There is a curious road going south off the road between Ballina and Sligo at Dromore West. Akin to a time machine rollercoaster ride, it is a single track that larrups up and down over the Ox Mountains, it looks like the Ireland of a hundred years ago.

The few buildings which dot the road were around before The Great War. Some, have been around since before Napoleon.

The most common entity up here is the Mayo Black-faced sheep. After the Great Famine during the 1850s, the Irish Landlords, who owned vast estates in the mountains, imported thousands of these sheep from Scotland, through Killary Harbour. They are hardy, possessing long coarse wool which protects them from rain and cold winds; they can withstand the harsh climate of the western coast of Ireland and survive on plants such as heather. They never ask for much.

But they now have their own icon, from the hand of Ore. Inside, there are two other pieces from another artist.

They will divide opinion.

They make this curious road all the more curious.

Wunsdorf is a town famous for its statues of Lenin – both of which are difficult to access; but there is a statue of Yuri Gargarin. The Russian cosmonaut is plonked with no explanation in the centre of town. The building in which it is in front of, was, I believe the Soviet Union Commandos Headquarters in Berlin. Unfortunately, unlike Phoenixrosedesign, I did not walk behind Yuri to see his God given ass.

He woke early as usual, slipped out of bed, shuffled over to the shuttered window, stuck his eye to the gap and looked down on quiet, tree-lined Haberlandstrasse, he could hear the birds singing, he watched them fly out of the trees, wheeling into the blue sky. He turned and watched Elsa sleeping, she was smiling, dreaming and smiling, he grinned and went out to the washroom. ‘Fifty three Albert,’ he said to the mirror, he washed quickly, dressed and went up to his study. He looked over the scattered papers on his desk, took his hat put it on, went into the hall, opened the door, went through it and closed it gently behind him. He tumbled down the four flights, the building was still asleep. He stepped out, the weather was fine and still. He turned onto Landshuterstrasse.

A truck sped by packed with Brownshirts, gazing passively down at him, their election flags and bumf fluttering in the wind, reading Deutschland Erwache and Fur freiheit und Brot with small swastikas in the corners Young, handsome, idealistic, virile. A shadow of darkness on the bright street. He turned at the Deutsche Bank, three men in bowler hats and pinstriped suits, laughing disappeared down the steps of the Untergrundbahn. Albert could hear the sound of the train arriving underneath, shunting under his feet through the city.

He went into the shop and bought a bag of apples. Walking back, eating one of the apples, he thought of an article, written b Carl von Ossietzky in the left wing journal, Die Weltbuhne, in which he, Albert, had been name checked, in which von Ossietzky was pointing to the increased usage of the term, ‘Cultural Bolshevism’ being used to attack anything which offended the cultural sensibilities of the right – ‘when Klempereer takes tempi different from Furtwangerl, when a painter uses a colour for a sunset not seen in Lower Pomerania, when one favours birth control. when you build a house with a flat roof, when you admire Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein, when you follow the democracy of the brothers Mann and when you enjoy the music of Hindemith and Kurt Weill – all that is ‘Cultural Bolshevism”

There was a man outside the cafe with a placard around his neck on which was written – Antifashisten Wahlt Liste 3 Kommunisten. A truck for President Paul von Hindenburg drives down the streets, warning the people that a vote for Hitler is a vote for “eternal discord.” He made his way onto Bayerischer Platz and got to thinking about Charlie Chaplin’s movie City Lights, he and Chaplin had attended the premier in Los Angeles together, he was thinking about it’s final scene when The Tramp is gazing in the window at the love of this life and the petals are falling from his flower. He walked around Bayerishcer Platz for a while, finishing his apple, it was getting busier, people beginning their day, he started back to his apartment.

The area where Einstein lived, now known as the Bavarian Quarter, was the former Jewish district of West Berlin. In the early 1990s, Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock inaugurated their hugely controversial “Places of Remembrance” memorial. Stih and Schnock attached eighty signs hung on lamp posts throughout the Bavarian Quarter, each one spelling out one of the hundreds of Nazi laws and rules that gradually dehumanized Berlin’s Jewish population. They are disgusting – Jews aren’t allowed use the subway; Jews are not allowed to buy sweets; Jews aren’t allowed use telephones; Jews may only buy food between four and five o’clock in the afternoon; Jews are not allowed to have pets; Jews are not allowed radios or record players; Items made of gold, silver or platinum and pearls belonging to Jews are to be turned into the state.

Einstein had left the country before these laws began to be implemented. As the political climate changed, he became more aware that his Jewish background meant that even a man of his stature was at risk of anti-Semitic attacks. He spent more and more time in America and, when word reached him during a business trip there in 1933 that Hitler had finally taken over, he decided never to return. He accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived with his family until his death in 1955.

