Why him? “He was an artist who was misunderstood by his surroundings and thought he was a giant. We were interested in that,” says Zdeněk Svěrák.
Alois Beer graduated from three classes at a German school and studied wood turning at the age of thirteen. After his apprenticeship, he went on a hike to Vienna and passed through a number of Austro-Hungarian monarchy. His travels also took him to Styria, Bavaria, northern Italy, Venice, Verona and Milan. He then attended painting courses in Ljubljana.
However, he returned to his native Dobruška and opened his own wood-turning workshop. He himself writes that he was: “a lathe operator, a carver, a porter, a gilder, a glassmaker and a painter”.
“He described several dozen notebooks, a total of three and a half thousand pages. They are stored in our museum. We scanned the whole estate and I chose something from it. “I regret that I am not a poet and even during the First Republic the whole book Ungrateful. It is an amazing source of information that has not yet been exhausted in all respects, “points out Jiří Mach, a publicist and former head of the Museum of National History in Dobruška.
PHOTOGALLERY: Christmas trees in the Rychnov region are getting ready for the gala. How do you like it?
He had a reputation as a weirdo in Dobruška
In order for Alois Beer to probably add knowledge to his world, he wrote travel notes not only in Czech, but also in German, in Kurent, and you can even come across Hungarian in them, even though he did not speak this language.
The house where Alois Beer lived.
He was also a promoter of technical innovations, for which he earned a reputation as a weirdo in Dobruška. “He was the first to have an umbrella in Dobruška. The umbrella did not exist in the small town in the 19th century. And Beer suddenly went around with an umbrella, they thought he was crazy. He was different from the others, he was a very peculiar personality. I probably wouldn’t want him as a neighbor. He kept arguing with his neighbor about something and “he judged, and the most decent expression he had for him was” Mamlas Franc. “But what he left behind is an amazing document of the time in which he lived,” adds Jiří Mach.
When Ladislav Smoljak allegedly mentioned Alois Beer in one of the interviews as one of the forerunners of Jára Cimrman, Jiří Mach sent him and Zdeněk Svěrák the then freshly completed DVD with a scanned work by Alois Beer. And finally, he personally handed it over to Miloň Čepelka. Its importance is appreciated by the current generation of researchers. Although Dobruška has not yet unveiled any memorial plaque to Alois Beer, she has her place of honor in the local cemetery.
More about Alois Beer (February 27, 1833, Dobruška – October 10, 1897, Dobruška)
“He was a great supporter and enthusiastic promoter of technical progress. He participated in the organization and success of two landscape economic and industrial exhibitions, which took place in Dobruška in 1889 and 1892. Beer’s chronicler’s work is almost a monumental document, depicting word and image life in the second half. On three and a half thousand pages in almost seventy notebooks, he captured mainly Dobruška, but a large part of the notebooks are also devoted to his travels and fellow travel, and in his hometown he drew and described all the houses and gave the characteristics of their inhabitants. also to other towns and villages in the whole Podorlicko region, but also in other regions, which he visited only briefly (eg Povltaví, Šumava). especially the war events of 1866, which significantly affected the life of the then towns and villages Eastern Bohemia. Beer also captured clothing, production tools and products, and many other things he saw with receptive eyes. His work thus conveys to us not only the objective world, but also the thinking and opinions of him and his contemporaries. It thus forms a special testimony to his time, region and city. So far, information not only of a historical, but above all of an ethnographic nature has not been fully used. (Source: Jiří Mach)
– .
