Berlin, Germany – When David Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour arrived in West Berlin on June 6, 1987, the city was the world’s de facto capital of geopolitical turmoil, cleft in two physically and politically by 168km (104 miles) of machine-gun-guarded concrete wall.

The stage on which Bowie was to perform lay to the west of the division line on the derelict lawn of West Berlin’s Platz der Republik, a grassy square in front of the imperious Reichstag building. The building had once been the seat of the German government (and is again today) but in the late 1980s had stood largely unused since World War II due to its proximity to the Berlin Wall looming directly behind it.

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The tour had come to participate in the Concert for Berlin, an event held as part of the city’s 750th-anniversary celebrations, and when the performance venue was erected, its West Berliner organisers made sure that several speakers were pointing directly at the Wall.

It was a cool evening when Bowie and company took to the stage beneath a 15-meter (50-foot), illuminated spider before an audience of some 80,000 fans. At the same time, listeners from the east gathered as close as they dared, their numbers accumulating steadily.

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Attendees to the west got their money’s worth, as Bowie rocked through a lengthy 24-song set followed by three encores. The tracks were largely drawn from his latest run of albums – Scary Monsters, Let’s Dance and Never Let Me Down – but a few harkened back to those he’d recorded a decade earlier while living in the city, most notably his anti-Wall anthem, “Heroes”.

By all accounts the performance was well-received by those watching from the Reichstag. Bowie himself later expressed that it was an emotional experience.

For those listening to the east, however, the music may have been welcome, but the atmosphere was oppressive as members of the Volkspolizei – the People’s Police, a civilian wing of the much-feared Stasi secret police – spent the duration of the concert hassling and intimidating those who had congregated to hear it.

The following evening as the crowd swelled precipitously for a second day of music, violence erupted when East German authorities cracked down on eastern listeners – a repressive act that only inflamed opposition and ultimately contributed to the Wall’s collapse.

A tale of two cities

At the time, Berlin sat at the crux of the Cold War. In the wake of World War II, the victorious powers had chopped Germany into four regions, each occupied and administered by one of the United States, the USSR, the United Kingdom and France. But with Berlin situated deep inside the Soviet zone, it was agreed that the capital, too, would be divided along similar lines.

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Then in 1961, following years of rising tension, the Soviets boxed in the western Allied section of the city with a heavily fortified and guarded barrier – the infamous Berlin Wall – which divided families and severed economic and social ties.

“It’s hard for any of us to really imagine,” says Berlin Wall historian Hope M Harrison, professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. “This was a world metropolis like New York, London, Paris, Rome – and suddenly to have it divided in two!” Families were separated, employees cut off from their jobs, students from school. “It had a huge, devastating impact on the people of Berlin.

“For Berlin, it was a gash through the city,” Harrison explains. “For the world, it symbolised two things: the Cold War – here it is in concrete – but also both the brutality and simultaneously the weakness of the Communist regime.” That the powers that lay to the east felt it necessary to wall its people in was “a kind of admission of defeat”, she added.

Life on both sides of the barrier became increasingly grim. Those to the east experienced pervasive censorship and a rapid diminishing of material standards due to the food and supply shortages that plagued the Soviet Union. Those in West Berlin settled into their besieged enclave, where greater cultural freedom allowed for wide-ranging artistic experimentation, but the sense that it was all teetering on the brink persisted.

“West Berlin very much became a countercultural place,” says Harrison, gravitating artists, punks, anarchists, and East Germans looking to escape compulsory military service. “It was living on the edge, so it attracted people who were happy to live on the edge, some of them with the Berlin Wall literally in their back yard or across the street.”

The fall of Ziggy Stardust

“That’s why I went to Berlin,” said Bowie, who moved to West Berlin in 1976 at the age of 31. “I wanted to have another kind of friction … people living under the impression that everything might collapse very quickly.”

