Photo by Jimmy King
As I was born in the 1980s, I didn't experience David Bowie's interest in the communist East firsthand. Instead, I learned to love him via his thrilling, polished pop of the mid-90s. But later, when I discovered Bowie's Berlin Trilogy as a Western pop culture-obsessed teenager in then-capitalist Poland, it became apparent that these records were a result of a careful immersion in the otherness of the Soviet Bloc. They're in equal measure about our history as his heart. That the allegedly bleak and sinister communist East was a fascinating place culturally, and that historically charged Eastern Europe must have possessed some truly sophisticated allure, given that it appealed so strongly to a disillusioned generation from the consumerist West. This sophisticated, gloomy music, considered Bowie's masterpiece, speaks of an "alternative" Eastern Bloc: one that existed more in dreams and yearning than in the everyday reality.
As far as Western popular music goes, a strong argument could be made that Bowie discovered the Soviet Bloc. His relocation to Berlin in 1976 (and the subsequent recording of his landmark trilogy) enabled a whole generation of musicians, from opposing geographical and political backgrounds, to communicate with each other. In the murk of the Cold War's divided capital— dangerous, concrete-laden, grey, sleazy, sexy—Bowie recognized the potential for a fruitful cultural and historical cross-fertilization.
Bowie's European fixations stemmed from his prolific dabbling—his interest in everything from the occult, to mime, the space program, William Burroughs' dystopian visions of aliens conquering human civilisation, Warhol's pop artifice and simulacrum. Raised in a London suburb as a child of the hippie generation, as well as the post-war British welfare state, he could have gone in any political direction. His late ’60s/early ’70s albums reveal this dualism: Alongside a typical flower child interest in shady mysticism is an unusual political alertness. He loved Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Gurdijeff, Kahil Gilbran, Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Anger, while songs like "All the Young Dudes" and "Star" had jarring references to the Labour movement.
Bowie's later sincere interest in Cold War history is in stark contrast with his early, somewhat troubling, ventures into the world of right-wing ideology. The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Hunky Dory (1973) both contained Nietzsche-inspired themes, where a modern man is to be replaced by a "Homo Superior," Bowie's bizarre take on the concept of the Ubermensch—later developed into the Ziggy Stardust-era's Starman, which suggested that the Ubermensch would be an alien who would appear from the sky and impose his rule. The lightning face paint from the cover of Aladdin Sane resembles a glamorised version of the British Union of Fascists' logo. This bizarre flirtation with a political taboo came probably from Bowie's yearning for rockstar fame and success, and his instinctive understanding of a pop idol as a political, perhaps even fascist-style, leader. Fueled by his cocaine habit, Bowie made deeply unsettling comments about fascism in various interviews, not least an infamous, addled Playboy feature: "Britain is ready for a fascist leader… I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism… I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership… Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars…You've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up."
Bowie's fixation with totalitarianism also found its muse closer to home when fascism once again reared its head in 1970s Britain. Diamond Dogs (1974) was the result of a failed attempt to stage a musical based on Orwell's 1984. Denied the rights by Orwell's widow Sonia, Bowie transformed his idea into a less specific, post-apocalyptic, glam-driven vision of urban decay. It also fed on his short-lived hope to create a musical of the Soviet underground comic "Oktobriana," about a Communist superheroine—a kind of totalitarian Wonder Woman—which was published in the West.
While the Beatles had sung about the USSR, Bowie decided to actually go there. In early 1973, after a tour in Japan, he bought a camera and boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway, traveling over 9,000km from Khabarovsk, just 30km from the Chinese border, to Moscow, where he strolled around, looking at the hard-working communist men and women, and taking plenty of pictures, while looking flamboyant as usual. He then took a train to Paris, which stopped for technical reasons in the capital of socialist Poland—specifically, at Warsaw's northern station, Warszawa Gdańska. This short stop has been much mythologized by Polish fans. Allegedly, during these 40 minutes, Bowie looked around the station's socialist concrete architecture, went up for a walk to the district of Żoliborz, and strolled around Paris Commune Square. There, in a socialist cultural club called Empik, he purchased some records—among them, possibly, an LP by the folk band Silesia, whose song "Helokanie" bears a close resemblance to Bowie's "Warszawa."
