Searching for my father's Leica
When one loses a parent at an early age, one clutches at opportunities to find important ties to bring the missing person back to one’s life.
In our family history, apart from losing many loved ones, scores of our possessions got lost, confiscated, stolen … They disappeared in the flow of disastrous history of Central Europe of the last century with so many moves and changes of locations. Both my parents, together with my maternal grandparents, were deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and only allowed to take a small case each. Then, they were moved to Auschwitz and further labour camps, carrying no personal possessions. Miraculously, both my parents returned in separate ways after the war but had to start again to gather the few items secretly held for them by dear friends and then slowly acquire again the essential objects needed for everyday being and to satisfy their hours of leisure.
Another calamity descended at the beginning of 1952 when my father was arrested suddenly, imprisoned and then unlawfully murdered by the Czechoslovak state in December 1952. After his arrest, our apartment was invaded by the State Security agents. Many of our possessions were taken away, and most were never seen again. For example, our Škoda 1101 Tudor faux cabriolet, bought second-hand in 1948, was taken from our privately rented garage, as well as bank savings books, cash, identity, membership and ministry entry cards, photographs, diaries, private correspondence, keys, father’s leather briefcase, many books, and my father’s 1938 Leica IIIb (with an unfinished film inside!), which he so dearly treasured, being a keen photographer. Luckily the State Security agents left a detailed list of all the items taken, which noted the camera serial number.
I cannot be sure when Rudolf obtained his Leica IIIb delivered to Prague by the Leitz factory in Wetzlar, Germany in January 1939. It is possible that Rudolf bought it second hand on return from the concentration camps, because how would the camera have survived the war unless it belonged to the few items kept for the uncertain future in their absence by dear friends of my parents?
Was my father aware that as soon as the formation of the Third Reich occurred in 1933, Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956), son of the head of the company from 1920 to 1956, began receiving calls from his Jewish employees, asking for help to get them and their families out of Germany? As Protestants, Leitz and his family, were unaffected by Nuremberg Laws. However, the Laws restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz established what has become known as the 'Leica Freedom Train', a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being sent overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were assigned to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. Leitz did what he did because he felt responsible for his workers, their families, and for his neighbours in Wetzlar.
Those sent to the USA went to Leitz's Manhattan office, where they were helped to find jobs. Each new arrival was given a Leica as financial security because it could be easily exchanged for cash. The refugees were also paid a Leitz allowance until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press. They worked in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US.
Rudolf could not have known, because this incredible event came to light only fairly recently, and because the Leitz family did not wish it to be publicised. From Ernst Leitz II’s point of view, he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position.
Another interesting fact is that the Leica camera was a preferred tool for many Jewish photographers such as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, André Kertész, Elliot Erwitt, Yevgeny Khaldei, Ilse Bing, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Fritz Block, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Dauman, Garry Winogrand, Lou Reed, Jucia Moholy, Joel Meyerowitz and others.
Leica history started in 1849, when Carl Kellner founded the Optical Institute (Optisches Institut) in Wetzlar, Germany. Here, he produced microscopes and telescopes. Kellner died at the age of 29 and his apprentice, Friedrich Belthle, who married Kellner’s widow, assumed responsibility for the company. In 1864, Ernst Leitz I, who studied mechanics, began working at the Optical Institute and a year later would become a partner in the company. Belthle died in 1869 and Leitz I took over the business. Leitz I changed the name of the company to Ernst Leitz-Optische Werke-Wetzlar. Oskar Barnack, the Leica camera designer, was a brilliant mechanic who trained at Carl Zeiss, whom Emil Mechau, his former colleague at Zeiss, asked to join the Leitz company in 1911. Dr Max Berek, who came to Leitz a year later, constructed the Leica lenses.
The first Leica camera prototype was built by Barnack in 1913. The original Leica Ur was intended as a camera for test exposures with a 35mm cine picture film. Barnack took a few photos with the new camera in 1914. The Leica was further developed into several prototypes, and in 1923, Barnack convinced Ernst Leitz II to make a Leica 0 preproduction series (nos. 100 to 125) of 25 cameras for the factory personnel and outside photographers to test. Although the prototypes received mixed reception, Ernst Leitz II decided in 1924 to produce the new camera.
The Leica I camera (no. 126) was made late in 1924 and already sold in January 1925, but the official Leica launching was staged at the March 1925 Leipzig Spring Fair. The Leica was one of the first cameras to combine high-quality lenses with a compact, portable and easily pocket-able body.
