{"id":15185,"date":"2010-08-22T02:11:46","date_gmt":"2010-08-22T00:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jensunmack.dk:80\/wordpress-3\/?p=15185"},"modified":"2010-08-22T02:11:46","modified_gmt":"2010-08-22T00:11:46","slug":"bowie-flygtede-fra-verden-og-gemte-sig-i-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jensunmack.dk\/wordpress-3\/bowie-flygtede-fra-verden-og-gemte-sig-i-berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Da Bowie flygtede fra verden"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sent l\u00f8rdag tog denne blogsm\u00f8rer U-bahn fra Schlesissche Strasse vestp\u00e5, men sporarbejde tog turen p\u00e5 U1-linien en uventet omvej, med skift p\u00e5 stationen Mendelsohn-Bartholdy-Park, K\u00f6htener Strasse, kendt som stedet hvor Hansa by the Wall-studiet <\/a>ligger. Sv\u00e6rt som n\u00e6rmest umuligt ikke at sv\u00f8mme hen i Bowie og Iggy og Eno og <\/em>Visconti <\/em>og <\/em>Sales-br\u00f8drene og Low <\/em>og The idiot<\/em> <\/em>og Heroes<\/em> og Lust For Life<\/em> n\u00e5r man nu er deromkring, s\u00e5 her i affekt, uden defensive forbehold eller offensive reservationer, et oversat og stedaktuelt uddrag fra Tobias R\u00fcther’s bog Helden: David Bowie and Berlin<\/em> – enjoy!<\/p>\n

When he wasn\u2019t 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 Caf\u00e9 Anderes Ufer, he cycled down Hauptstrasse towards the Hansa Studios on Potsdamer Platz.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s Court. Then Bowie passed the construction site of the so-called \u2018social palace\u2019, a twelve-storey residential machine on top of the ruins of the Sportpalast, where Goebbels invoked \u2018total war\u2019 in 1943 and now 514 concrete flats were being built [\u2026]. A couple of blocks further and across theLandwehr Canal on Reichpietschufer, Bowie passed Mies van der Rohe\u2019s New National Gallery on the left and the next building site on the right: Hans Scharoun\u2019s State Library. It was completed in 1978.Bowie could virtually watch it being built as he recorded \u2018Heroes\u2019. Here, he will have turned off to the right to get to K\u00f6thener Strasse along theLandwehr Canal. House number 58 is the Hansa Studios. The building faces the Wall, directly on Potsdamer Platz [\u2026].
\nAnd when he didn\u2019t cycle, as it is said to have rained often that autumn of 1976, then perhaps he simply took the bus. \u2018He valued and used the public transport system,\u2019 says Eduard Meyer (Bowie\u2019s studio technician at Hansa).
\nBut 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 \u2014 bringing a situation to the brink of escalation to gain capital out of it, as happened during the Berlin crisis of 1958 \u2014 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\u2019 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. \u2018You could still tell,\u2019 says Eduard Meyer, \u2018how it fascinated him to be living in the place where Nazi history took place. He gave off that feeling to those immediately around him.\u2019 [\u2026]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018There was a German school in Berlin at the beginning of the century called Die Br\u00fccke (the Bridge) \u2014 an expressionist school,\u2019 Brian Eno once said. \u2018Very rough, rough strokes \u2014 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 \u2014 the boldness of attack, the unplanned evolutionary quality of the images, and the over-all mood \u2014 remind me of the way David works.\u2019
\nAnyone trying to read the traces of Eno\u2019s friend David Bowie in Berlin, anyone searching out eye witnesses and inscriptions and remains, looking for Bowie\u2019s 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. \u2018Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,\u2019 writes Christopher Isherwood, \u2018it is my own skeleton aching.\u2019 And Bowie too no doubt identified with the city\u2019s 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\u2019s partus praecipitatus. Always having to be more, always having to wrestle with one\u2019s own role \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.
\nAnd how he threw himself upon Berlin and surrendered himself to the place! The city, he enthused, had been \u2018the artistic and cultural gateway to Europe in the twenties,\u2019 \u2014 \u2018virtually anything that happened in the arts happened there.\u2019 He spent hours walking by the Wannsee lake, cycling, visiting Nazi sites and having his photo taken there \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u2018time machine\u2019, because the grey-on-grey other guests seemed to come from the fifties \u2014 but it was just East Germany\u2019s \u2018real existing socialism\u2019. On the other side of the wall, in the neon West of Kurf\u00fcrstendamm, Bowie is said to have regularly collapsed in the gutter after litres of pilsener \u2014 that must have been his own reverence to the drunken culture for which Berlin was known in the late seventies and early eighties.
\nBut 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\u2019t walk along a road without being afraid of people. Now no one looked at him longer than necessary. Some Berliners still pronounce his name \u2018Boffie\u2019 today; they had called Isherwood \u2018Issyvoo\u2019 in the thirties. Fame doesn\u2019t count for much in this city. \u2018Anyone could claim that,\u2019 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 Sch\u00f6neberg, had a regular table in the Exil restaurant on Kreuzberg\u2019s Paul-Lincke-Ufer and the Paris Bar on Kantstrasse, and disappeared backstage at Romy Haag\u2019s drag show in the evenings. Had the telephone cut off. And wanted to be alone. \u2018I thought I\u2019d take the stage sets,\u2019 Bowie said, \u2018throw them away, go out there and live the real thing.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

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Sent l\u00f8rdag tog denne blogsm\u00f8rer U-bahn fra Schlesissche Strasse vestp\u00e5, men sporarbejde tog turen p\u00e5 U1-linien en uventet omvej, med skift p\u00e5 stationen Mendelsohn-Bartholdy-Park, K\u00f6htener Strasse, kendt som stedet hvor Hansa by the Wall-studiet ligger. Sv\u00e6rt som n\u00e6rmest umuligt ikke at sv\u00f8mme hen i Bowie og Iggy og Eno og Visconti og Sales-br\u00f8drene og Low … L\u00e6s videre Da Bowie flygtede fra verden<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n