"In December we were the owners of this huge box and completely undecided what would happen to it. I hired a forester, who put himself downstairs with a big black dog, so that what was still there, namely the beautiful old locks would not be stolen, and then I travelled here with my mother-in-law and an architect, and the architect said - yes, it can be fixed up. And then we thought, either we let the house we just got back fall into disrepair, or we move in. And then we moved in in September. Into a heated house, with running water, and levelled floors. It still looked tremendous from the outside, but it was an incredible achievement, I was deeply impressed by the quality and commitment of all the people involved."
"Their first impressions of the Czechoslovakia of that time did not resemble their father's "lost paradise". Everything was grey. The landscape was grey, the houses were grey, the faces were grey and all the clothes were grey. The girls on the street wore ugly baggy clothes, and when you went into a shop there was only one kind of goods, and even that was grey, it left a really big impression."
"In 1948, I won't tell you exactly at what time, it must have been in the spring... with this 50,000 crowns, which was a lot of money then, they hired a smuggler who took them close to the border and then through the forest - you'll cross running here now. They were walking in three, my grandfather had a backpack with a pair of nice shoes, my father had a backpack with Schopenhauer, The Divine Comedy and some other clever books, and my uncle Bedřich with his beloved microscope under which he used to dissect frogs. Then they walked to Regensburg, got to a camp, and the normal, hard life of refugees began. In big halls, with lots of people and horrible toilets somewhere in the corridor. There's a nice story about how shortly after they had arrived, a valet from the castle in Regensburg arrived with an invitation for my grandfather to dinner. He [the grandfather] was very happy and asked, 'What should we wear?'The valet replied, 'A tail coat, off course, Your Highness!' He said, 'I left it in Drahenice!' 'I am very sorry, Your Highness!' And dinner was cancelled."
"Practically, for the family, it meant that they were not allowed to go to Drahenice, that they lived in a flat in Troja, that only Czech was spoken. Even my grandmother, who spoke Czech only poorly, no longer spoke German to anyone. They put great emphasis on not using German, even if they met German acquaintances on the street. It was one of the few forms of protest."
Johannes Lobkowicz was born on 22 August 1954 in Munich, the son of Mikuláš Lobkowicz, who had been living in exile for six years at that time. Mikuláš Lobkowicz fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 and became a prominent philosopher and political scientist abroad, working at universities in Germany and the USA. Johannes therefore spent his childhood partly in the USA. However, he studied in Germany, established himself as a banker, got married, and had five of his six children there. In 1992 he restituted the family castle in Drahenice, Central Bohemia, where he and his family moved permanently. He learned Czech as a foreign language as an adult. However, when asked where he feels at home, Johannes Lobkowicz answers without hesitation that he is at home in Drahenice. This is also because, as he says, every young child in Bohemia knows his family’s name, unlike in other countries.