For many years I was very keen to replace the missing Rudolf’s Leica IIIb. But where to find the closest model to the one that was stolen? Once having decided I really wanted it, I searched many internet auction sites and only recently managed to locate one from the same series delivered to Prague in January 1939. Surprisingly, it was located in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where my mother and stepfather, Pavel Kovály, resided while in exile in the USA from 1968 to 1996. Surely a chance coincidence? The seller did not know the camera’s history, but perhaps it was brought over also by a Czechoslovak émigré after the Soviet occupation in 1968 …
So now this Leica is with me, with the correct Summitar 5cm f2 lens as supplied by Leitz originally, and I can have it on my writing desk and take a few shots now and then to keep my father’s memory alive.
October 2025
copyright © 2025 Ivan Margolius and Margolius Family Archive
In our family history, apart from losing many loved ones, scores of our possessions got lost, confiscated, stolen … They disappeared in the flow of disastrous history of Central Europe of the last century with so many moves and changes of locations. Both my parents, together with my maternal grandparents, were deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and only allowed to take a small case each. Then, they were moved to Auschwitz and further labour camps, carrying no personal possessions. Miraculously, both my parents returned in separate ways after the war but had to start again to gather the few items secretly held for them by dear friends and then slowly acquire again the essential objects needed for everyday being and to satisfy their hours of leisure.
Another calamity descended at the beginning of 1952 when my father was arrested suddenly, imprisoned and then unlawfully murdered by the Czechoslovak state in December 1952. After his arrest, our apartment was invaded by the State Security agents. Many of our possessions were taken away, and most were never seen again. For example, our Škoda 1101 Tudor faux cabriolet, bought second-hand in 1948, was taken from our privately rented garage, as well as bank savings books, cash, identity, membership and ministry entry cards, photographs, diaries, private correspondence, keys, father’s leather briefcase, many books, and my father’s 1938 Leica IIIb (with an unfinished film inside!), which he so dearly treasured, being a keen photographer. Luckily the State Security agents left a detailed list of all the items taken, which noted the camera serial number.
I cannot be sure when Rudolf obtained his Leica IIIb delivered to Prague by the Leitz factory in Wetzlar, Germany in January 1939. It is possible that Rudolf bought it second hand on return from the concentration camps, because how would the camera have survived the war unless it belonged to the few items kept for the uncertain future in their absence by dear friends of my parents?
Was my father aware that as soon as the formation of the Third Reich occurred in 1933, Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956), son of the head of the company from 1920 to 1956, began receiving calls from his Jewish employees, asking for help to get them and their families out of Germany? As Protestants, Leitz and his family, were unaffected by Nuremberg Laws. However, the Laws restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz established what has become known as the 'Leica Freedom Train', a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being sent overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were assigned to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. Leitz did what he did because he felt responsible for his workers, their families, and for his neighbours in Wetzlar.
Those sent to the USA went to Leitz's Manhattan office, where they were helped to find jobs. Each new arrival was given a Leica as financial security because it could be easily exchanged for cash. The refugees were also paid a Leitz allowance until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press. They worked in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US.
Rudolf could not have known, because this incredible event came to light only fairly recently, and because the Leitz family did not wish it to be publicised. From Ernst Leitz II’s point of view, he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position.
Another interesting fact is that the Leica camera was a preferred tool for many Jewish photographers such as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, André Kertész, Elliot Erwitt, Yevgeny Khaldei, Ilse Bing, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Fritz Block, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Dauman, Garry Winogrand, Lou Reed, Jucia Moholy, Joel Meyerowitz and others.
Leica history started in 1849, when Carl Kellner founded the Optical Institute (Optisches Institut) in Wetzlar, Germany. Here, he produced microscopes and telescopes. Kellner died at the age of 29 and his apprentice, Friedrich Belthle, who married Kellner’s widow, assumed responsibility for the company. In 1864, Ernst Leitz I, who studied mechanics, began working at the Optical Institute and a year later would become a partner in the company. Belthle died in 1869 and Leitz I took over the business. Leitz I changed the name of the company to Ernst Leitz-Optische Werke-Wetzlar. Oskar Barnack, the Leica camera designer, was a brilliant mechanic who trained at Carl Zeiss, whom Emil Mechau, his former colleague at Zeiss, asked to join the Leitz company in 1911. Dr Max Berek, who came to Leitz a year later, constructed the Leica lenses.