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Drowning in the recent superstardom brought on by The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and accompanied by flat-mate and then-floundering former Stooges frontman Iggy Pop, Bowie ostensibly went to Berlin to escape the raging cocaine addiction that had prompted his previous handful of albums – particularly Station to Station, the production of which Bowie later reported he had little to no recollection.

Raised in Bromley, not far from London, he had gone to the US in 1974 but, after two years of maximalist rockstar debauchery across New York City and Los Angeles, the singer was desperate for change. The Thin White Duke (as he was monikered during his Station years) was in a transitional mode and Iron Curtain-era Berlin seemed an appropriate environment for this modulation.

“I knew I had to get to an environment that was totally different from Los Angeles,” he explained towards the end of 1977. “The most arduous city that I could think of, and it was West Berlin. It’s a very good, therapeutic city for an artist.”

By the time Bowie arrived in Berlin, its Cold War culture conflict was in full swing and music played no small part in the struggle. That same year, famed German folk singer Wolf Biermann had his East Berlin citizenship revoked while he was away performing in West Berlin, barring him from returning home: His crime – writing a song critical of the Stasi that was sung among its prisoners.

Western music was largely banned in the east, though East Germans still received radio and television transmissions from the other side of the Wall, as well as smuggled cassette tapes and records cut into medical x-ray films known as “ribs”, “jazz on bones”, or “bone music”.

The Berlin Trilogy

“It’s a very tight life there, surrounded by a wall with machineguns,” Bowie said of life in West Berlin. “The longer you live there the more it comes in, and the Wall by the end feels as though it’s right around the apartment or house you’re staying in.”

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In fact, Bowie could see the Wall from Hansa Studio, where he finished his 11th and 12th albums, Low and Heroes, and produced Iggy’s second solo release, Lust for Life. Hansa is still there today, just around the corner from sections of the Wall displayed in the square of Potsdamer Platz (which Bowie mentioned in “Where Are We Now?” 30 years later, a song largely about the day the divide finally fell – November 9, 1989).

These days, it is flanked by a fashionable shopping centre and the luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel rather than the armed guard towers that enforced the division of the city for some three decades. It was beneath one of those towers that Bowie spied the inspiration for Heroes’ titular track. Producer Tony Visconti and singer Antonia Maass would steal away to kiss in the shadow of the Wall during recording sessions; Bowie used the image of that as a symbol of the power of love over oppression.

“It’s about what it means to be a hero and stand up,” said Harrison. “I think this song is very relevant right now. Standing up against what you feel is wrong and shameful.”

Over the ensuing decades, the song Heroes went on to become the most recognised anthem from what was dubbed Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, but what is most distinct about Heroes the album and its forerunner Low are their least-known tracks: The synth-driven, largely lyricless compositions that comprised the second side of both records.

“I needed to discover for myself a new form of musical language before I continued writing,” Bowie explained. “Low and Heroes aren’t so much situations, but a process of discovery. Searching for a new artistic language so that I can go further.”

Going further meant leaving something behind, and it was in Berlin that he killed off the characters behind whom he’d long hidden – Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke – and embraced an identity he had heretofore obscured: Himself.

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“I never wanted to appear as myself on stage ever,” he said in 1979, shortly after leaving Berlin for the Isolar II World Tour – said to be his healthiest tour in years due to the noticeable reduction in cocaine use – “until recently.”

Changes

When you compare the interviews Bowie gave before and after Berlin, it’s plain to see that he had undergone a fundamental change during the roughly 18 months he lived there. Before, there was a dolled-up rock star trying to bluff away nerves. After, he seemed remarkably mature, calm and clear-eyed.

Escaping the throttle of cocaine probably didn’t hurt, but it was something more than that. As he explained to interviewers who commented on the shift in his dress and demeanour during the closing years of the 1970s, he had come down from the astral antics of Ziggy and the megalomania of the Duke and humbled himself among humanity. Gone were the pomp and flash of fame, and here now was this very normal-looking guy with bad teeth.

