Childhood
Jára Cimrman was born to Marlen and Leopold Cimrman in Vienna on
a cold night in the year 1867 or 1892
(Due to the unreadable handwriting of the clerk of the 4th Vienna
district Franz Huschek, who wrote the records into the registry
only when drunk, we can't be precise about the year of birth).
His father was a well-known tailor-innovator in Vienna.
According to the entries in Cimrman's diary, he didn't have a happy childhood. His father enrolled him in a Czech school and his mother in an Austrian school. Due to these two steps he went to Czech lessons in the morning and to German lessons in the afternoon, which is reflected in his works as a sort of language-schizophrenia. What other schools he attended it is not known because he mastered most of the professions, which he later engaged in, by himself.
One of the reasons for his unlimited inventiveness was most likely the fact, that he didn't experience the teenage stage thereby he didn't get disturbed from his work. His parents were hiding his true sex from him until the age of 15, because he had to wear clothes handed down to him from his elder sister Luisa. When the malicious classmates of the girls-college told him that he definetely wasn't a girl, his teenage stage was already over because it is known that girls mature earlier.
Sigmund Freud
Another turning point to his deeds was when his Moravian
fellow-countryman Sigmund Freud visited his father's workshop
intending to lengthen the sleeves and trousers of his suit.
While waiting for his suit he noticed young Jaroslav,
who was fastened to the table because of his hyperactivity.
Freud told him: "I see, you are tied up!"
These words kindled an explosion of resistance in Cimrman's head. Not very long after that Cimrman puts down his spoon with the semolina pudding and leaves his home at the age of thirty-seven (or thirty-two).
Travels
From that moment on, we find his deeds punctuated in the history of mankind.
He proposed a project for the Panama-canal to the US government along with
an Opera of the same name.
He investigated the life of the polar "selfeaters".
He missed the North Pole only by 7 metres when fleeing from the "Chomper"
tribe.
He started a puppet theatre in Paraguay.
In Vienna, he established a school for criminology, a ballet school and
a musical school.
Old age
The last place he lived was in a little village called Liptákov under the mountains Jizerské hory. In 1969, Jiří Šebánek and Zdeněk Svěrák found a chest there with the master's legacy. Cimrman had lived in Liptákov since 1902. We know this a result of an analysis (by carbon dating) of the dirt on his shoes that he arrived in to Liptákov. From this analysis they determined the year 1902, +/- 200 years. According to later studies of the Liptákov chronical, it was the year 1904. Most of his dramatic compositions were written in Liptákov. Cimrman's trail disappears from Liptákov with the first gunshots of the first world war in 1914. Where to, it is not known.
