Jimmy recalls a day in Berlin following in the footsteps of David Bowie, the rock star who sought refuge in the divided city when fame had almost killed him.
One of the first tours I noticed among the various options for what to do in Berlin was an excursion based around David Bowie. I recalled vaguely that Bowie had decanted to the then still-divided city for a couple of years when he’d burned out in the USA.
More significantly, my fellow traveller Sue was a big fan of early Bowie so I thought this would be a treat for her (and me, too).
It turned out to be an absolute blast, tracing the city’s influences on Bowie, from Bertholt Brecht through the Weimar decadence of Cabaret to the effect of the wall and its ultimate removal.
I won’t ruin too many surprises for anyone who takes the tour with the knowledgeable and entertaining Dan, suffice it to say that David Bowie arrived in West Berlin in 1976, raddled with drugs and basically dead on his feet from the excesses of an extended stay in LA.
That’s not to say he and his chum Iggy Pop lived like monks while they were in the then former German capital but it would take another 40 years for his over-indulgence in alcohol to finally silence the Thin White Duke.
In between times he recorded two of his Berlin Trilogy albums Low and Heroes while prepping Lodger and producing The Idiot for Iggy. Berlin had a profound influence on Bowie and there is plaintive reminder of his time there on the track “Where Are We Now?” on his penultimate 2013 album The Next Day.
“Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz … you didn’t know that I could do that ...” he sings. When he lived there, you couldn’t. Potsdamer Platz was a “ghost” station, beneath the no-man’s land between East and West. The video accompanying the song (below) is a virtual tour of old Berlin.
And Bowie has had a significant effect on Berlin. In 1987, he returned to perform the Glass Spider tour in front of the crumbling remains of the Reichstag building. He had quarter of the speakers turned back towards East Berlin and they could hear the crowd on the other side chanting: “The Wall must fall!”
Bowie and Iggy would frequently visit the Eastern side of the city, which was remarkably easy to do for Westerners. My dentist told me just the other day that, as a young backpacker visiting East Berlin, he went to the Wall because there were rumours of a free concert and witnessed music fans arriving in droves, and East German police trying to drive them away then just giving up.
Less than two years later, the wall did fall and, when Bowie died in 2016, the German government paid tribute to him, saying he had lit the fuse that brought it down.
As for the tour, it helps to make sense of Bowie and Berlin but there’s nothing quite like wandering the streets down which he walked listening to his music on a little Bluetooth speaker – although that did scare the crap out of one man who was dozing on the street outside Bowie’s former flat as we walked past with Sound and Vision pumping out.
If you want more detail, you can read a pretty comprehensive description of the tour – although it doesn’t mention it – in this Rolling Stone article. I’m not saying the writer just took the same tour as we did – facts are facts, after all – but there’s nothing in the feature that we didn’t do.
A peek into the lives of others
It’s fair to say that Berlin’s past is very much part of it’s present. We visited the German spy museum, which was fascinating and where you can read all about defectors and double agents and even take a lie detector test or try to wriggle and slide your way through a web of laser beams that trigger alarms when broken.
In the museum of East German everyday life we learned that East Germans were very heavily into naturism – frolicking about in the nude at holiday camps – in a weird and politically non-threatening liberation from their otherwise heavily censored, surveilled and repressed lives.
In that vein, we also took in a very odd burlesque show in a strange little cocktail bar called the Prinzipal Kreuzberg, where a junkie-thin woman completely covered in tattoos took most (but not quite all) of her clothes off.
After that, an amply proportioned lady stripped and sexually assaulted anything that didn’t move – including one female customer’s leg and a bannister – all to the music of Led Zeppelin.
We left before the second show, not concerned by anything we had seen or might see, but because the four people next to us started smoking. It seems the bars under a certain size and at which food is not prepared can still allow smoking in Berlin.
And suddenly, amid all this retro-decadence and sophisticated Boho abandon, we felt like we were the civilised ones.
- For more information on the David Bowie Walking Tour, and how to book tickets ($185 per person), click here.