South Moravian Rudi Dutschke
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Karel Němec was born on January 2, 1949 in Jihlava. During the German occupation, his father Jaroslav, the leader of an illegal Communist Party organization in the Dačice region, was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned until 1945 in Kounice dormitories and in Bavaria. In 1949, the family moved to Jihlava. The witness’s father, a supporter of Marxist ideas, accepted an offer from local Communist Party officials to become a director of a political school. He left the office two years later due to disagreements. At high school, Karel Němec became involved in the student movement of the Czechoslovak Youth Union and after the dissolution of the union he served as a chairman of the district independent school union. After the August occupation, the witness´s father did not pass the normalization checks. During the years 1987–1989, Karel Němec wrote and reproduced samizdats under the names New Socialism or For Democratic Socialism. He published the most interesting articles by Brno and Prague authors from the circle of left-wing dissent, as well as some foreign texts. He participated in the reproduction of the periodical Dialog, which was published by the Obroda club (The club for the Socialist Reconstruction Obroda). He established intensive connections with this left-wing opposition initiative and invited leaders to several secret talks in Jihlava. He got several names from the dissent community at the Club of Democratic Socialism in Jihlava and sought to unify independent civic initiatives. With the idea of establishing a Coordinating Committee of Independent Civic Initiatives, he succeeded in Jihlava, where in the summer of 1989 the so-called roof agreement was concluded. After November 17, 1989, he publicly gave a speech on behalf of the Coordinating Committee in Jihlava Square, which was to be preceded by provocative actions of the State Security. After the fall of the communist regime, he remained a supporter of direct social democracy and without major ambitions he appeared on the candidates of the CSSD political party. In 2009, he co-authored the second and expanded edition of the Almanac of the Silenced Victim, which was dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the burning of Evžen Plocek. He lived in Jihlava at the time of filming (July 2021).