With Bowie increasingly worn out due to his cocaine habit, his Station to Station era (and attendant Teutonic, 1930s-indebted Thin White Duke look) coincided with a psychotic period. This culminated in his infamous, alleged Nazi salute at London's Victoria Station in 1976, which he would deny for years afterwards. The faux-pas was a tipping point: He endeavored to kick drugs and attempt to rejuvenate himself by relocating to West Berlin. While Bowie's time in the German capital didn't prove to be especially healthy, it lent him a seriousness and gravitas his work had previously lacked. There, driven by his interest in Expressionism, the 1920s avant-garde, and Germanic rock, he transformed himself into a dandy, a student of history, and a real artist.
Cycling from his home in Schöneberg to Hansa Tonstudio, famously just next to the Wall, Bowie recorded his three Berlin masterpieces. In 1977, he channeled the city into Low, an exquisite, otherworldly and minimalist record, in which the most extraordinary feature is space. The second side is filled with abstract, sweeping, electronic landscapes, whose coldness evokes both the infinite depth of cosmic space, as well as the cold spaces of communist boulevards in Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin. Side B opens with the towering "Warszawa," Bowie's most obvious homage to the doubtless grim-seeming city he caught a glimpse of back in 1973 (and possibly again, in 1976, on a trip with Iggy Pop). It's the most eccentric take on traditional Eastern European music imaginable, with Bowie singing invented words in a high pitch, over Eno's swirling electronics.
Also in 1977, "Heroes" was similarly entrenched in European imagery. Not only its famous cover, with Bowie emulating a painting by the Expressionist Erich Heckel, but its references to specific places in Berlin, to Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider in "V2-Schneider," and "Sense of Doubt," with rain and cars running in the background evoking film noir and Cold War espionage. With its Japanese koto, "Moss Garden" signaled Bowie's interest in the farther East. "Heroes"' greatest emblem, of course is its title-track, perhaps Bowie's most beloved hit, which is both a love story of Berlin Wall-separated lovers, and an anthem to pop music's redeeming protean powers.
The influence of Bowie's Berlin period spread swiftly. The Human League dreamed about the dignity of hard labour and Yuri Gagarin's space flights; New Romantic Visage projected a moon over Moscow; Eurythmics recorded the conceptual soundtrack to Michael Radford's adaptation of Orwell's "1984"; Ultravox fantasised about concrete, spies, and Cold War Vienna; Depeche Mode dabbled in musique concrète and socialist realist imagery of glamorized workers. The relentlessly modernist, cold, electronic sound of Bowie's Berlin albums allowed them to dream beyond the Wall.
Germany, with its brilliant electronic music (stimulated by other centers of electronic music, such as that in Warsaw), was a laboratory, and a window from which Bowie could comfortably observe the history behind the barbed wire without getting bruised by it. Kraftwerk had provided a sound and alluring trips on the Trans-Europe Express, but it was Bowie who united elements of music and history that had seemed separated by the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall. As a model postmodernist, someone who built his life and art out of the artificial, the fabricated, who traversed pop art, comic books, and Brecht, Bowie needed the necessary frisson of the real, which he found in Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow. There, you had little art or style to be consumed, but the burden of history, which could be tracked on the cities' gigantic open spaces: all consuming emptiness and morbid austerity.
In the 1981 film, Christiane F, an adaptation of the sensationalist autobiography of a teenage heroin addict and Bowie obsessive from West Berlin, Bowie becomes a soundtrack to infinitely sad, murky landscapes filled with failed housing projects and a failed family unit. While related to a specific experience, he unified the fears and sense of decline felt by young people on both sides of Europe. He was the wall against which Christiane F and her young friends—sex workers and heavy drug users—projected dreams that never came true. Whichever side of the curtain they were on, all young people were disadvantaged by Cold War politics and the decaying economy. The Iron Curtain turned out to have big enough holes through which young people could finds ways to each other—poked and widened by Bowie's curious spur.