He served dissidents at the Na Klamovce restaurant
Stáhnout obrázek
Karel Širmer was born in September 1945 in the village of Střezivojice in the Kokořín region, where his parents had moved from Prague for a few months. He grew up in Prague‘s Vinohrady district, where his father had a pub with a shop. He and his two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, helped their father at work, which influenced his choice of profession. After returning from two years of military service, he joined Jednota Mělník. In 1969 he became an employee of the Restaurants and Canteens (RaJ) Prague 5. He first worked as a waiter in the workers‘ pub U Tatrovky in Smíchov, then at U Šmídů (then Na Formance) in Kováků Street and U Mlynářky in Holečkova Street. These were third- or fourth-rate restaurants, frequented mainly by workers. U Tatrovky opened at 6 a.m. and famous actors used to go there for soup, coming back from the night move or leaving from the Smíchov railway station to film at the Barrandov studios. In 1976, Karel Širmer went to work as a substitute at the Na Klamovce restaurant, where he eventually remained as manager for 28 years. Apart from athletes and students, people from the dissent began to visit Klamovka at that time. For example, Mejla Hlavsa and other musicians from the band The Plastic People of the Universe, publishers of samizdat and signatories of Charter 77, which attracted the interest of the State Security. Therefore, the pub was regularly inspected and pearl-clutching took place when State Security officers were looking for pretexts for criminal sanctions against this community. Karel Širmer remembers, among other things, syringes deliberately scattered on the toilet, which were supposed to be proof that the long-haired customers were taking drugs. The society of dissidents usually met at Klamovka on Mondays. State Security officers first surrounded the pub every Monday, along with reinforcements from Ústí nad Labem, Děčín and other towns. Eventually, they pressured the RaJ management, which ordered Širmer to extend the closing days from Saturday and Sunday to Mondays. RaJ still paid him the lost profit for the Monday working day. On the other hand, Širmer often had to pay fines, which were given to him under various pretexts by members of the Public Security Service, for example, for not observing closing hours. His guests then paid the fines. At the end of the 1980s, Václav Havel was also detained at Klamovka, having come there to meet Western European journalists from the Spiegl and Stern newspapers. When he was elected President of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the regime in December 1989, he came from the Castle to celebrate the event at Klamovka. Under the new conditions, Karel Širmer privatised the pub and worked there until 2004, when he retired.
