Josef Kraus

The gamekeeper Straka lives by himself in the Bohemian forest hill. He has quarreled with his only son. He cannot come to terms with the fact that his son has abandoned his beloved forests and settled in a town. He has never even met his grandson Vasek. Following an illness, however, little Vasek needs some country air, and so one day his mother Jarmila delivers him to her father-in-law's cottage. At first Straka is angry, but Vasek is an unaffected lad and throws himself with verve into all the little adventures that the forest provides.

Sunday in September 1977, a celebration of the Miners Day. The old Hepnar is sitting at the cemetery and is recalling events from ten years ago. That time the representative of the ministry Barvír announced at the miners meeting that mining in the mines would decrease. He reasoned this decision by the fact the deposits of coal are almost used up. The boss of the mine and most of the miners protested. Barvír did not take their critical objections into account. He announced at the communist district meeting the closure of the business as the mine according to new economic principles did not prosper.

Former Nazi Klaus Abard survives to the 1990s by taking anti-ageing pills. He plans to use a time travel trip to return to Germany in 1944 and present Hitler with a hydrogen bomb, so that he can win the war. Unfortunately the pilot, woman-chasing Karel Bures, dies on the morning of the trip and his earnest twin brother Jan impersonates him, without knowing about the plot. The plot goes wrong when they lose the bomb and land near Hitler's bunker in 1941, at a time that the Nazis sense victory. Bures, with two of the plotters, escape capture by the Nazis and make it back to the time machine. Bures programs the machine to return one day before they left, because he figures he can then save his brother and foil the plot.

Set in the early 1930s, a young man finds a job as a dishwasher in a hotel and quickly works his way up the ladder. Loosely based on the novel by Henryk Worcell.

The title "All My Good Countrymen" is not without irony as this epic tale of Czech village life from shortly after the end of the Second World War concentrates on the activities of a group of friends who are not beyond reproach in siding with a politically corrupt regime for material advancement. Are these the "good countrymen" of the title or does it refer to the rest of the village who scorn these petty authority figure with silent contempt?

Mr. Kopfrkingl enjoys his job at a crematorium in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. He likes reading the Tibetan book of the dead and espouses the view that cremation relieves earthly suffering and sets out to save the world. There may be another idealogy that fits snugly with his existing worldview.