Visiting Hansa in 2025, one might get the impression that Bowie lived a lavish lifestyle in Berlin – such is the studio’s increasingly gentrified neighbourhood today. But things were very different in 1976, when he rented a small apartment at 155 Hauptstraße in nearby Schöneberg – a working-class district largely populated with Turkish immigrants and artsy gays – where Bowie churned out hundreds of paintings that he was too self-conscious to show anyone.

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“They’re all portraits of people in isolation,” he later explained. “Most of the paintings are Germans or Turks who live in Berlin … from East Berlin and now living in West Berlin knowing their families are on the other side of the Wall.”

In the 20 years before Bowie’s arrival, some 650,000 Turkish workers had come to Germany as part of a bilateral agreement with Turkiye to supplement a steep labour shortage. Many brought families, and over the course of two decades developed a thriving, visible migrant community in Berlin and beyond.

Looking at the paintings you can recognise the influence of Bowie’s favourite painter, the German expressionist Erich Heckel – declared “degenerate” by the Nazis – whose Roquairol inspired the cover art for both Heroes and Iggy’s 1974 solo debut The Idiot. Today you can see Heckel’s work at the Brucke Museum, which Bowie frequented during his time in Berlin.

The subject matter of Bowie’s paintings hints at the transition he was undergoing. In the lyrics throughout Low and Heroes – with the notable exception of the latter’s title track – he maintained his early-career tendency towards introspection, sometimes to the point of outright wallowing. But with his hallucinatory portraits of struggling Turks and Germans, suddenly he was turning his gaze outward and examining the hardships of others rather than his own. This inclination came to a head with the overlooked and much-maligned finale to the Berlin Trilogy, 1979’s Lodger.

Misfire or misunderstood?

To say that Lodger fell flat would be an understatement. It was one of the worst-selling records of Bowie’s career. Critics tore it apart, declaring it “self-plagiarism” and complaining of its “droning mood pieces”. Many claimed it was not a proper Berlin album at all; it wasn’t recorded there and was tonally divergent from the first two instalments. Some went so far as to accuse Bowie of marketing gimmickry through his saddling of a lesser album to its more powerful predecessors.

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But with the benefit of hindsight, one might determine that Lodger was in fact the logical conclusion to his time in the city – that it was a Berlin recording because it was a direct response to the social and political plight he encountered there. It is perhaps the most human album he created in the first three decades of his career – a record about real people, immigrants and world affairs, critical of society and almost optimistic in its teasing of it, unlike the introverted Cold War starkness of Low and Heroes.

Consider its opener, “Fantastic Voyage”, in which Bowie warns about the dangers of apocalyptic nuclear brinkmanship, reminding those in charge that “Dignity is valuable, but our lives are valuable too.” It’s a song that champions life in the face of the political mood swings that threaten disaster, urging humanity over geopolitical partisanship – one of the few songs from the era that Bowie continued to perform well into the new millennium.

Or “Yassassin” – Turkish for “Long Live” – which explores the struggles of Turkish immigrants facing bigotry and violence at the hands of native Germans, an issue that feels all too relevant in contemporary Berlin, home as it is to many African migrants and refugees from Syria and Ukraine amidst a rising tide of nationalism.

To continue: The mock-toxic (moxic?) masculinity of “Repetition” and queer-coded “Boys Keep Swinging”. His sardonic swipe at the vapidity of the music industry in “DJ”. Then wrapping up the album with “Red Money”, which concludes with the line, “Such responsibility/it’s up to you and me.” These are the songs of someone who has moved beyond the glamour of rock stardom to embrace the humanitarian power of the platform.

The fall of the Berlin Wall

A decade later, Bowie would return for the Concert for Berlin. The three-day event was organised by Radio in the American Sector (RIAS 2), a station that was notorious for broadcasting Soviet-banned music to both sides of the city. Held in an open-air venue and featuring performances from the likes of the Eurythmics and Genesis in the days to follow Bowie, one promoter later asserted that the show was, at least in part, an intentional provocation of Eastern authorities.

