Josef Matouschek was born in Svárov u Tanvaldu, he graduated from the academy of commerce in Liberec and worked as a personal secretary to industrialist Heinrich von Liebig. From the end of the 1880s, Matouschek participated in everything that had to do with the discovery and promotion of natural wonders in the Liberec region and its wider surroundings. In 1886 he joined the German Mountain Society for the Ještěd and Jizera Mountains and four years later he was already a member of its main committee. Beside his job, the mountain association became the focus of his life. This is when Matouschek became the initiator of the systematic marking of hiking trails in our mountains and he also began to publish. His articles started to appear more and more often in newspapers and magazines, but especially in the yearbooks of the mountain society. He applied his perfect knowledge of the region in his cartographic works, particularly significant among which was the special map of the Jizera Mountains from 1927, known even today as “the Matouschek Map”. It covers the wide area roughly between Žitava and Mimoň in the west and the west part of Krkonoše Mountains in the east. The map brought an unprecedented amount of information and detail. Particular attention was paid to the Jizera Mountains. Almost all tourist attractions were listed here, hundreds of watercourses, landscape shapes, settlements and their parts, solitary houses, roads and pathways, forest passages, rocks, prominent trees, crosses and memorials were recorded by name and marked with perfect attention to detail. This was also the first map that showed the area using contour lines. In 1929 Matouschek published a smaller Special Map of the so-called Kumer Mountain Range (Spezial-Karte vom Kummergebirge) with a scale of 1 : 33 300 and in 1932 Special Map of the Dubská Hill-land (Spezial-Karte vom Daubaer Bergland) with a scale of 1 : 40 000. Both maps, and especially the latter, were very popular among the general public. The list wouldn`t be complete without the colour map of marked trails (Markierungs-Karte vom Jeschken- und Isergebirge, 1 : 75 000) from 1935. Its aim was not to record details, but to chart all the marked routes of this vast region.
Josef Matouschek died in Liberec shortly after the end of the war, on 12 July 1945. The location of his grave was unknown for a long time. It was not until 2002 that it was discovered that the urn with Matouschek`s ashes had been placed in the family tomb in the Oldřichov v Hájích cemetery. There is a simple inscription on the tombstone: Josef Matoušek,* 4. 10. 1867 †12. 7. 1945. His name is written in Czech because that is how he was registered in the registry office. Since he himself was moving in a German-speaking circles, he modified his name accordingly and he consistently spelled it in German, even though he apparently never had it changed officially. The tomb was repaired in 2004 by members of the Mountain Society for the Ještěd and Jizera Mountains. During the renovation, the inscription on the original plaque bearing the name of Josef Matoušek was supplemented with the Czech-German addition reading “Landscape Expert and Mapmaker / Landschaftskenner und Kartengestallter“.