The first Leica camera prototype was built by Barnack in 1913. The original Leica Ur was intended as a camera for test exposures with a 35mm cine picture film. Barnack took a few photos with the new camera in 1914. The Leica was further developed into several prototypes, and in 1923, Barnack convinced Ernst Leitz II to make a Leica 0 preproduction series (nos. 100 to 125) of 25 cameras for the factory personnel and outside photographers to test. Although the prototypes received mixed reception, Ernst Leitz II decided in 1924 to produce the new camera.
The Leica I camera (no. 126) was made late in 1924 and already sold in January 1925, but the official Leica launching was staged at the March 1925 Leipzig Spring Fair. The Leica was one of the first cameras to combine high-quality lenses with a compact, portable and easily pocket-able body.
For many years I was very keen to replace the missing Rudolf’s Leica IIIb. But where to find the closest model to the one that was stolen? Once having decided I really wanted it, I searched many internet auction sites and only recently managed to locate one from the same series delivered to Prague in January 1939. Surprisingly, it was located in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where my mother and stepfather, Pavel Kovály, resided while in exile in the USA from 1968 to 1996. Surely a chance coincidence? The seller did not know the camera’s history, but perhaps it was brought over also by a Czechoslovak émigré after the Soviet occupation in 1968 …
So now this Leica is with me, with the correct Summitar 5cm f2 lens as supplied by Leitz originally, and I can have it on my writing desk and take a few shots now and then to keep my father’s memory alive.
October 2025
copyright © 2025 Ivan Margolius and Margolius Family Archive
The Robot of Prague
Whenever in Prague my first steps lead me to Říční Street, a quiet backwater in the Malá Strana quarter by the Vltava river, seen above as it appeared in 2003. Always, when I stand in front of number 11, I am amazed at the lack of tourists who flock to the city yearly to satisfy their cultural and travel cravings. Why do they miss the most important spot in Prague if not the whole world? Surely this is the centre of the universe.
An ordinary old, plain three-storey apartment house, half-way up a narrow cobbled street with a gateway into a yard at the rear: what is the fuss about, you ask? If you visit at present there is a clue in a bronze plaque fixed to the front façade just below the run of first-floor windows: ‘V tomto domě žili a tvořili bratři Josef a Karel Čapkové v letech 1907 – 1925’ (Brothers Josef and Karel Čapek lived and worked in this house between 1907 and 1925).
Nowadays the world public is aware of Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek and more recently Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký as authors who have originated from the Czech lands, while both Čapeks are now nearly forgotten. However, before the Second World War it was the Anglophile Karel Čapek who was the best known. In the 1930s Karel became the foremost candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature mainly for his plays R.U.R., The Makropulos Affair (turned into an opera by Leoš Janáček) and novel War with the Newts, but he never received it. Čapek visited Britain in 1924 and made friends with G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton and became an honorary member of the London PEN Club. Čapek also admired T. G. Masaryk and published Conversations with T. G. Masaryk. Karel’s brother Josef was an acclaimed painter, graphic artist, writer and poet.
On August 6th, 1907 Karel Čapek (1890-1938) and Josef Čapek (1887-1945) moved to Říční 532/11 from Úpice, a small town under the Krkonoše Mountains in northern Bohemia where their father Dr Antonín Čapek (1855-1929) had his own house. The Prague flat was found by Božena (1866-1924) their mother, after Antonín had to abandon his Úpice medical practice due to illness.
The Říční house had six windows in the upper storeys with a yellow-painted façade. Josef had the larger corner room, where he had his easel, which had one window looking into the yard, and two street windows. After his marriage in 1919, Josef’s and his wife Jarmila’s bedroom was in the middle and the shared living room with two street windows was at the end. The kitchen next to Karel’s room faced the yard through the glazed, access walkway. Karel’s room was furnished with simple furniture from the previous century. It was a narrow room with one window facing the yard and his writing desk underneath. His brother’s paintings hung on the walls.
