Surreal and magical, this trail showed me Berlin through Bowie’s eyes

Music icon David Bowie had such an enduring love affair with Germany’s Berlin, he almost single-handedly brought the notorious wall that divided the city crashing down two years before it finally fell.

He was playing a concert in 1987 in front of the Reichstag in West Berlin, and insisted on turning some of the speakers to blast his music out over East Berlin. A crowd gathered to listen by the Brandenburg Gate and began chanting, “The wall must fall!” and pushed forward until the authorities forcibly dispersed them.

Hansa studios with an ever-changing hologram of Bowie.

For the late Bowie, who’d gone to live in Berlin originally in 1976 to try to clean up his addiction to drugs and alcohol in anonymity, that performance was one of the highlights of his life. “It was breaking my heart and I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again,” he said later. “When we did Heroes, it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer.”

So when the wall did finally come down in 1989, the newly united German government was eager to give him credit, saying he helped start the uprising that led to the extraordinary event. On his death in 2016, the German Foreign Office even tweeted, “Goodbye David Bowie. You are now among Heroes. Thank you for helping bring down the wall.”

“And he certainly did,” says Dan Borden, a former New York architect, sometime writer, filmmaker and die-hard Bowie fan who also works as a guide with Insight Cities, which offers tours of Berlin through the eyes, and via the life, of the musician.

“He lit the fuse that started the rebellion. He was a 40-year-old rock star and got up there and really did something that mattered.”

There’s something quite magical about being shown around a city and seeing it through the lens of a musical maestro who recorded so many hit songs during a three-year stay there, all inspired and informed by the tragedies and triumphs of the place.

The Neues Ufer cafe beneath the building where Bowie had his flat. 

Wandering through the streets in Bowie’s footsteps, with Borden playing his songs on a small speaker, is quite surreal, especially on the 50th anniversary of his becoming an international superstar with the release of US No.1 hit single Fame and album Young Americans.

It’s a great way to get to know both Bowie and his Berlin, as he discovered the politics of East versus West, pursued a love of Weimar Republic culture, watched Bertolt Brecht plays at the historic Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, recorded music, explored, played, painted, ate, socialised, experimented with politics and gender, and searched for a new theme.

It was an immensely creative period, and he wrote most of the material that made up his Berlin trilogy, Low, Heroes and Lodger. He also straightened up his mate, Iggy Pop, producing his album The Idiot, which included the track China Girl. This became a big hit for Bowie later on his album Let’s Dance. All were recorded at the Hansa Studio in the Kreuzberg district, which is still in business today, with an eye-catching hologram of Bowie in the front window.

In Bowie’s foosteps...

Upstairs in the studio, Bowie caught sight of two lovers kissing by the wall which so fired his imagination about the tragedy of a divided city and led to Heroes, with its lyric: I can remember / standing by the wall / and the guards shot above our heads / and we kissed as though nothing could fall.

The tour also takes us, with a mix of walking, trains and buses, to Schoneberg, where Bowie and Iggy Pop lived in a second-floor apartment on Hauptstrasse, a building that now bears an Aladdin Sane wall statue, and where they used to eat and drink in the Neues Ufer Cafe next door.

Bowie also crossed over into East Berlin regularly via Checkpoint Charlie with his Allied passport. The perfect place to visit to get a taste of the atmosphere back then is the Tranenpalast, or Palace of Tears. This alludes to all the tearful partings between East German residents and Western visitors: the exhibits include one suitcase containing a Bowie album.

While there, Bowie made a movie, Just a Gigolo, mostly because he was a huge fan of one of his co-stars, Marlene Dietrich. To his crushing disappointment, she filmed all her scenes in Paris, so the pair never met, and the film was a disaster.

And finally, one of the last stops on the tour is Potsdamer Platz, a “ghost station” in East Berlin in Bowie’s day, but today a busy, buzzing square. It haunted him, we know. He mentioned it in one of his last hit songs, the 2013 mournful Where are we now?

Had to get the train / From Potsdamer platz / You never knew that / That I could do that / Just walking the dead …

Insight Cities is a network of local historians in central Europe, with a wide range of tours in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Salzburg. Their three-hour Bowie Berlin small group tour costs $115 a person. InsightCities.com

The writer travelled at her own expense.