Strange to think of Einstein and Hitler walking the same streets at the same time. Humble Albert pottering about his little apartment; Hitler strutting about the Lustgarten yelling his utopia. Albert changing our way of looking at Newton’s universe; Hitler changing the way Germans looked at the world. Fortunately, Albert escaped the clutches of the Nazis who hated him. Alexander Richie, in her marvelous book, Faust’s metropolis writes, ‘the Nobel laureates Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard led the attack against Einstein’s ‘Jewish physics’, an approach to science which, they said, sought to undermine the absolute laws of nature. For them, ‘German science’ was factual and objective while ‘Jewish science’ was mere opinion. Ultimately their attack on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity impeded attempts by Nazi scientists to develop a nuclear bomb, according to Albert Speer, Hitler’s knowledge of atomic science ‘was limited to anything that appeared even remotely associated with Einstein, for whom he conceived an irrational hatred.’ It did not help that Heisenberg and Max Planck were called ‘white Jews’ because they agreed with Einstein. Although research in atomic physics did continue throughout the Nazi period, anti-Semitism might have been the crucial factor which prevented Hitler getting the bomb before the United States.”

Hitlers’ one dissolved into the all, Einstein’s one embraced the all, the power of daydreams mightier than fiendish visions. Contained in Knausgaard’s The End, is a remarkable piece of writing that is worth quoting in full – “Remoteness is the opposite of authenticity, and it is not the yearning for authenticity that is the problem, but the remoteness that gives rise to it. The unique is what cannot be replicated, existing only in a particular place at a particular time.It is the art of the one, and the life of the one. What took place in Germany was that the one dissolved into the all, the sky of ideals descended to earth, and the image of the absolute, which is without consequence, became a point of reference for human action. The absolute, in this case construed in terms of race, biology, blood, soil, nature, death was not only set against the relative, construed in terms of the stock market, the entertainment industry, democratic parliamentarian-ism, as occurred throughout the period leading to the First World War, but it was also carried into life itself, as action: Nazi Germany was the absolute state. It was the state its people could die for. Watching Riefenstahl’s film of the rallies in Nuremberg, its depiction of a people almost paradisiac in its unambiguousness, converged upon the same thing, immersed in the symbols, the callings from the deepest pith of human life, that which has to do with birth and death, and with homeland and belonging one finds it splendid and unbearable at the same time, though increasingly unbearable the more more one watches…and I wondered where that sense of the unbearable came from, the unease that accompanied those image of the German paradise, with its torches in the darkness, the intactness of its medieval city, its cheering crowds, its sun and banners, whether it was something I imposed upon the, knowing from what this paradise arose, what it would become and at what cost, and what happened to it, and I came to the conclusion that this was not the reason, that it came not from what was in me, the knowledge I had of what lay behind the images of those days, but something from in the images themselves, the sense that the world they displayed was an unbearable world. Not that it was a false world, because this was obvious, its every image meticulously created from scratch for that particular occasion, it was more that this false world one if the few pure utopias to be established in the last century, in which everything was exactly the way it was supposed it be, was unbearable in itself. What was unbearable about it lay in its own undifferentiatedness Everything was so affirmative of one and the same thing, and when this is the case no other thing exist but that one, and without the other is nothing. The society that Riefenstahl portrayed , this utopia of the one, had to establish an other for its own simplicity, it own undifferentiatedness, the be maintained, and this what lies beneath those peaceful and harmonious images and fills them with such foreboding: the inevitability of war. It was not the absolute values of Nazism that led them to war, for birth and death, homeland and belonging are characteristics of all people and all peoples it was the utopias of one and the same. It was the fall of the differentiating into the undifferentiated.

Albert’s equivalence theory stated that objects and the space-time fabric around them can influence – even distend – one other and influence how they move. A century on, the conclusions are clear: without Einstein we couldn’t even begin to understand black holes or the Big Bang theory. And without his general theory of relativity, the world would be a very different place. Thankfully, the good German won out.

When Albert returned to his apartment, Elsa was still sleeping. He went into his office , closed the door and picked up his violin, he looked out the window and thought, am I or the others crazy?

The runway is stuffed with people, whilst the terminal is empty. Templehof, once the mother of all airports, lies empty, the fact that it is one of the largest buildings in the world, makes it all the more bizarre. In terms of square footage, it is beaten only by The Pentagon, Ceausescu’s Parliament Palace in Bucharest and several newer international airports. Only in Berlin, could a 400 hectare site slap bang in the city centre be left abandoned, or at least huge swathes of it, be left abandoned. Hectares are confusing, what is a hectare? Well, Monaco is 200 hectares, that gives you an idea, Templehof is twice the size of Monaco. As you walk around abandoned Templehof, hearing your footsteps echo around it’s giant halls, you can look out the windows and in the distance, hordes of Berliners stroll, jog, roller blade and cycle on the runway, while people loll in the grass tending barbecues and sipping beer. How wonderfully odd.

