Blackfield District Committee

The Blackfield District Committee is the local political body whose chairman, Josef Laník, appears at Landauer House after it has been converted into a physiotherapy building. Through Laník’s authority and his account of the house, the Committee embodies the postwar transfer of power while laying claim to the building’s history: the house is presented as a former capitalist luxury, a structure defended during wartime, and a potential public inheritance.

The Committee and Its Chairman

At the house, Laník introduces himself as chairman of the District Committee, responsible to the Party for the Blackfield area. He addresses those present as comrades, making the visit unmistakably political as well as architectural. Hana already knows him and greets him as Comrade Laník, observing that he has risen in the world. His reply locates that rise within the revolution: the proletariat is now in power.

Laník’s position joins local administration to Party responsibility. The Committee is not described through offices, procedures, or a wider membership; its presence in the narrative is concentrated in its chairman, whose official standing gives him the power to shape what the visitors hear about the house.

Authority Over the House’s History

During the hour-long tour, Laník interrupts Hana’s account of the building with facts he knows as a former caretaker: when it was constructed, what materials were used, and what happened after the Landauer family left. Hana supplies knowledge of the architect and the owners’ family, while Laník contributes the building’s material record and wartime history. Their complementary accounts make the tour a shared narration of the house, even as their distinct kinds of knowledge remain visible.

The visit is explicitly framed as a passage from architecture to politics. Laník insists that Eve explain to her readers how he defended the house against a counterattack by what he calls the forces of bourgeois Fascism. His phrasing turns the building’s survival into a revolutionary story, and the journalist’s notebook and the photographer’s camera carry that version beyond the room. The camera’s repeated shutter, described as sending images from the present into the past, gives the tour a further tension: the house is being recorded even as its history is being interpreted.

From Private Luxury to Public Use

A later account identifies Laník as the building’s former caretaker and recalls that he described the Landauers’ life there as indecently luxurious. He says he maintained the structure as best he could while bombs fell around it, then defended it with his sister against the Nazis during liberation, before handing it over intact to the Soviet forces. The Committee chairman thus speaks both as a political official and as someone with a personal history of caring for the building through war and regime change.

Laník hopes the house will be opened to the public, so ordinary people can enjoy what was once reserved for a privileged few. That aspiration recasts the modernist residence as a collective resource, not merely a monument to its former owners. Yet the building’s neglect complicates the claim: it is described as one of the city’s architectural gems, while the city takes little notice of it. The Committee’s account consequently carries both a promise of public access and an implicit question about whether political possession is enough to preserve or value the house.