Karel had just finished the play The Outlaw (Loupežník), submitting the manuscript to his publisher Otakar Štorch-Marien. At the same time, Karel started on his new project. Karel was preoccupied with the contemporary difficult conditions of the factory workers and the hard-line attitude of their bosses ever since writing the story Systém together with his brother Josef, published first in the weekly Národní obzor on October 3rd, 1908. The memory of the Úpice textile workers on strike whom he had witnessed, seeing their march through the town, and the knowledge of newly introduced mass production and scientific management methods of manufacturing became his inspiration. In Systém the Čapek brothers described the action of a greedy factory owner who tried to employ workers devoid of human needs, ideas and emotions, purely to be used as automata and working machines to achieve the most efficient manufacturing means. However, after one worker had a visit by a pretty woman in his accommodation cell, his passions were aroused and having affected his fellows, the workers revolted, killed the owner’s family and set fire to the factory buildings.
A further impetus came, as Karel explained in an article in London’s Evening Standard in 1924. One day he had to take a tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city centre. The tram was uncomfortably overcrowded. He was astounded how modern living situations made people unconcerned about their normally accustomed living comforts. People were pressed together inside, even spilling outside on to the tram steps, appearing not like herded sheep, but like machines. He started to think about people not as individuals but as machines and during the journey thought about an expression which would describe a human being only able to work but not able to reason.
With that in mind, Karel began to write a drama about the manufacture of artificial people from man-made organic material who would free humans of work and drudgery, but finally due to overproduction those labouri would lead humankind to destruction and annihilation. He chose names of characters that carried symbolic meaning: Domin from dominus for the general manager of Rossum’s (derived from the Czech word rozum: mind, intelligence, sense, reason), Alquist, head of the works department, from the Latin aliquis, Fabry, engineer general from fabrika (factory), Busman, general commercial manager from ‘businessman’, Dr Gall, head of the physiological and experimental department from Galen and names from antiquity for the artificial beings such as Marius and Sulla.
For what to call the artificial workers he turned for help to his brother Josef. Karel described the occasion some 13 years later in the newspaper Lidové noviny of December 24th, 1933, in Kulturní kronika column, on page 12:
‘The author of the play R.U.R. did not, in fact, invent that word; he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unguarded moment. And while it was still fresh he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, the painter, who stood before an easel, vigorously painting at a canvas.
"Listen, Josef," the author began, "I think I have an idea for a play."
"What kind?" the painter muttered (he really did mutter, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.
"Then write it," the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was almost insulting.
"But," the author said, "I don't know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them labouri, but that strikes me as a bit literal."
"Then call them robots," the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting.’
In the summer of 1920 Karel decided to fine-tune the play at his parents’ place in Trenčianské Teplice and to have complete peace rented an attic room in the next door house. Despite the tropical heat of that summer, after a week of intensive work, he completed the play. By the beginning of August 1920 he was back in Prague. In November the play was published by Aventinum in a large run of 2000 copies with the cover in purple-brown designed by Josef, hardly four weeks after signing the contract.
The first premiere was at Klicperovo divadlo in Hradec Králové by the local amateur players on January 2nd and 3rd, 1921 followed by the National Theatre's official production in Prague on January 25th, 1921 with the stage set designed by architect Bedřich Feuerstein and directed by Vojta Novák, with costumes by Josef Čapek. The play, according to a review in Lidové noviny on January 27th, had a thunderous reception and many stage calls were requested of the author at the end of the show.
The play describes the activities of Rossum’s Universal Robots company that makes artificial people from synthetic, organic matter. These beings are not mechanical creatures, they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. Initially they seem happy to work for humans, but that changes with time, and at the end a hostile robot revolt points to the extinction of the human race, perhaps to be saved by a male robot and a female robot acting as Adam and Eve. Karel wrote that all the characters in the play had the right to exist, this circumstance must be carried through even if it ends in tragic consequences, otherwise greatness would not be attained. After the reality of conflicts life carries on, if there is no faith in life it is not worth to continue living.’ In my works nothing ends in death. I do not mean that life is a solution and purpose of everything, but is an eternal culmination, continuation and reconciliation of everything.’
