Bowie’s Berlin: Up against the wall

Berlin, Germany: 168 kilometers of machine-gun-guarded concrete wall cleft in two when David Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour arrived in West Berlin on June 6, 1987, the city’s de facto capital of geopolitical turmoil.

The stage on which Bowie was to perform lay to the west of the division line on the derelict lawn of West Berlin’s Platz der Republik, a grassy square in front of the imperious Reichstag building. The German government once had a seat there, and it still does today, but it has been largely unoccupied since World War II because of its close proximity to the Berlin Wall, which is looming directly in its place.

The tour had come to participate in the Concert for Berlin, an event held as part of the city’s 750th-anniversary celebrations, and when the performance venue was erected, its West Berliner organisers made sure that several speakers were pointing directly at the Wall.

Bowie and company performed in front of an audience of about 80,000 people in a cool evening under a 15-meter (50-foot) illuminated spider. At the same time, listeners from the east gathered as close as they dared, their numbers accumulating steadily.

Bowie rocked for what their money’s worth during a protracted 24-song set that included three encores. The tracks were largely drawn from his latest run of albums – Scary Monsters, Let’s Dance and Never Let Me Down – but a few harkened back to those he’d recorded a decade earlier while living in the city, most notably his anti-Wall anthem, “Heroes”.

According to all accounts, the Reichstag audience enjoyed the performance well. Bowie himself later expressed that it was an emotional experience.

The Volkspolizei, the civilian branch of the feared Stasi secret police, spent the duration of the concert hassling and intimidating those who had gathered to hear it, though the music may have been welcome.

The following evening as the crowd swelled precipitously for a second day of music, violence erupted when East German authorities cracked down on eastern listeners – a repressive act that only inflamed opposition and ultimately contributed to the Wall’s collapse.

A tale of two cities

At the time, Berlin sat at the crux of the Cold War. The victorious powers divided Germany into four regions, each controlled by a member of the USSR, the UK, or France, after World War II. But with Berlin situated deep inside the Soviet zone, it was agreed that the capital, too, would be divided along similar lines.

The Soviets then boxed in the western Allied area of the city in 1961, breaking up families and severing economic and social ties with the infamous Berlin Wall, a heavily fortified and guarded barrier.

“It’s hard for any of us to really imagine,” says Berlin Wall historian Hope M Harrison, professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. This was a global metropolis like New York, London, Paris, and Rome, and it was split in half unexpectedly! ” Families were separated, employees cut off from their jobs, students from school. It had a profound, devastating effect on Berlin’s citizens.

“For Berlin, it was a gash through the city,” Harrison explains. It represented the Cold War, as it is known in concrete, as well as the brutality and weakness of the Communist regime at the same time. ” That the powers that lay to the east felt it necessary to wall its people in was “a kind of admission of defeat”, she added.

On both sides of the barrier, things started to get worse. Those to the east experienced pervasive censorship and a rapid diminishing of material standards due to the food and supply shortages that plagued the Soviet Union. More cultural freedom gave people in West Berlin the opportunity to experiment with a wide range of artistic expression while they retreated to their besieged enclave.

“West Berlin very much became a countercultural place,” says Harrison, gravitating artists, punks, anarchists, and East Germans looking to escape compulsory military service. People who were happy to live on the edge, some of whom had the Berlin Wall literally in their backyard or across the street, were drawn there. ”

The fall of Ziggy Stardust

Bowie, who was 31 when he moved to West Berlin in 1976, said, “That’s why I went to Berlin.” “I wanted to have another kind of friction … people living under the impression that everything might collapse very quickly. ”

Drowning in the recent superstardom brought on by The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and accompanied by flat-mate and then-floundering former Stooges frontman Iggy Pop, Bowie ostensibly went to Berlin to escape the raging cocaine addiction that had prompted his previous handful of albums – particularly Station to Station, the production of which Bowie later reported he had little to no recollection.

He was born in Bromley, a short distance from London, and immigrated to the US in 1974. However, after two years of totalist rock star debauchery, the singer was desperate for a change. The Thin White Duke (as he was monikered during his Station years) was in a transitional mode and Iron Curtain-era Berlin seemed an appropriate environment for this modulation.

At the end of 1977, he stated, “I knew I had to travel to a place that was completely different from Los Angeles.” “The most arduous city that I could think of, and it was West Berlin. For an artist, it’s a very good, therapeutic city. ”

By the time Bowie arrived in Berlin, a Cold War cultural conflict was already raging, and music was a key component of the conflict. That same year, famed German folk singer Wolf Biermann had his East Berlin citizenship revoked while he was away performing in West Berlin, barring him from returning home: His crime – writing a song critical of the Stasi that was sung among its prisoners.

East Germans still largely banned Western music, but they did receive radio and television transmissions from the opposite side of the Wall as well as smuggled cassette tapes and records cut into medical x-ray films known as “ribs”, “jazz on bones”, or “bone music” were they still received?

