“When I asked the National Gallery for a renewal of the permit a year later, they denied it. So I still kept trying somehow... Because I’d given myself the task of helping promote Czech culture in Germany and in Europe, so I had this concept, a job, and various options were opening up for me - so I broke off my work engagement with the National Gallery and requested the Ministry of Culture for a renewal of the permit. And I received an answer from the Party watchdog of the National Gallery, saying that I’d left the country without permission from the Gallery and its superiors, and that I am an emigrant. So I became an emigrant. And it had further consequences. The curator of the National Gallery was in AICA, and my curator from Bochum was also in AICA, and when they held their general assembly in Canada in 1970 - which was when my request was being processed and when he denied it - my curator later told me that they had tried to talk him in to firing me. Which would have been a catastrophe for me.”
“When my father hadn’t yet been placed in the concentration camp, he had to work on a construction site, and I used to bring him lunch. One time, we were going on together along Masaryk Street in the direction of the station, and already in those days people would walk along the rails and ignore the pavements. He had his star on of course. And I saw in the crowd coming opposite us one boy from our class, who I knew was from a family of collaborators. His name was Vávra, he spelled it Wawra. So I told Dad: ‘Dad, there’s one Nazi from our class.’ And my father said: ‘You carry on, you don’t know me.’ And disappeared off to the side, in the direction of Josefov Street. And the boy really did stop me and ask: ‘What were you doing talking to that Jew?’ And of course I said I hadn’t been talking to anybody, ‘You’re seeing things, I don’t know any Jew.’ But it was a terrible shock for me, and when I came home, I had terrible thoughts and I cried.”
“I won’t forget one moment from Sychrov, when we went out for a walk after dinner with Annie Masaryková, just the two of us, and I was telling her I had an extremely intense relationship... That he was the ideal for me, her uncle Jan Masaryk, and that I was convinced that it hadn’t been suicide, but murder. And she had told me of her experiences concerning the death, that she had also been in the flat that morning, and she told me how it looked there, the mess it was in, and her opinion - that Jan Masaryk had such character, that he would never have climbed up to the high window. And then she had the pyjamas that were proof it could never have been suicide. That was an amazing conversation...”
“We graduated (from grammar school) in ’52, and I think it’s important for the atmosphere: we were ordered to graduate in Unionist shirts. And do you know how we graduated? In Unionist shirts, in black suits with black jackets and silver ties!”
“The Germans fled first. We did something that was repeated again in ’68, I did the same in Prague, that we flipped over signboards. That means that the Germans kept fleeing in circles. Then the Hungarians fled. They fled with carts and horses. And some youngsters from Olešnice would unharness their horses, always when there were two horses, they unharnessed one of them and let them flee with just the other. And one image I still have before me, they were throwing lump sugar out of the carts - and us children were collecting it. And then along came this elite army of extremely nice people, and that was the Romanian army which liberated everything there. They only joined our side in the the last year of the war.”
Petr Spielmann was born on the 11th of October 1932. Spielmann’s father came from a Czech-German family, his mother was Czech with Moravian roots, and before his birth, Petr’s parents lived in Dresden. Upon the creation of the Weimar Republic, they were forced to return to Czechoslovakia - they settled down in Northern Bohemia, Petr was born in Ústí nad Labem. During World War II he was supposed to join a transport because of his second-degree mixed origin, but his mother saved him. He spent the end of the war with his relatives in the Moravian countryside.
After the war the family moved to Prague. After graduating from grammar school, Petr Spielmann went to study the history of art at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno. He soon got in touch with the artistic community, especially at the House of Art. After completing his studies he began work at the Brno Municipal Museum, later switching to the National Gallery in Prague. In 1957 he married and started a family. Towards the end of the Sixties, he functioned as the union chairman of the National Gallery, and after the occupation he received an offer of employment at the Bochum Museum in Germany. He decided to move abroad with his wife and son. He was declared an emigrant in 1971. After the death of the curator of the Bochum Museum, Petr Lee, Spielmann became his successor. He led the Bochum Museum until 1997, buying over 1200 items into its collections from Czechoslovak artists, including emigrant artists. Since 1997 he has lived alternately in Bochum and in Brno. From 2004 to 2007 he was the dean of the Brno Faculty of Fine Arts.
