Big Man; Big Heart Gunter Blobel

Big Mind; Big Heart    Gunter Blobel  May 21, 1936—February 18, 2018

A brilliant scientist who won the  Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1999, he gave the million dollar award to the restoration of Dresden. He was not born in the city;  it was never his home yet from the age of eight he lived there in his heart.

 

I first met Gunter Blobel in October, 2003. Everything about him seemed over-sized. He was exuberant, expansive. He was also tall, his white hair thick and wavy.  There was something lyrical about the way he talked; his hands swooped around as if in accompaniment to his song.  He managed to look elegant with it being overly casual or studied. On this day he was wearing a white linen shirt, black trousers and a black cardigan. A beige, heavy knit cashmere scarf was wrapped around his neck. He seemed fit but was no body braggart. (Later, I learned from another early bird around the Central Park Reservoir,  that he was an early morning runner.)

Dr Blobel sat down behind a desk was stacked with papers. I was warned me that he was very busy; that our meeting would have be short.  I did not doubt it. I felt sure his daily commitments exceeded the number of hours in a day.  One reason for this may be that he is a charismatic and prodigious talker. It was two hours later that I stood up to say goodbye. I apologized for having kept him from his work.

“When the subject is Dresden,” he said, “I can go on talking for ever.” 

   

  Dresden was the reason I was there.  I was dug into trying to find out more about a famous collection of 18^th century porcelain that had been born and two centuries later had met its death in Dresden. It was commissioned by Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony, who made the city his capital. In his race to be the first in Europe with the recipe for hard paste porcelain he had set up a factory at nearby Meissen. The early Meissen collection I was learning about was later sold but it had stayed in Dresden until it was hidden in the mountains outside for safekeeping during the Second World War. Against orders, a truck loaded with it,  was parked overnight in the courtyard of the city’s residence palace. That was the first night of the firebombing. 

Surprisingly (some might say miraculously) a decade later a few porcelain survivors of the great collection were dug out of the still unsifted mounds of rubble.  These patched together small figures had become my guides to the collection; to its owners and to the city with which its fate had been intertwined from the first.  Martin Roth, Director of Saxony’s State Museums in Dresden, told me that I must talk with Gunter Blobel. No doubt it was his introduction that made the encounter possible. For all his warmth and generosity of spirit, I suspected that Gunter Blobel would not have patience for people with whom he shared no interests.

   Minutes after we met, we were in the small village in Silesia where he grew up. It was towards the end of the Second World War.  This region, then in Nazi Germany was later in Communist East Germany and now is in Poland. Gunter was one of eight children. The youngest was two; the eldest a teenager and he was eight when his father, a veterinarian, decided that they must leave home where life was “a rural idyll.” The Russians were advancing from the East.

   “People believed the Russian and American armies would meet at the Elbe,” Gunter Blobel told me.  And they were terrified. Russian troops were infamous for rape and robbery.  The family was going to head for the American side of the river and the farm of relatives in western Saxony. The car was packed; off they went.

   Dresden straddles the Elbe.  It was the young boy’s first sight of a big city.  This one packed a particularly potent punch. Since the 18^th century, Dresden had been one of Europe’s culture centers: Bach played the inaugural concert on the organ in the Frauenkirche; Wagner conducted the premiere of his Flying Dutchman at the Semperoper.  The Old Masters, porcelain, arms and armour museums were world famous. For centuries, writers had remarked on the beauty of its Renaissance and baroque architecture.  

“It was a child’s fantasy,” Gunter Blobel recalled, still  bewitched. “Everywhere there were putti, statues, cupids with arrows pointing down at me. I asked my parents couldn’t we stay longer? They said no.”  The family reached their new if temporary home in early February, 1945.  Within days they heard reports on the radio that Dresden was being bombed.  They already knew. “You could see for a hundred miles, the wine-red sky.”

 The war in Europe was over by May. The family headed east again. “There was rubble instead of road,” he said. “We ate what we could scavenge in the fields.”  Sometimes they found apples; sometimes things that they had to boil before they were edible. “Everywhere there were burnt out farms, dead animals—cows, horses.” Whole villages were destroyed.

  Once again they came to the Elbe.   

   “It took us a whole day to cross Dresden,” he remembered. “It smelled of corpses. Broken statues were on the ground.  It was horrendous, horrendous.”

  This ebullient man I had been listening to had tears in his eyes.  He had not buried his “horrible horrible, unimaginably horrible” memories. He allowed them to lay him low and surely this was not the first time. Yet he had new and marvellous images of the city to soothe him; not least of all because of his own heroic efforts.

   The eight year old who saw Dresden in ruins made a promise: If ever in his life he had money, he would  use it to help rebuild what had been a magical city. In 1991 Dr. Gunter Blobel founded the Friends of Dresden.  In 1999, most of his million dollar Nobel award went for the rebuilding of the city’s glorious Frauenkirche and the replacement of a synagogue to replace one that had been destroyed by the Nazis.

”I cannot tell you how hard I worked to raise the money,” he said.  “I couldn’t do it again.” Because of his passion and all that very hard work, that was not and will not be necessary.