The Berlin Trilogy

“It’s a very tight life there, surrounded by a wall with machineguns,” Bowie said of life in West Berlin. The Wall by the end appears to be right around the apartment or home you are staying in, and the longer you stay there, the more people enter. ”

Bowie actually saw the Wall from Hansa Studio, where he finished Low and Heroes, Iggy’s second solo album, Lust for Life, and finished his 11th and 12th albums. Hansa is still there today, just around the corner from sections of the Wall displayed in the square of Potsdamer Platz (which Bowie mentioned in “Where Are We Now? A song largely about the day the divide finally came to an end, November 9, 1989, is a song that is about that day.

These days, it is flanked by a fashionable shopping centre and the luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel rather than the armed guard towers that enforced the division of the city for some three decades. Bowie discovered the inspiration for the song’s title track, Heroes, beneath one of those towers. Producer Tony Visconti and singer Antonia Maass would steal away to kiss in the shadow of the Wall during recording sessions; That image serves as a testament to the triumph of love over oppression, according to Bowie.

“It’s about what it means to be a hero and stand up,” said Harrison. This song is very timely, in my opinion. Standing up against what you feel is wrong and shameful. ”

Over the ensuing decades, the song Heroes went on to become the most recognised anthem from what was dubbed Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, but what is most distinct about Heroes the album and its forerunner Low are their least-known tracks: The synth-driven, largely lyricless compositions that comprised the second side of both records.

Before I could continue writing, Bowie remarked, “I needed to learn a new musical language for myself.” “Low and Heroes aren’t so much situations, but a process of discovery. To expand my artistic vocabulary, I’m looking for a new language. ”

In Berlin, he killed off the characters he had long hidden behind, including Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, and the Thin White Duke, and accepted a self-assured identity that had previously been hidden: himself.

“I never wanted to appear as myself on stage ever,” he said in 1979, shortly after leaving Berlin for the Isolar II World Tour – said to be his healthiest tour in years due to the noticeable reduction in cocaine use – “until recently. ”

Changes

It is obvious that Bowie had undergone a significant change during the roughly 18 months he lived in Berlin when he compares the interviews he gave before and after. Before, there was a dolled-up rock star trying to bluff away nerves. He appeared remarkably mature, composed, and unfocused afterward.

Escaping the throttle of cocaine probably didn’t hurt, but it was something more than that. He had come to terms with Ziggy’s astral antics and the Duke’s megalomania and had humbled himself among humanity, as he explained to interviewers who had spoken to him about the change in his appearance and demeanor in the final years of the 1970s. Gone were the pomp and flash of fame, and here now was this very normal-looking guy with bad teeth.

One might assume that Bowie lived lavishly in Berlin when he visited Hansa in 2025, which is the studio’s increasingly gentrified neighborhood today. But things were very different in 1976, when he rented a small apartment at 155 Hauptstraße in nearby Schöneberg – a working-class district largely populated with Turkish immigrants and artsy gays – where Bowie churned out hundreds of paintings that he was too self-conscious to show anyone.

He later remarked, “They’re all portraits of people standing alone.” “Most of the paintings are Germans or Turks who live in Berlin … from East Berlin and now living in West Berlin knowing their families are on the other side of the Wall. ”

In the 20 years before Bowie’s arrival, some 650,000 Turkish workers had come to Germany as part of a bilateral agreement with Turkiye to supplement a steep labour shortage. In Berlin and beyond, many immigrants brought families, and over the course of 20 years, a vibrant, visible migrant community emerged.

Looking at the paintings you can recognise the influence of Bowie’s favourite painter, the German expressionist Erich Heckel – declared “degenerate” by the Nazis – whose Roquairol inspired the cover art for both Heroes and Iggy’s 1974 solo debut The Idiot. Bowie visited the Brucke Museum while he was in Berlin, and you can see Heckel’s work today at the Brucke Museum.

The subject matter of Bowie’s paintings hints at the transition he was undergoing. He continued to practice his early-career introspection, sometimes to the point of completely wallowing, throughout Low and Heroes, with the exception of the title track. But with his hallucinatory portraits of struggling Turks and Germans, suddenly he was turning his gaze outward and examining the hardships of others rather than his own. The overlooked and much-maligned 1979 film Lodger, the end of the Berlin Trilogy, undercuts this tendency.

Misunderstood or misinterpreted?

To say that Lodger fell flat would be an understatement. One of Bowie’s best-selling albums ever was released. Critics tore it apart, declaring it “self-plagiarism” and complaining of its “droning mood pieces”. It was allegedly not a true Berlin album at all, according to some. it wasn’t recorded there and was tonally divergent from the first two instalments. Some even went so far as to accuse Bowie of marketing gimmickry by slapping a lesser album on top of his more potent uptempo works.

But with the benefit of hindsight, one might determine that Lodger was in fact the logical conclusion to his time in the city – that it was a Berlin recording because it was a direct response to the social and political plight he encountered there. In contrast to Low and Heroes, which is his introverted, harsh album about immigrants and world affairs, it is perhaps his most human album in the first three decades of his career.

