David Bowie

On Sunday, David Bowie died of cancer at 69. He was one of the major influences on pop music in the late 20th century. In the late 70's he spent time in Berlin, living in an apartment at Hauptstrasse 155, barely two blocks from our flat in Schoeneberg.

For all the other groupings that he created or was a part of, one major one was that list of artists who moved to Berlin and experienced a creative rebirth. In fact the city attracts people for this reason - somehow it features prominently as a place to come and rejuvenate creative energy. While the Weimar Republic's Berlin of the 1920's attracted that generation's artists, Bowie was among the first to recognize the place as such in the post-war period. He sought a respite from the drug-induced malaise of rock star parties in the LA scene in the seventies, and for three years here he produced some of his most acclaimed work.

Something about the "outpost" nature of Berlin during the GDR era served to attract artists: The city was basically surrounded by Soviet tank battalions, sliced through the center by the Wall's death strip barrier, and still full of pock-marked buildings from the final days of the greatest conflagration in history. It was a city trying to forget its WWII past while living with the unsettling daily reminders of guns pointing at its head.

The Anderes Ufer, was just two doors down from his apartment, is now called the Neues Ufer and houses a Bowie memorabilia collection on the walls since he and the Stardust band frequented it. People who come to Berlin and write about the city's musical history will inevitably stop in and write about the Neues Ufer since it features so prominently in the landscape due to the Bowie connection.

Into this scene Bowie appeared, eager to find a place where he could be anonymous.

"I wanted to go back to a kind of Expressionist German film look...A black and white movies look, but with an intensity that was sort of aggressive."

He recorded at Hansa Studios, whose former location sat right next to the Wall near Potsdamer Platz. Apparently one could look out of the window and see directly into a guard tower on the Wall, where East German guards scowled back with their machine guns. VERY edgy.

He recorded three albums here between 1976-78 which he later referred to as "his DNA." The middle one, Heroes, is the best known. Its title track goes straight to the issue of the divided city and a hopeless love affair as a metaphor for it.

I put his song "Heroes" on my playlist when I moved to Seattle in 1998, one of those songs you remember vaguely from childhood but that experience a resurgence when you listen again with adult ears. And then I have another resurgence with it living here now and understanding it in yet a different light.

Truncated version of "Heroes" lyrics:

Though nothing, will keep us together
We could steal time, 
just for one day
We can be Heroes, for ever and ever
What d'you say?

I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing,
nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, for ever and ever
Oh we can be Heroes, 
just for one day

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns shot above our heads
(over our heads)
And we kissed, 
as though nothing could fall
(nothing could fall)
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be Heroes, 
just for one day

We're nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we're lying, 
then you better not stay
But we could be safer, 
just for one day

Oh-oh-oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh, 
just for one day

The key stanza references the Wall. One day Bowie looked down from the recording studio window at Hansa and saw a couple kissing near the border strip. The idea for the song was born: an indictment of the GDR regime within a hopeless romance that only triumphs for a brief moment. Another stanza about dolphins is a reference to East Germans who perished trying to flee to the West by swimming the Spree River and drowning or being shot in the attempt.

The very notion of this creative force of Berlin is a bit of a paradox of course: The GDR regime and the Wall provided the pretext for something to struggle against, yet without it the city may not have been as bizarrely inviting.

In 1987 Bowie returned to Berlin to play a three day concert at the Wall. He sang "Heroes" as a crowd of East Germans gathered on their side of the Wall to hear the music, since such concerts were illegal in East Berlin.

"And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again."

A week later Reagan was in Berlin with his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. Two years later the border opened and the GDR was history.

The night he died I came up out of the U-Bahn at Kleistpark curious to see if anyone had put up flowers or something outside his old flat. And did they. I spent an hour in the near-freezing mist with a large crowd that clustered up and down the sidewalk in front of 155 Hauptstrasse. The candles, flowers and letters written on postcards and old album covers spilled down from the building entrance steps onto the sidewalk. Packs of people with teary eyes mixed with cigarette and weed smoke. Someone had the Deutsch version of Heroes on a loop. Nearby Neues Ufer and another bar were packed and playing Bowie tributes.

I went in the Neues Ufer and edged my way to the back to see the Bowie picture shrine and listen to the conversations, but had to leave soon since there was barely room to stand. Outside in traffic people honked as they drove by. A drunk guy set off a few bottle rockets. Others mostly just stood and stared at the flickering candles and notes next to the piles of flowers, the way you must when someone is suddenly taken from you.

A couple days later, while the shrine of flowers and candles still stood, a new street sign appeared on the 155 block of Hauptstrasse proclaiming it now "David Bowie Strasse." German efficiency.

Bowie eventually left Berlin and moved on with the next stage of his career,  having conclusively put the glam rock Ziggy Stardust years to rest and sated his Berlin itch. 

"I had not intended to leave Berlin, I just drifted away. Maybe I was getting better. It was an irreplaceable, unmissable experience and probably the happiest time in my life up until that point."

In the single "Lazurus" from his final album, which was just released last week, he says a thinly-disguised goodbye to his fans since he knew his time was short. The video features him lying in bed with a wrap around his head and two stones resting on his eyes. A showman to the last.










Additional Links of Note:

Vox article about the effect of the 1987 concert on the Wall's collapse.

Here's a wonderful article from the UK's Independent about him that I discovered shortly after we moved here. It offers up a rich sketch of our neighborhood and the musical history than surrounds and infuses it. It now is relevant for yet another reason.

Bowie's BBC obit.