Heroes by Tobias Rüther

Author:Tobias Rüther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

6 DID YOU SEE DAVID BOWIE?

The artists of Die Brücke, Brian Eno once said, painted with ‘very rough, tough strokes – and they all have a mood of melancholy about them or nostalgia, as if they were painting something that was just disappearing.’ And their ‘boldness of attack, the unplanned evolutionary quality of the images, and the over-all mood – remind me of the way David works.’

Anyone attempting to retrace the steps of Eno’s friend David Bowie in Berlin, anyone in search of eyewitnesses and references and relics, of Bowie’s brushstrokes from the period between autumn 1976 and spring 1979 at 155 Hauptstrasse, is not doing anything different to what the object of their search was himself doing at the time. Bowie is in search of himself in the city. He sees himself in relation to it. ‘Berlin is a skeleton that aches in the cold’, Christopher Isherwood wrote. ‘It is my own skeleton aching.’ Bowie must have identified too clearly with the strange fate of the city. The fate of having become great, politically and architecturally, too quickly and therefore condemned to suffer growing pains for ever. The architectural critic Heinrich Wefing once spoke of a ‘precipitate delivery’, of bursting hurriedly into life. Having to be more and then more and more, having always had to struggle to define one’s own role and still having to – Bowie recognizes all this in himself. And like Bowie, Berlin has indulged itself too much and ruined itself through megalomania. And again like Bowie the city has to pay for it with a permanent hangover. Karl Scheffler’s gloomy, hackneyed dictum that Berlin is condemned eternally to become, never to be, takes on a new meaning in Bowie’s case. Because Bowie is the embodiment of this statement. It’s as though it were tailor-made for him. The ‘ever-changing shape’ is what Lindsay Kemp, that man of the theatre, called his pupil David back in the 1960s. Bowie finds a new master in the shape of Berlin.

And doesn’t he just go crazy for Berlin, head over heels! The city, he enthuses, ‘was the artistic gateway of Europe in the Twenties and virtually anything important that happened in the arts happened here.’ He spends hours walking by the lake at Wannsee, or cycling, visiting places associated with the Nazis and has his photograph taken there – at least that’s what he does in the first few weeks. He crosses over to East Berlin again and again going through Checkpoint Charlie in order to see the Berliner Ensemble, at Brecht’s old theatre. Just round the corner from there he goes for a meal with Iggy and Visconti to the Ganymed restaurant on Schiffbauerdamm, which Visconti calls a ‘time machine’ where the other guests look like something out of the drab 1950s – this, though, is just what’s termed ‘really existing socialism’. Back on the other side of the Wall, in the blazing Western neon of Kurfürstendamm, Bowie is regularly found collapsed in the gutter from the effects

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