Consider its opener, “Fantastic Voyage”, in which Bowie warns about the dangers of apocalyptic nuclear brinkmanship, reminding those in charge that “Dignity is valuable, but our lives are valuable too. One of the few songs from the era that Bowie continued to perform well into the new millennium is “it’s a song that champions life in the face of the political mood swings that threaten disaster.”

Or “Yassassin” – Turkish for “Long Live” – which explores the struggles of Turkish immigrants facing bigotry and violence at the hands of native Germans, an issue that feels all too relevant in contemporary Berlin, home as it is to many African migrants and refugees from Syria and Ukraine amidst a rising tide of nationalism.

The mock-toxic (moxic) is still present. ) masculinity of “Repetition” and queer-coded “Boys Keep Swinging”. In “DJ,” his sarcastic rant at the savageness of the music business. Then wrapping up the album with “Red Money”, which concludes with the line, “Such responsibility/it’s up to you and me. These songs are the work of a singer who has abandoned rock star status to embrace the platform’s humanitarian impact.

The Berlin Wall’s fall

A decade later, Bowie would return for the Concert for Berlin. Radio in the American Sector (RIAS 2), a station infamous for broadcasting Soviet-banned music on both sides of the city, organized the three-day event. Held in an open-air venue and featuring performances from the likes of the Eurythmics and Genesis in the days to follow Bowie, one promoter later asserted that the show was, at least in part, an intentional provocation of Eastern authorities.

What is alleged to be the first public demonstration against partition was inspired by the concert, which attracted thousands of East Berliners clambering to their side of the barrier in search of music. By the second and third days of the concert, eastside police had violently attacked listeners and demonstrators, arresting at least 100 people. Many people have since claimed that this was the final straw in a long, unwavering shift in public opinion of the Soviet Union.

“These concerts and Western music were listened to widely in East Berlin and East Germany,” says Harrison. For many, this division was brought to light by these icons singing so close, just outside the Wall. ”

Further events were held in connection with the East-West Berlin conflict. In July 1988, Bruce Springsteen performed in East Berlin to an audience of 300,000 at the invitation of officials who thought his working-class image would suit communist propaganda, only to have it backfire when the Boss made statements in favour of tearing down the Wall.

Harrison notes that “The Wall is very well known for how it fell.” “Unexpectedly and in fact by mistake. The function of chance should always be overlooked. ”

After months of widespread protests and the East/West German border’s fragmentation, it finally came down to one man, an East German official named Gunter Schabowski, who misinterpreted instructions that were merely a change to travel restrictions on November 9, 1989, to declare the border open before an international news conference.

East Berliners now launched toward the Wall, hoping to cross it in a Bowie-style scene from the song “Where Are We Now”? ”:

Twenty-one thousand people
Cross Bosebrucke
Crossers are made.
Just in case

One of the border checkpoints that night, which included a young Angela Merkel, the incoming chancellor of a united Germany, was overthrown by East Germans.

Footage of jubilant masses from both east and west celebrating atop the barrier was broadcast around the world. The demolition wouldn’t begin until the following year, though they did so with sledgehammers and saws to break it down panel by panel and brick by brick.

On New Year’s Eve 1989, David Hasselhoff headlined the Freedom Tour Live concert attended by 500,000 people from both sides of the Wall. The song “Looking for Freedom” by Hasselhoff, who had previously been unheard of by those in the east because it was only a few meters into the west, reached its height as a crane raised him above the Brandenburg Gate.

Officials began the official teardown in June 1990, and East and West Germany were reunified into Germany as we know it today on October 3. The Soviet Union, which fell apart over the course of the following year, was now written on the wall, formally dissolving on December 26, 1991.

While Harrison doesn’t attribute the Wall’s fall to Bowie – it is hard to argue that it wasn’t driven by the wider socioeconomic, geopolitical situation – some Germans prefer the legend to the reality as evidenced by a tweet from the German Foreign Ministry upon the singer’s death in January 2016: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now a member of the #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall. ”

New lands

Today, little remains to mark Bowie’s time in Berlin, except the music. The singer’s constantly shifting portrait is visible in the Hansa Studio where he recorded it. Or you can have a drink at his old boozing spot, Neues Ufer – German for “New Shore” – which was supposedly the first gay bar in town back in 1977.

The most striking tribute to Bowie’s time in the city is located directly across the street from the bar, Hauptstraße 155, with candles and votive offerings on the stoop below, a plaque above explaining the Berlin Trilogy, and the phrase “We can be heroes, just for one day. ”

Bowie spent a year and a half living in the second-floor apartment that he had previously resided in, and it was there that he broke free from his own confines and transitioned from self-centered rock star to socially aware artist.

Now, nearly 35 years after the Wall fell, with old divisions cropping up once again in Germany and the wider world, the story of Bowie and the Berlin Wall suggests important lessons. that despite suffering, there can still be great creativity and beauty. That the human compulsion towards freedom cannot be caged. That life is constantly evolving. That walls come down.

Source: Aljazeera