Sent lørdag tog denne blogsmører U-bahn fra Schlesissche Strasse vestpå, men sporarbejde tog turen på U1-linien en uventet omvej, med skift på stationen Mendelsohn-Bartholdy-Park, Köhtener Strasse, kendt som stedet hvor Hansa by the Wall-studiet ligger. Svært som nærmest umuligt ikke at svømme hen i Bowie og Iggy og Eno og Visconti og Sales-brødrene og Low og The idiot og Heroes og Lust For Life når man nu er deromkring, så her i affekt, uden defensive forbehold eller offensive reservationer, et oversat og stedaktuelt uddrag fra Tobias Rüther’s bog Helden: David Bowie and Berlin – enjoy!
When he wasn’t in the studio he rode around town. He soon bought himself a bicycle: a classic English Raleigh with three gears. Once Bowie had had his breakfast of coffee and Gitanes at Café Anderes Ufer, he cycled down Hauptstrasse towards the Hansa Studios on Potsdamer Platz.
Back then, cycling was a rather relaxed affair; hardly anyone can remember traffic jams in the West Berlin of the 1970s. So Bowie cycled off and past Kleistpark underground station; from here on the four lanes are no longer called Hauptstrasse but Potsdamer Strasse. On the left followed the Allied Air Safety Centre, housed in the building where the 20 July conspirators were tried before the so-called People’s Court. Then Bowie passed the construction site of the so-called ‘social palace’, a twelve-storey residential machine on top of the ruins of the Sportpalast, where Goebbels invoked ‘total war’ in 1943 and now 514 concrete flats were being built […]. A couple of blocks further and across theLandwehr Canal on Reichpietschufer, Bowie passed Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery on the left and the next building site on the right: Hans Scharoun’s State Library. It was completed in 1978.Bowie could virtually watch it being built as he recorded ‘Heroes’. Here, he will have turned off to the right to get to Köthener Strasse along theLandwehr Canal. House number 58 is the Hansa Studios. The building faces the Wall, directly on Potsdamer Platz […].
And when he didn’t cycle, as it is said to have rained often that autumn of 1976, then perhaps he simply took the bus. ‘He valued and used the public transport system,’ says Eduard Meyer (Bowie’s studio technician at Hansa).
But what a route he took every day! It goes right across his formative programme. Bowie begins two or three blocks away from the house where Marlene Dietrich was born. Then he passes right by one of the headquarters of the Cold War, with its technique of brinkmanship — bringing a situation to the brink of escalation to gain capital out of it, as happened during the Berlin crisis of 1958 — which he had lived out in person in every one of his artistic undertakings. Immediately after that,Bowie passes one of the memorial sites of Goebbels’ propaganda, which he once wanted to write a musical about, pushing on into the heart of the art of the very years that had fascinated him since his childhood, and from there cycling along the isolation turned to stone, into his own present day in the Hansa Studios. ‘You could still tell,’ says Eduard Meyer, ‘how it fascinated him to be living in the place where Nazi history took place. He gave off that feeling to those immediately around him.’ […]
‘There was a German school in Berlin at the beginning of the century called Die Brücke (the Bridge) — an expressionist school,’ Brian Eno once said. ‘Very rough, rough strokes — and they all have a mood of melancholy about them or nostalgia, as if they were painting something that was just disappearing. And all of that — the boldness of attack, the unplanned evolutionary quality of the images, and the over-all mood — remind me of the way David works.’
Anyone trying to read the traces of Eno’s friend David Bowie in Berlin, anyone searching out eye witnesses and inscriptions and remains, looking for Bowie’s brushstrokes from the time between autumn 1976 and spring 1979 at Hauptstrasse 155, is doing nothing other than what the man they are seeking did himself back then: Bowie was looking for himself in the city. He read himself in it. ‘Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,’ writes Christopher Isherwood, ‘it is my own skeleton aching.’ And Bowie too no doubt identified with the city’s strange fate. The fate of growing too quickly, politically and in urban planning terms, and having to suffer eternal growing pains; the architecture critic Heinrich Wefing once talked of Berlin’s partus praecipitatus. Always having to be more, always having to wrestle with one’s own role — Bowie recognised himself in this fate. And like Bowie, Berlin got high on itself and ruined itself through megalomania, and like Bowie, the city now had to make amends in a state of permanent hangover. Karl Scheffler’s wretched dictum, quoted to death, that Berlinis condemned to be eternally becoming, never to be, gained a new dimension thanks to Bowie. Bowie was the embodiment of this statement. It was as if tailor-made for him. An ever-changing shape — that was what the theatre-maker Lindsay Kemp called his disciple David at the end of the 1960s. In Berlin, Bowie found a new master.
And how he threw himself upon Berlin and surrendered himself to the place! The city, he enthused, had been ‘the artistic and cultural gateway to Europe in the twenties,’ — ‘virtually anything that happened in the arts happened there.’ He spent hours walking by the Wannsee lake, cycling, visiting Nazi sites and having his photo taken there — at least he still did in the first few weeks. He crossed over to East Berlin over and again at Checkpoint Charlie to visit the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s old theatre. Around the corner from there, he ate at Ganymed on Schiffbauerdamm with Iggy Pop and Tony Visconti, who called the wine restaurant a ‘time machine’, because the grey-on-grey other guests seemed to come from the fifties — but it was just East Germany’s ‘real existing socialism’. On the other side of the wall, in the neon West of Kurfürstendamm, Bowie is said to have regularly collapsed in the gutter after litres of pilsener — that must have been his own reverence to the drunken culture for which Berlin was known in the late seventies and early eighties.
But the city took him in and tolerated him, as it has tolerated every freak and interesting maniac that has tried their luck here: asking no questions, taking no interest, shrugging its shoulders. After Los Angeles,Bowie says, his paranoia was so huge for a while that he couldn’t walk along a road without being afraid of people. Now no one looked at him longer than necessary. Some Berliners still pronounce his name ‘Boffie’ today; they had called Isherwood ‘Issyvoo’ in the thirties. Fame doesn’t count for much in this city. ‘Anyone could claim that,’ is one of its maxims to this day. Even the local papers took a while in autumn 1976 to realise who was suddenly living in Schöneberg, had a regular table in the Exil restaurant on Kreuzberg’s Paul-Lincke-Ufer and the Paris Bar on Kantstrasse, and disappeared backstage at Romy Haag’s drag show in the evenings. Had the telephone cut off. And wanted to be alone. ‘I thought I’d take the stage sets,’ Bowie said, ‘throw them away, go out there and live the real thing.’