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The concert brought thousands of East Berliners crowding to their side of the barrier hoping to hear, and inspired what was supposedly the first public demonstration against the partition. By the second and third days of the concert, eastside police had violently attacked listeners and demonstrators, arresting at least 100 people. This, many have since claimed, was the last straw, once and for all shifting public opinion firmly against the Soviet state.

“These concerts and Western music were listened to widely in East Berlin and East Germany,” says Harrison. “These icons singing so close, just on the other side of the Wall, certainly for many drove home this division.”

There were more concerts to come associated with the East-West Berlin conflict. In July 1988, Bruce Springsteen performed in East Berlin to an audience of 300,000 at the invitation of officials who thought his working-class image would suit communist propaganda, only to have it backfire when the Boss made statements in favour of tearing down the Wall.

“The Wall is very famous for how it fell,” notes Harrison. “Unexpectedly and in fact by mistake. We should never overlook the role of chance.”

Following months of large-scale protests and the piecemeal disintegration of the East/West German border, it finally all came down to one man – an East German official named Gunter Schabowski – who, on November 9, 1989, declared the border open before an international news conference after misreading instructions that were merely a modification of travel restrictions.

Now East Berliners surged towards the Wall hoping to cross in a scene captured by Bowie in the track “Where Are We Now?”:

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Twenty thousand people

Cross Bosebrucke

Fingers are crossed

Just in case

Bosebrucke was one of the border checkpoints overwhelmed by East German masses that night, including a young Angela Merkel – the future chancellor of a unified Germany.

Footage of jubilant masses from both east and west celebrating atop the barrier was broadcast around the world. They started the work of dismantling it that very night, using sledgehammers and saws to tear it down brick by brick and panel by panel, though the demolition wouldn’t begin in earnest until the following year.

On New Year’s Eve 1989, David Hasselhoff headlined the Freedom Tour Live concert attended by 500,000 people from both sides of the Wall. Its climax came when Hasselhoff sang his hit “Looking for Freedom” while a crane raised him above the Wall alongside the Brandenburg Gate, long inaccessible to those in the east due to its location just a few metres into the west.

Officials began the official teardown in June 1990, and East and West Germany were reunified into Germany as we know it today on October 3. The writing was now on the wall for the Soviet Union, which collapsed over the ensuing year, dissolving formally on December 26, 1991.

While Harrison doesn’t attribute the Wall’s fall to Bowie – it is hard to argue that it wasn’t driven by the wider socioeconomic, geopolitical situation – some Germans prefer the legend to the reality as evidenced by a tweet from the German Foreign Ministry upon the singer’s death in January 2016: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.”

New shores

Today, little remains to mark Bowie’s time in Berlin, except the music. There is Hansa Studio where he recorded it, which displays in its window the singer’s constantly shifting portrait. Or you can have a drink at his old boozing spot, Neues Ufer – German for “New Shore” – which was supposedly the first gay bar in town back in 1977.

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But just down the street from the bar, at Hauptstraße 155, is the most striking memorial to Bowie’s stint in the city: The graffiti-haloed bust of Aladdin Sane – one of his most famous alter-egos – emerging from the building facade, candles and votive offerings on the stoop below, a plaque above explaining the Berlin Trilogy and bearing the words “We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Just above is the second-storey apartment Bowie called home for a year and a half, and it was here among struggling Turkish immigrants and German families separated by the Wall that he tore down his own barriers and metamorphosed from self-centred rock star to socially aware artist.

Now, nearly 35 years after the Wall fell, with old divisions cropping up once again in Germany and the wider world, the story of Bowie and the Berlin Wall suggests important lessons. That there can be great creativity and beauty even through calamity. That the human compulsion towards freedom cannot be caged. That life is full of changes. That walls come down.

“To so many people,” concludes Harrison, “the peaceful fall of the Wall showed that something you think will never end can, in fact, end. It made many people feel that anything is possible.”