Since then, and almost immediately, the robot word (other Czech contributions to the English dictionary are pistol, polka) explained as deriving from the Czech word robota (‘hard work’) by the quick-witted Josef, has become a universal expression in most languages for artificial intelligence machines invented by humans to help in their endeavours. Artificial human-like beings or intelligent machines have been thought of and written about before Čapek, such as the Golem, Frankenstein, the Steam Man, Tik-Tok, etc., but only now there was a word that described aptly the ‘new species’. This word, coming out in the first two decades of the twentieth century, joined other important discoveries and inventions as cornerstones of the rise of Modernism in the arts and sciences, such as X-rays, radiotelegraphy, radium, polonium, quantum theory, relativity theory, four-dimensional geometry, Cubism, aeroplane flight, etc. A new spirit was thought to have arrived, a spirit of the synthesis of new concepts, of a new human élan, of multiple views of reality, ambiguity of meaning as in Kafka’s works, leading towards new humanity and a new kind of people with a burning desire for sunlight, clean air and clear thought, a new attitude to life. Čapek's robots were a pure example of modernity not just in the name but by being ambiguous between the real being and the artificial machine. It prompted and inspired contemporary artists, writers and architects to create novel ideas based on new thinking and not on an imitation of the past, as had happened before.
So do me a favour when next in Prague: please pay homage to the birth of the most famous Czech word in worldwide use in the place of its conception.
First published in the Newsletter, The Friends of Czech Heritage, Issue 17, Summer/Autumn 2017, pp. 3 - 6
copyright © 2017 and © 2025 Ivan Margolius
An ordinary old, plain three-storey apartment house, half-way up a narrow cobbled street with a gateway into a yard at the rear: what is the fuss about, you ask? If you visit at present there is a clue in a bronze plaque fixed to the front façade just below the run of first-floor windows: ‘V tomto domě žili a tvořili bratři Josef a Karel Čapkové v letech 1907 – 1925’ (Brothers Josef and Karel Čapek lived and worked in this house between 1907 and 1925).
Nowadays the world public is aware of Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek and more recently Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký as authors who have originated from the Czech lands, while both Čapeks are now nearly forgotten. However, before the Second World War it was the Anglophile Karel Čapek who was the best known. In the 1930s Karel became the foremost candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature mainly for his plays R.U.R., The Makropulos Affair (turned into an opera by Leoš Janáček) and novel War with the Newts, but he never received it. Čapek visited Britain in 1924 and made friends with G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton and became an honorary member of the London PEN Club. Čapek also admired T. G. Masaryk and published Conversations with T. G. Masaryk. Karel’s brother Josef was an acclaimed painter, graphic artist, writer and poet.
On August 6th, 1907 Karel Čapek (1890-1938) and Josef Čapek (1887-1945) moved to Říční 532/11 from Úpice, a small town under the Krkonoše Mountains in northern Bohemia where their father Dr Antonín Čapek (1855-1929) had his own house. The Prague flat was found by Božena (1866-1924) their mother, after Antonín had to abandon his Úpice medical practice due to illness.
The Říční house had six windows in the upper storeys with a yellow-painted façade. Josef had the larger corner room, where he had his easel, which had one window looking into the yard, and two street windows. After his marriage in 1919, Josef’s and his wife Jarmila’s bedroom was in the middle and the shared living room with two street windows was at the end. The kitchen next to Karel’s room faced the yard through the glazed, access walkway. Karel’s room was furnished with simple furniture from the previous century. It was a narrow room with one window facing the yard and his writing desk underneath. His brother’s paintings hung on the walls.
Karel had just finished the play The Outlaw (Loupežník), submitting the manuscript to his publisher Otakar Štorch-Marien. At the same time, Karel started on his new project. Karel was preoccupied with the contemporary difficult conditions of the factory workers and the hard-line attitude of their bosses ever since writing the story Systém together with his brother Josef, published first in the weekly Národní obzor on October 3rd, 1908. The memory of the Úpice textile workers on strike whom he had witnessed, seeing their march through the town, and the knowledge of newly introduced mass production and scientific management methods of manufacturing became his inspiration. In Systém the Čapek brothers described the action of a greedy factory owner who tried to employ workers devoid of human needs, ideas and emotions, purely to be used as automata and working machines to achieve the most efficient manufacturing means. However, after one worker had a visit by a pretty woman in his accommodation cell, his passions were aroused and having affected his fellows, the workers revolted, killed the owner’s family and set fire to the factory buildings.
A further impetus came, as Karel explained in an article in London’s Evening Standard in 1924. One day he had to take a tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city centre. The tram was uncomfortably overcrowded. He was astounded how modern living situations made people unconcerned about their normally accustomed living comforts. People were pressed together inside, even spilling outside on to the tram steps, appearing not like herded sheep, but like machines. He started to think about people not as individuals but as machines and during the journey thought about an expression which would describe a human being only able to work but not able to reason.
