From the Street for the Street: Street poet Vera Vorneweg

Originally, we were scheduled to meet at 11 AM. Just before that, the writer texted me, asking to delay our interview by half an hour: “That’ll allow me to have breakfast.” At half past eleven, she is sitting in Skotti’s – no longer hungry, but still tired. She’d returned from a reading in Erfurt late the night before. Then she also stopped at a concert at the Künstlerhaus Dortmund on route to Düsseldorf. The 37-year-old is sipping her cappuccino to dispel her residual fatigue: “There’s a lot going on right now.” There always is a lot going on for Vera Vorneweg. Since she chose to leave her job at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences in 2018 to fully focus on writing, she has been doing just that with admirable vigour and consistency.

She often is lucky enough to discover some special sites, meet just the right people, and make them excited about her work. On the train to Erfurt, the writer had another one of these helpful encounters when she met a Thuringian businessman who had just arrived from Dubai. He owns a number of properties in the Thuringian capital city. Vorneweg had brought him a cup of coffee from the on-board bistro, “I can hardly only get something for myself”. That got them talking, and in the end, she had his business card. Following this, Vorneweg is now going to inscribe the gate of a historical Erfurt house “with a text that merges past and present” next April.

Playful use of language

Vera Vorneweg has always been writing. “That’s what many people say about themselves, though.” She kept a diary as a teenager. Later, she moved on to poems. By now, she is feeling more at home in long prose texts. She likes the idea that she doesn’t have to tell a story: “Only novels and stories are published in the literary scene. Playful use of language is increasingly pushed into the background. I, for one, like to have a theme that I can encircle with language. At the same time, I don’t require a story to emerge from it.”

Vera Vorneweg ceased to write her texts entirely on paper several years ago. She’s also leaving them on tree stumps, stones, containers, or roller shutters. She had the idea of writing on places in the public space even before the pandemic started. She took her first tentative steps, experimenting with a number of surfaces: “I wanted to try out what it was like to write on something else than paper.” The first surface she applied her delicate letters to with an acrylic pen was a tree trunk in the Eller Forest . She followed up by writing on a large stone near the Fortuna-Büdchen site right on the banks of the river Rhine. She also left some text on a wall of the Hall of Fame on Vennhauser Allee. That, however, was sprayed over again within the week. “Of course, I thought it was a shame for it to happen that quickly.” Her other early works have also suffered over time. “At least the tree trunk still shows that there used to be some text on it. You can’t read the story anymore, however. The writing has started to look rather like mould now.”

Like a sponge

When the coronavirus rendered indoor events all but impossible, Vorneweg stepped up her outdoor activities. “Ellerstraße/Oberbilk” was created in the summer of 2021, as Vorneweg left a silent, delicate work on the brown shutters of the closed Oberbilk pub “Zum Blauen Bock”, capturing scenes from the neighbourhood. The writer came to the site on Ellerstraße eight or ten times, choosing a different time of the day for each occasion. “Things are different in the morning, evening, or at noon.“ She was sitting outside the building entrance, notebook and pen poised, waiting for what was to come while remaining as open for it as she could. “Everything that happened might be of interest to me.” Her approachable manner naturally let her quickly strike up conversations with passers-by: “Many have opened up to me, telling me their most intimate experiences. Life stories, upheavals, fates. I acted as a sponge, soaking it all up.” Once Vorneweg had seen and heard enough, she digitised her handwritten notes, brought them into linguistic shape, proofread them, and finally applied the snippets from her personal conversations that can now be found on the shutters. “My street poetry is an accessible offer,” Vorneweg explains. “It’s from the street, for the street. There is no mediator. No money is taken. You don’t even have to read it. Just looking is quite enough.”

Since then, Vera Vorneweg has given Düsseldorf three works, or, more specifically: two and a half. Apart from the one mentioned above, a second one can be found in Oberbilk, also on shutters. That one is placed on those of a closed kiosk right next to “Skotti’s”. An unfinished work is located on one of the containers at Oberkassel bridge on the Stadtstrand  (city beach), where Vera Vorneweg started to apply Bertha von Suttner’s peace manifesto “Lay down your arms!” after the war in Ukraine broke out.  She has completed 50 out of 300 pages of text since March, covering half the container. Vera Vorneweg’s nature goes beyond this form of artistic protest against the war: She also actively helps as well. She and her family hosted four Ukrainian refugees, two women and two children, for three months. While her guests have returned to Kiev since, the writer and her family will forever remember the time when the war had come to their own living room. In times when arms deliveries have become acceptable for the majority, Vorneweg remains an uncompromising pacifist. She wants to continue her work on the container as soon as the Stadtstrand season  commences next spring, hopefully bringing the full work by Bertha von Suttner into the public space by the end of 2023, as the writer states. “People are often talking about how men experience war. I want to use this work to make the female perspective visible, to show how war and violence affect women, less so physically and more so psychologically.” The diary of a soldier’s widow by Nobel Peace Prize laureate von Suttner is just perfect for this, she says.