From 2002-2008 he was a district councillor and chaired the Roudna Committee. At the time of the filming in 2024, he lived with his wife Martina Podlipna, née Paulíková, in Plzeň in Roudná. They raised two daughters together.
Commemorative medal for significant social achievements awarded to Jiří Podlipný by the Rector of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, 13 November 2019
Commemorative medal for significant social achievements awarded to Jiří Podlipný by the Rector of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, 13 November 2019
Jiří Podlipný as a little boy with his mother Květoslava at the under-construction housing estate in Tuhnice, Karlovy Vary, the photo shows the Meteor shopping centre in the distance
Jiří Podlipný as a little boy with his mother Květoslava at the under-construction housing estate in Tuhnice, Karlovy Vary, the photo shows the Meteor shopping centre in the distance
Jiri's great-grandmother (maternal grandfather's mother) Anna Hodanová in the yard of a farm in Malechov near Švihov, Jiri's uncle Jiří Hodan is on a bicycle next to her, 1959
Jiri's great-grandmother (maternal grandfather's mother) Anna Hodanová in the yard of a farm in Malechov near Švihov, Jiri's uncle Jiří Hodan is on a bicycle next to her, 1959
Jiří Podlipný with his grandparents at the cottage in Suchá near Nejdek in the Krušné hory, which his grandfather bought after the tragic death of his son Jiří Hodan, approximately in 1974-75
Jiří Podlipný with his grandparents at the cottage in Suchá near Nejdek in the Krušné hory, which his grandfather bought after the tragic death of his son Jiří Hodan, approximately in 1974-75
Jiří's great-grandfather Rudolf Kašpar, the head forester during the First Republic and later after 1945, managed the forests of the Beaufort estate in Bečov nad Teplou after the expulsion of the indigenous population as an employee of the forest administration
Jiří's great-grandfather Rudolf Kašpar, the head forester during the First Republic and later after 1945, managed the forests of the Beaufort estate in Bečov nad Teplou after the expulsion of the indigenous population as an employee of the forest administration
A procession in Horní Blatná in Krušné hory in 1923, which goes to lay the foundation stone of the monument to Master Jan Hus. At that time it was such a "Czech uprising" in the German borderlands, later Sudetenland. Jiří's great-grandfather Rudolf Kašpar is on the far right in the photo with a beard, feather on his hat and wearing a suit
A procession in Horní Blatná in Krušné hory in 1923, which goes to lay the foundation stone of the monument to Master Jan Hus. At that time it was such a "Czech uprising" in the German borderlands, later Sudetenland. Jiří's great-grandfather Rudolf Kašpar is on the far right in the photo with a beard, feather on his hat and wearing a suit
Approximately in 1952-53 in Malechov, in the yard of Jiří's great-grandmother Anna Hodanová holds little Jiří Hodan, a future musician who tragically died in a plane crash in 1973 (Aeroflot Flight 141). Next to him sits his older sister (Jiri Podlipny's mother) and above them in a white blouse stands Jiri's grandmother Květoslava Hodanová, née Kašparová
Approximately in 1952-53 in Malechov, in the yard of Jiří's great-grandmother Anna Hodanová holds little Jiří Hodan, a future musician who tragically died in a plane crash in 1973 (Aeroflot Flight 141). Next to him sits his older sister (Jiri Podlipny's mother) and above them in a white blouse stands Jiri's grandmother Květoslava Hodanová, née Kašparová
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