The Czechs in a Nutshell

Do you know who was the first to reach the North Pole? Who also projected the Panama canal, invented both yoghurt and the forerunner of Internet, made numerous revolutionary discoveries in chemistry and engineering, wrote several brilliant dramatic plays and symphonies and, in addition to that, inspired people such as Einstein, Chekhov and Zeppelin in their work? None other than the universal genius Jára Cimrman!

It has never been established exactly when the incredibly gifted Jaroslav (Jára among friends) was born. Since the priest responsible for the local church register was allegedly drunk, both 1853 and 1864 figure as his year of birth. However, it’s undisputed that Bohemia and Moravia, at the time Cimrman was born were still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It has also been established that his mother was an Austrian actress, Marlén Jelínková, while his father a Czech tailor named Leopold Zimmermann (quite typically for the ethnic and cultural mixture that prevailed in the Habsburg Empire, Cimrman’s Germanic mother had a Slavonic name while his Czech father had a German one).

However, as it often goes in Central Europe, people with bi-national parentage tend to become bigger nationalists than those with both parents of the same nationality. In Jára’s case, he became an ardent Czech patriot, who insisted that his über-German surname should be treated as a Slavonic one. But this is pretty much all we originally know about him, because in 1914, by the outbreak of the First World War, Cimrman disappeared from the surface of earth. Only in 1966 was a trunk with his belongings accidentally discovered in the village of Liptákov. Thus, the pantheon of Czech national heroes had suddenly been enlarged with one of human history’s most extraordinary personalities.

As you might already have guessed, Jára Cimrman is a pure mystification, created by two journalists in Czechoslovak Broadcasting for a radio program that was released in 1966.

But contrary to all expectations, the listeners’ response to the program about the unknown genius was so overwhelming that one of the radio journalists, Zdeněk Svěrák (also known as the author of the screenplay of the Oscar-winning film “Kolja”), decided to transform the gag into a theatre play. So in 1967, with assistance from his friend, the director Ladislav Smoljak, Svěrák staged The Act — “a play that was found among the unknown genius Jára Cimrman’s belongings” — in a theatre in Prague’s Malá Strana.

The Act was a tremendous success. People loved the wild exaggerations about the Czech giant-cum-patriot and all his crazy adventures from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of course, it was no less fun that all the actors were clumsy and nervous amateurs, and that the play was opened by an ultra-scientific seminar about Cimrman and his life and adventures given by “Professor” Smoljak and “Docent” Svěrák (see: Academic Titles).

Four decades and 13 plays later, Jára Cimrman has become something like the quintessence of Czech humor and national identity. People queue up for hours to get tickets to his plays (like The Act, all of the others have also been written by Smoljak and Svěrák), which have been performed at the Jára Cimrman Theatre in Prague’s Žižkov district for many years.

The most ardent fans have learnt entire passages from different Cimrman plays by heart, and “cimrmanologists” compete in reeling off the longest and funniest quotations from the 14 plays. To honour the great Czech, several cities have even installed plaques announcing that “Jára Cimrman once slept in this house” or “In this house, the Czech universal genius Jára Cimrman once had breakfast”.

Foreigners may find the Czechs’ Cimrman craze strange. When the ensemble turned up at a theatre festival in Austria some years ago, the festival’s director immediately threw the Cimrman gang out, shouting that “these Czech dilettantes” were a disgrace to the performing arts. Yet the actors’ profound amateurism is probably one of the reasons why the Czechs love the Cimrman figure. In fact, the very concept is a manylevelled parody: the actors are making fun of themselves and their lack of professionalism, the Cimrman figure is making fun of “great heroes”, and the fact that the greatest — and also most unfortunate — of them all is actually Czech, is a parody of the nation’s rather modest size and unfortunate destiny.