Ing. Libor Hörbe

* 1964

  • "That time intrigued me of course. I'm talking about the real turning point time, actually those couple of days before the turning point, before it became clear how things were going to pan out. What is important, and this goes for both job and friends and family, is that the 'turning tides' revealed an awful lot about people. See, there were many people in the socialist 'grey zone' who seemed to be fair, criticised the regime and cracked political jokes. But a lot of them completely flipped out, quite unexpectedly. Those turning tides actually caused the individual details and human characters to unveil in a matter of days, which I don't think happens under normal circumstances. You can experience this with somebody when you go [into the wilderness] and experience critical situations with them, that's where those characters come out, otherwise it doesn't happen. And this was such a very special moment where these things pretty much surfaced. It struck me a lot in the sense that it actually surprised me how you can't just rely on your internal judgment and some external aspects."

  • "I was fully aware of the regime I was living in. It was clear, there were limits. I was lucky enough to get to West Germany where we had relatives when I was 16, so I saw what it was like there. Of course I knew that this decision was a one-way street. You run away, yes, it's possible, but there's no going back. Of course, you could run without a foreign currency certificate if you saved up enough for a trip with Čedok. I also always thought of [emigration] as a possibility, or at least from the age when I realised what emigration was. But I never really considered it because, all that time I partially considered the situation here in Czechoslovakia at that time as a farce. In high school, in grammar school, you understood it more, so we had more fun than in elementary school. We joked about it more to show off to the girls. In college, it was almost completely ridiculous because we were almost finished people and the end of the regime was coming, and some things were just plain ridiculous. I perceived it all the time that I was living with a... what was happening around me seemed more like a farce. Then there was a major turning point when I took the job. I'm not sure if it was before or after my military service. We were sent to a compulsory meeting, I don't remember what it was for. That meeting was chaired and spoken at by the chairman of the party cell at LIAZ. It was a speech that was basically about nothing. At the end, there was a vote on something, but that was basically about nothing too. I'd already been used, over the years, to not oppose the regime externally, but in some of my community and at home I would say what I wanted to. So when I voted, I just raised my hand for something I basically didn't even care about. It was some complete bullshit... All of a sudden, I look around and see all these people standing, every single one of them, with their hands up. That's where I remember, that was the first moment it dawned on me, and I said, well, this isn't gonna work. I'm gonna have to run away. I can't stay in this, just to sit here and act the way I'm acting. I don't think it's gonna be easy for me to start protesting anything right now. That was kind of a weird first moment where I thought, 'I'm going to have to run away.'"

  • "Not that I felt any pressure being forced into anything, nor was I offered membership in the party. But the frustrating thing was that I as a newcomer - and of course I saw it in other newcomers too, especially those fresh from school [CTU] - had some fresh ideas despite socialism. I didn't want to do the job just because I had to go to work. It became clear very soon that our ideas would not get past managers who didn't want to get into any trouble. I think the case was very often that the managers didn't really understand what they were supposed to do, so they were a priori afraid to try something like that, fearing they would embarrass themselves. The pace of work was... [very slow] compared to today,"

  • "I was taking the bus home with a fellow student, and he was going in the same direction as me. We were talking - I don't remember how we came to this - about possibly joining the party [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] and he asked me what I thought of it. To tell you the truth, in spite of the way things were set up in my home, I never asked that question myself. I never really thought of what would happen if I was forced to do it and had children and things like that. Of course, back then everybody knew the way things were. He asked me about it, and I - because I had never thought about it - said neutrally, 'I don't really know, man,' and he said, 'How come you don't know?' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Well, that's a fundamental thing. Once you join in, you're in on it.' And I realised at that moment that this person was more morally mature for that situation than I was, because he named it for me."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Mnichovo Hradiště , 13.02.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 57:57
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 28.02.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:06:19
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 3

    Praha, 27.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:38:31
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

I voted for something I had no interest in. And then I realized I couldn’t go on like this.

Libor Hörbe, 2024
Libor Hörbe, 2024
photo: Post Bellum

Libor Hörbe was born in Turnov on 27 January 1964 and grew up in Mnichovo Hradiště. Both his parents Osvald and Alena Hörbe worked in the local branch of LIAZ. His father came from the village of Dolní Krupá, where a large German community lived before the war. Several of his relatives married German partners and were deported with them after the war, so the family had contacts in the West. Normalization did not affect the Hörbe family significantly. Libor Hörbe lived a normal childhood with walks in the countryside, and at the age of twelve he fell for playing the guitar. He completed the grammar school in Mnichovo Hradiště and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University, graduating in 1987. After a year’s military service in Janovice nad Úhlavou, he worked as an electrical designer at LIAZ in Mnichovo Hradiště, but he became frustrated working in a dysfunctional socialist enterprise. In November 1989, he became actively involved at the workplace and in the town’s Civic Forum. He left LIAZ in the late 1990s and now (2024) works as the head of development at Proseat in Mladá Boleslav. He continues to pursue music, and has written two novels and one collection of short stories.