With that in mind, Karel began to write a drama about the manufacture of artificial people from man-made organic material who would free humans of work and drudgery, but finally due to overproduction those labouri would lead humankind to destruction and annihilation. He chose names of characters that carried symbolic meaning: Domin from dominus for the general manager of Rossum’s (derived from the Czech word rozum: mind, intelligence, sense, reason), Alquist, head of the works department, from the Latin aliquis, Fabry, engineer general from fabrika (factory), Busman, general commercial manager from ‘businessman’, Dr Gall, head of the physiological and experimental department from Galen and names from antiquity for the artificial beings such as Marius and Sulla.
For what to call the artificial workers he turned for help to his brother Josef. Karel described the occasion some 13 years later in the newspaper Lidové noviny of December 24th, 1933, in Kulturní kronika column, on page 12:
‘The author of the play R.U.R. did not, in fact, invent that word; he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unguarded moment. And while it was still fresh he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, the painter, who stood before an easel, vigorously painting at a canvas.
"Listen, Josef," the author began, "I think I have an idea for a play."
"What kind?" the painter muttered (he really did mutter, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.
"Then write it," the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was almost insulting.
"But," the author said, "I don't know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them labouri, but that strikes me as a bit literal."
"Then call them robots," the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting.’
In the summer of 1920 Karel decided to fine-tune the play at his parents’ place in Trenčianské Teplice and to have complete peace rented an attic room in the next door house. Despite the tropical heat of that summer, after a week of intensive work, he completed the play. By the beginning of August 1920 he was back in Prague. In November the play was published by Aventinum in a large run of 2000 copies with the cover in purple-brown designed by Josef, hardly four weeks after signing the contract.
The first premiere was at Klicperovo divadlo in Hradec Králové by the local amateur players on January 2nd and 3rd, 1921 followed by the National Theatre's official production in Prague on January 25th, 1921 with the stage set designed by architect Bedřich Feuerstein and directed by Vojta Novák, with costumes by Josef Čapek. The play, according to a review in Lidové noviny on January 27th, had a thunderous reception and many stage calls were requested of the author at the end of the show.
The play describes the activities of Rossum’s Universal Robots company that makes artificial people from synthetic, organic matter. These beings are not mechanical creatures, they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. Initially they seem happy to work for humans, but that changes with time, and at the end a hostile robot revolt points to the extinction of the human race, perhaps to be saved by a male robot and a female robot acting as Adam and Eve. Karel wrote that all the characters in the play had the right to exist, this circumstance must be carried through even if it ends in tragic consequences, otherwise greatness would not be attained. After the reality of conflicts life carries on, if there is no faith in life it is not worth to continue living.’ In my works nothing ends in death. I do not mean that life is a solution and purpose of everything, but is an eternal culmination, continuation and reconciliation of everything.’
Since then, and almost immediately, the robot word (other Czech contributions to the English dictionary are pistol, polka) explained as deriving from the Czech word robota (‘hard work’) by the quick-witted Josef, has become a universal expression in most languages for artificial intelligence machines invented by humans to help in their endeavours. Artificial human-like beings or intelligent machines have been thought of and written about before Čapek, such as the Golem, Frankenstein, the Steam Man, Tik-Tok, etc., but only now there was a word that described aptly the ‘new species’. This word, coming out in the first two decades of the twentieth century, joined other important discoveries and inventions as cornerstones of the rise of Modernism in the arts and sciences, such as X-rays, radiotelegraphy, radium, polonium, quantum theory, relativity theory, four-dimensional geometry, Cubism, aeroplane flight, etc. A new spirit was thought to have arrived, a spirit of the synthesis of new concepts, of a new human élan, of multiple views of reality, ambiguity of meaning as in Kafka’s works, leading towards new humanity and a new kind of people with a burning desire for sunlight, clean air and clear thought, a new attitude to life. Čapek's robots were a pure example of modernity not just in the name but by being ambiguous between the real being and the artificial machine. It prompted and inspired contemporary artists, writers and architects to create novel ideas based on new thinking and not on an imitation of the past, as had happened before.
So do me a favour when next in Prague: please pay homage to the birth of the most famous Czech word in worldwide use in the place of its conception.
First published in the Newsletter, The Friends of Czech Heritage, Issue 17, Summer/Autumn 2017, pp. 3 - 6
copyright © 2017 and © 2025 Ivan Margolius