Hermann Sehr

"It was something completely new, as you can imagine. I liked it there, even though most of them didn't want to join the army. I was learning music, I could just study music sideways, I had time for it and they still supported me. And we had beautiful performances with the orchestra, which I can still talk about today. I also had good colleagues. We were musicians, not militarists. "

"Conversations with the elderly were very interesting. My old violin masters were travelling in the world. They went through it all, they were making instruments or repairing them from Budapest through Vienna to Heligoland. Their horizon was different. You like to talk to people like that. They were able to recognize what was good and what was bad. They knew people. One could talk to them about anything, they were no fanatics. You could also talk to these people about what is beautiful and what is not beautiful. This was a big topic for us, the instrument makers. As a violinist you know it. When someone made a snail, it had to be beautiful. He could also mill it himself, the machine may do everything more accurately, but the hand will make it more beautiful. When someone painted a picture, you could say it's beautiful, it's not beautiful. Today, everything is beautiful in an abstract way. When we talked about music before, it was beautiful. It must have made sense to us."

"We looked at our former home across the border. Boden was only five hundred meters from the border. In 1950, the houses were still standing, even though they were all empty. The Czechs, who then took over the farmstead, moved inland again. The whole village was empty, only pigeons circled between the buildings. Later, they also went wild. So, I could compare how they became wild pigeons again. But I thought my life was there. In the spring, when the cherries bloomed, it was clear that there used to be a village where people lived. Where I used to live, but where I can no longer go. These are thoughts that come to my mind very often, they keep coming back.”

"I, a little boy from a Czech village, saw the whole world. I don't want to start counting all my journeys now, but as a military musician, I've really seen the whole world. And I'm proud of that."