Abstract
What a beautiful day, Emil Franke may well have been thinking to himself as he hurried through the streets of Prague on a cool November morning in 1937. If only that day he had not been confronted by an unpleasant member of parliament's interpellations! The representatives of the Sudeten German Party were going to be asking about the wages of German minority teachers and Karel Domin, the rector of Charles University, was planning to ask about Straka Academy.
Franke knew the situation in the academy very wellby the beginning of the 1920s, his Ministry of Supply had already occupied some of its rooms, and Domin shed some light on this situation. In his interpellation Domin described the state of the foundation as the most painful chapter in the existence of foundations in Czechoslovakia.
He finished his speech by asking a question: Are you, as Minister of Education, willing to arrange for both the foundation and academy to be returned and kept for our students as the founder of this foundation intended? As Franke very well knew, at that moment in time the academy had barely any students. It was basically useless, it served no purpose.