How Bowie united Berlin just for one day
ALOT has changed around Hansa Studios. When David Bowie was in Berlin between 1976 and 1978, Hansa was surrounded by wasteland. The Berlin Wall could be seen from the control room window.
When Bowie sent his producer and backing singer out so he could concentrate on his lyrics, he spotted them canoodling by the Wall. The guns being shot above their heads may have been a bit of artistic licence, but them kissing as though nothing could fall was immortalised in Heroes.
The guides at Berlin Musictours are avid Bowie fans, and their excursions around the star’s old haunts aim to show how he was changed by his time in the city.
He had arrived from LA, ravaged by drugs and almost broke. Stopping by Bowie’s apartment in Schonberg, and the cafe down the road that became a regular haunt, it becomes clear that the normality of life in West Berlin saved him. But what makes the tour special is that it also delves into Bowie’s impact on Berlin.
This is most obvious at Hansa, which turned from an obscure German studio to the place where everybody wanted to record, and West Berlin morphed from isolated outpost into a cultural hotspot. The place where this manifested itself most clearly was on the lawn outside the Reichstag, next to where the open-air concerts. Some speakers were positioned facing east, so that those on the other side of the Wall could hear. Usually, the East German authorities adopted a stand-offish attitude to this, but on June 6, 1987, as Bowie was playing, they brought out stun guns and water cannon. The loudest cheers of the night came when he offered, in German, his best wishes to ‘our friends on the other side of the Wall’. This also became the first night when chants of ‘down with the wall’ were heard. The heroes of both sides had been united, just for one day.