How David Bowie's time spent in Berlin became the stuff of myth and legend

In a chapter of Rory MacLean’s book Berlin, dedicated to David Bowie’s much mythologised spell spent living in Germany’s then divided capital circa 1976-78, the author evocatively imagines one of the biggest rock stars in the world, anonymously rattling around the cobbled, battle-scarred streets of the city on an old Raleigh bicycle. On his cheerful pedal, he re-traces the footsteps of his creative idols, whether passing Brecht’s blitzed apartment in Wilmersdorf or Kirchner’s old studio in Steglitz.

The Starman subsequently inserted himself into the city’s artistic geography such that people today now walk Berlin’s streets retracing his footsteps. Like countless others, I’ve stood in front of the plain building at Hauptstraße 155 where Bowie once shared a flat with Iggy Pop, picturing the two of them stumbling in stoned and drunk. Similarly, I’ve hung about outside the legendary Hansa Studios, imagining the embryonic muffled strains of the Heroes album echoing faintly from within.

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Bowie’s as much a part of Berlin today as Brecht, Kirchner, Dietrich or Isherwood. And yet, relatively little is known, or at least properly understood, about his transformative time there. It was his great escape, from Los Angeles, from fame, from crippling cocaine addiction and paranoid psychosis. In a place of Cold War fear, beer, queers and sexual and artistic liberation at the ragged edge of the Western world, Bowie disappeared for a while. There’s no footage of him in Berlin, and few photographs. Outsized legends have grown up to fill the information void. Some of them, it transpires, are less powerful than events as they actually happened.

In Bowie In Berlin, a new BBC radio documentary, writer-presenter and filmmaker Francis Whately and producer John Wilson go further than ever in sifting Berlin Bowie fact from fiction and shining a torch into the murky inner life of his most mysterious era. The big truths hold firm. Berlin really did save Bowie, they concur, and helped an artist who had hitherto hidden behind characters – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – pull off his greatest reinvention. As himself.

“I think in Berlin, he wanted to get back to the real David Bowie, and I think that’s what he did,” says Whately, who knew the musician in the latter years of his life through his work on various TV documentaries including the acclaimed David Bowie: Five Years (2013) and David Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017).

“He grew a little moustache to try and hide himself,” Whately continues, “and started wearing a checked shirt and a pair of jeans. And we don’t kind of imagine him looking like that. And yet, when I met him, he did look exactly like that. He looked like a very normal guy, and I think that was who he was. There are obviously thousands of David Bowies. But I think the essential David Bowie is the Bowie he was in Berlin, bicycling around the city, visiting the sites, going to clubs at night, seeing and sort of drinking in everything that the city had available.”

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Alongside a handful of previously unheard archive clips, Bowie in Berlin shares testimonies for the first time from three women – artist and former RSC actor Clare Shenstone, transsexual performer and legendary nightclub owner Romy Haag and former journalist Sarah-Rena Hine – all of whom knew Bowie intimately, and shared time with him in the city (amid an evidently richly varied and complex sexual-romantic life).

Shenstone’s contributions are particularly emotional. “Clare was my door into Berlin,” says Whately. “Just the idea that he phoned her, as you’ll hear, in some distress, saying, you know, I really need you. I need you to come to Berlin. This was in the early days when he’d arrived there, when he was just a man at the end of his tether, after the long hangover from the LA years and fame and all that. I think she puts a human face on him.”

Some Berlin myths hold no water at all. For example, only one album from Bowie’s feted “Berlin trilogy”, with its revitalising sensibility of punk-y radicalism meets synth-y futuristic dread, was actually fully made in the city (1977’s Heroes; the concept of the trilogy was mostly marketing conceit). Undoubtedly, it’s an overstatement to say Bowie got clean from drugs in the heroin capital of Europe, although he did at least cut back (probably by compensating with alcohol). A notorious tale about him repeatedly violently ramming his drug dealer’s car with his own is amusingly confirmed by Bowie in an unearthed interview, although whether Iggy Pop was in the passenger seat, as legend has it, remains unclear.

I’ll leave it to the documentary to divulge the untold story behind the triumphant title track to Heroes, one of Bowie’s greatest songs, because it’s extremely moving. Let’s just say it’s far more personal than the popular version of events, which is that Bowie suddenly felt inspired to write the lyrics after spying producer Tony Visconti stealing a clandestine smooch with his lover, backing vocalist Antonia Maaß, in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. “Maaß has always denied that ever happened,” says Whately. “The actual Wall was quite a long way from Hansa, and the idea that Bowie could have seen two people kissing by it in no man’s land is very strange.”

If we can be certain of anything, it’s that Berlin stayed with Bowie throughout his life, right to the end. We know that from events of the coda to the documentary – a segment about Bowie’s return to the city in 1987, to perform a historic concert in front of the Reichstag within earshot of desperate East Germans on the other side of the Wall whom he could distantly hear cheering (“one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done” Bowie said). As we do from the wistful and uncharacteristically nostalgic references Bowie made to the city in the song Where Are We Now?, from his penultimate album The Next Day, released in 2013, three years before his death from cancer aged 69.

“We talked about Where Are We Now? I remember in an email, and how his times in Berlin were such happy days for him,” recalls Whately. “I think they were probably some of the happiest times of his life, because he was free.

“I think he’d be very proud that he is part of Berlin’s ongoing story.”

Bowie in Berlin is available on BBC Sounds now.

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