- journalist, writer and exile
CV
Lída Rakušanová was born Ludmila Horská on 26 May 1947 in České Budějovice.
After graduating from grammar school in 1965, she began studying Bohemistics and South Slavic languages at Charles University in Prague. After the August 1968 occupation, she interrupted her studies for a year and left with her future husband, photographer Josef Rakušan, first to France and then to Germany, where they both worked in a street lighting factory in Frankfurt am Main. In Germany, they applied for political asylum. In July 1969, they married in Frankfurt and moved to Munich, where they became involved in Czechoslovak exile activities. They published, among other things, in the exile magazine Text, whose editor-in-chief was Sláva Volný, a former communist journalist and one of the most prominent commentators on Radio Free Europe in Munich. Together with him, the Rakušans published the literary exile calendar Kalex for three years in the early 1970s.
In Germany, Lída Rakušanová studied German and Slavonic studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and became a court translator. In Munich, she worked as an editor for Radio Free Europe from 1978. From February 1978, she was part of its foreign editorial team, later assigned to the domestic political editorial team, focusing on Czechoslovakia, Central and Eastern Europe, NATO and the EU. In addition to hundreds of political commentaries, for many years she also prepared for RSE the programme Literature without Censorship, a continuing reading of books by authors banned by the regime, published in samizdat and in exile publishing houses. From the microphone she announced herself as Lída Šindlerová, which was her pseudonym.
Since 1989 she has lived alternately in Prague and the Bavarian Forest and has worked with Czech and German-language media, for example as a commentator for Czech Radio. In 1994, the Czech editorial office of Radio Free Europe in Munich was closed down and Lída Rakusanová then chose a career as a freelance journalist and moved to Prague. She continued to work externally not only with the subsequent Czech broadcast of Radio Free Europe in Prague, but also with Czech Television and Czech Radio. In the mid-1990s, she had her own talk show , Na pozvání Lídy Rakušanová , on ČT. Since the mid-1990s, she worked as a Prague correspondent under the name Ludmila Rakusan for the Berlin-based Der Tagesspiegel, the weekly Rheinischer Merkur, the Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft, the daily Passauer Neue Presse, etc. From 2002 to 2015 she was involved in the regional press publishing house Vltava Labe Press, where she developed journalistic projects and coordinated joint activities of the then parent publishing house Passauer Neue Presse.
In 2004, when she was the editor-in-chief of the central editorial office of the local daily, she founded the Institute of Regional Journalism, a joint project of the VLP publishing house and the Department of Journalism at the Faculty of Social Studies at MUNI, together with Professor Ivo Možný, the dean of the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University. Between 1 October 2004 and 16 October 2005 she was President of the Association of European Journalists. In 1998-1999 she was a member of the Czech part of the Coordinating Council of the Czech-German Discussion Forum. Since 2020 she has been a member of the College of the Museum of the Memory of the 20th Century.
Work
She is the author of the book Václav and Dagmar Havel, which was published in Czech and German, and the autobiography Svobodná v Evropě.
Awards
She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Czech-German Understanding Art Award (1997), the Silver Medal of the President of the Senate (2022), the Jan Palach Award (2000), the Jiří Ješ Award (2012), and the Opus vitae Award of the Czech Literary Fund Foundation for excellence in journalism and promoting the values of freedom and democracy before and after 1989 (2019).
Excerpt from the interview
"Pavel Tigrid has always been for me the essence of an intellectual icon and I really admired him very much. At the beginning I was so shaken when I met him alive because I knew him, because I knew how the communists attacked him and slandered him. And it seemed to me at the time that he must really be this almost mystical person who didn't even exist normally. But then when I saw him in Munich, when I met him, this was before I started working in radio, maybe it was when I was working there as a freelancer. That means around the mid-70s. I know he was like really fully immediate and he said to me, let's have a chat. At the time I was like: Oh my God, I'm going to tickle Tigrid! I got over it and I got over it very quickly that he was a man who was a terrible fan of the young people and he said that the old people, he wasn't nearly as old as he put himself back then, that the old people had done enough here and it wasn't very good, it wasn't leading to much, so he was giving space to the young people. And he was really giving it to me in the sense that he really inspired me, or helped me develop my journalistic beginnings, my skills. He gave me an amazing space in Testimony, where I did a report or a kind of analysis on North Ossetia. That was topical at the time. And I worked in radio at the beginning, and then when I was employed there, I worked in the foreign policy desk. And so it made sense at that point, because I was dealing with it anyway.
Then I started going to Franken, which was also a mystical place. Franken is actually a village on the outskirts of the North Palatinate, it's a little bit from the Czech border, and I have to say that it was absolutely amazing. This place was chosen by Abbot Opasek, the archbishop of the monastery of Brevnov. Right after 1945 he became the abbot of the monastery of Brevnov and he was the youngest abbot ever to come to this place. After 1948, when they arrested all the church dignitaries, they also arrested him and he didn't get out of prison until the 1960s and of course he couldn't go back to being a priest, so he had various jobs, like construction and so on. And then in the '80s he went to Rome, and when the Russian tanks came, the Pope wouldn't let him come back and they sent him to Rohr in Bavaria. And he was there and on that occasion he founded something called Opus bonum, or good work, and he founded it together with people from the Ackermann-Gemeinde, from the Ackermann community, with German colleagues. And the conference was always only once a year, always in the autumn. It was a wonderful place, because he always invited people who were from completely different backgrounds, but also, in a way, they didn't fit together. Belt organized the meetings together with Pavel Tigrid, because he was also one of the groups that didn't deal with that, and together with Ivan Medek, for example. Later, when Ivan Medek came to emigrate, but also, for example, with Richard Belcredi, who had a big say in those church circles, and they were always wonderful meetings that really made sense."
Photo
From the archive of Lída Rakušanová. Contemporary photos taken by Marta Myšková.
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