How Vera changed my daily routine
Did you see the woman athlete, a pole-vaulter I think she was, who lay down in the middle of the Olympia Stadium, covered her face with a towel, put her feet up – and went to sleep? How I admired her ability to switch off. Let me say, right at the beginning, that the theme of this Glosse is self-discipline. I have of course (of course!) never been to journalism school but if I had the instructor – I can imagine him now, a corduroy jacket with leather patches – would surely have said: State your theme at the beginning! And then: Stay focused!
That, precisely, is my problem. A book deadline is fast approaching, I have taken some time off from my daily work for the Times and resolve every day to produce a certain number of pages. Instead, I wake up early, walk the dog, drink a coffee at the bakers and read the papers by which time it is already the moment to switch on the Leichtathletik WM. Along with the competitors, I stretch, I warm-up; I exercise my right index finger by picking my nose, jog to the kitchen to make tea, stretch again; grunt in sympathy when a female shot-putter gets rid of her piece of iron. Only by seven o’clock in the evening am I ready to write; only then have I taken in enough carbohydrates to pick up a pen. In a quick sprint, a page is written, followed by a recovery period; then half a page, and exhaustion. It is probably the least efficient way of writing ever devised but the sheer accumulation of vacillation and guilt, the day of delay (a day in which people have run 400 metres at record speeds; or just gone to the office, made decisions, and returned; or fed, washed and educated a baby) is so draining that I have to go out of the house to reward myself with a drink. Berlin is full of bars for late-night folk, and I don’t mean the dreadful silos used by clubbers or the over-priced “lounges” but places like the “Imma oof” and “Rudis” where shift-workers go to get rid of their excess adrenaline: some journalists, a Notarzt after a busy, bloody night, a policeman on his way home; surprisingly few drunks, no alcoholics with plastic carrier bags full of clinking bottles. Since everyone is trying to clear his head after a long day of complex problem-solving, discussion tends to be monosyllabic. Arguments flare up and fizzle out. The other night, a reporter who should have known better launched into a passionate lament for the newspaper Neues Deutschland which looks as if it could collapse. Now if ever there was a paper that deserved to go bust it must surely be the ND, the old organ of the ZK of the SED. It has re-invented itself since the bad old days, but not by much; it is a paper with a history of calculated deceit. But I was too tired to make the obvious counter-arguments and just walked out.
The next day, meeting Vera Dörrier-Breitwieser, I wished I had not dodged a fight. She is a formidable woman and possesses a memory sharp enough to dismantle any nostalgic case for preserving a newspaper that once made excuses for a rotten regime. Her story is Berlin in aspic. Forget her, and people like her, and you distort the moral compass of the city. She was 28 and living with her parents in Pankow when the Wall went up, training reluctantly as a teacher. Her father was a librarian, a candidate member of the Party, a true believer; her mother a sceptic. What kept Vera sane was her regular weekend trips to a Christian-Jewish discussion group in Wannsee. The Wall put an end to that and she wrote to the Wannsee institute expressing her sadness. They in turn set in motion the escape organisation of the Freie Universität. A picture of Vera was sent to students in Switzerland who helped find a Swiss woman vaguely resembling the Pankow student, borrowed the woman’s passport, sent it to the FU team. And Vera began the process of reconstructing herself: with all the self-discipline of an athlete. She memorised the birthdates of the Swiss woman’s children – they were entered in the passport and the DDR Grenzler could well have asked her tricky questions – learning Schwyzerdeutsch, changing her face to match the photo. Out came the VEB labels in the underwear, off came the East German boots. A western coat with seal fur was arranged; a hat that could be pulled down to disguise the height of her forehead. The rivers and villages surrounding her supposed birthplace in Switzerland were memorised; a backstory was created and committed to memory. All this for a few minutes performance at the Friedrichstrasse crossing point. December 1961 she got over; the next woman to try to use a Swiss passport was caught and sent to Hohenschönhausen.
That short walk from east to west was probably the greatest moment in Vera’s life; a triumph of discipline, teamwork, of holding ones nerve. Not everything went smoothly later in the West – I was reminded of the complexities of an athlete’s life after winning a gold medal, coping with anticlimax – but she found happiness in her work as a librarian at the Otto Suhr Institut. Her life story, told to me over coffee without pathos, reminded me that the Berliners have a great talent for escape. But also this: if you want to achieve something strongly enough, even the least promising of personalities can develop the appropriate psychological muscle, the habits of self-discipline. So here’s my progress report: since meeting Vera, I have started to write in the mornings. Not much, and I am still easily deflected. But the pages are beginning to fill up, one by one.