Templehof airport closed it’s doors in 2008 after an incredible history. The site in medieval Berlin was owned by the Knights Templar, hence the name, Templehof. The Prussians and latterly united German forces used the site as a parade ground right up to the start of World War I. The first flights at the site took place when Frenchman Armand Zipfel and the American Orville Wright launched flight demonstrations from there in 1909. Templehof was first officially designated as an airport in 1923.

When the Nazis took power with their lofty futuristic plans, Templehof was handed over to the supervision of chief Nazi architect, Albert Speer with the direction to design the gateway to Europe and a symbol of Hitler’s world capital, ‘Germania’. Speer directed architect, Prof. Ernst Sagabiel to replace the old terminal building and man did he do that, the building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with semicircular hangars forming the bird’s spread wings, the 1.2 km quadrant is still something to behold.

Check out the giant canopy roof, high enough to accommodate most of the aircraft used by the airport even in the decades after WWII. The aircraft could taxi all the way to the building and under the canopy. Passengers could then board and disembark from the plane protected from the elements. Look closely at the picture above and you will see a whole lot of steel holding up the roof, more steel than would be required for a roof. That’s because it was to be more than a roof, the Nazis again were thinking ahead to their dastardly plans – they saw Templehof as the perfect site to parade their victorious armies, and saw the roof as the perfect place to install bleacher seats for one hundred thousand spectators to watch the triumphant Reich armies goosestep around the pan and Luftwaffe air displays dive and soar in the skies above.

During World War II, all civil aviation was moved to an airfield in Rangsdorf, whilst Templehof was used to assemble Stuka dive bombers. Soviet forces took Templehof in the Battle of Berlin in April 1945, but after the division of Berlin, it fell under the control of American forces. Thankfully, for Templehof was to prove the vital artery with which the Allies kept Berlin from been completely overrun by the Soviets. Apart from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world has never been closer to a Third World War than during the first tense months of the Berlin crisis of 1948.

The Berlin blockade was introduced so gradually that the West was not initially aware of what was occurring. However, on 31 March 1948, the Soviets announced that all western nationals travelling to Berlin via the Autobahn and railway would be required to show identification at Soviet control points. From that date, the Soviets escalated their control over Berlin. The Allies with only 6,500 troops in Berlin were in a very vulnerable position, when you contemplate that Stalin had 300 divisions, almost 400,000 troops within striking distance of Berlin. Step in General Lucius Dubignon Clay, stating, ‘Why are we in Europe? We have lost Czechoslovakia. We have lost Finland. Norway is threatened…After Berlin, will come western Germany and our strength there, relatively, is no greater and our position no more tenable than Berlin. If we mean that we are to hold Europe against Communism, we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war in Berlin without losing face. If we move, our position in Europe is threatened. If America does not know this, does not believe that the issue is cast now, then it will never and Communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay here until we are forced out.’

Them’s fighting words. On 23 June 1948, the Soviets barricaded all roads, canals and rail links leading to the western zones. Berliners were terrified, few believed that the city could hold out against the Soviet threat, may wanted to flee, but that was now impossible, everyone was trapped and there was only a couple of months supply of food and coal. US army Lieutenant-General Albert Wedemeyer suggested an airlift, an unprecedented airlift in terms of scale, to bring food and supplies to the citizens of besieged Berlin. The first plane landed at Templehof on Saturday 26 June 1948. What started as a haphazard affair, became one of the most efficient, large scale operations the world as ever seen. Marshaled by the extraordinary US air force transportation expert, General William H. Turner. The logistics of the operation were mind blowing, indeed the lessons learned in dealing with the sheer volume of planes later proved pivotal in creating the international system of air traffic control. The Allies built a second and a third runway at Templehof, used the airstrip at Gatow in the British sector and Lake Havel at Gatow where Sunderland Flying Boats were landed. And finally they constructed Tegel Airport – this became a lasting symbol of Berliners defiance – with almost 2,000 Berliners working on the runway laying over 10 million bricks scavenged from rubble. At the height of the airlift up to 8,000 tons were been brought each day. The missions were difficult and dangerous. Crews were making two or more round trips a day, seven days a week, in all weather; for tours of up to six months in old planes in need of repair with Soviet planes buzzing them and Soviet anti-aircraft guns blinding them with lights and jamming vital Allied radio incidents.

Berliners were incredibly thankful, they began to turn up at Templehof with presents, for the pilots, which for many consisted of their few prized possessions. Towards the end of 1948, west Berliners had become actively pro-western. Unlike many Germans in the west who still resented the western Allies, Berliners began to embrace American culture – cinemas showed American movies, clubs and cafes played American music, even people started using American expressions and idioms. The success of the airlift was a huge blow to Stalin, he had not expected it to succeed, he had assumed it would go the way of the Nazi’s failed attempt to supply Stalingrad or of the unsuccessful attempts by the Americans and British to supply Warsaw in 1944. In May 1949, he gave up the ghost and lifted the blockade. The only reminder now in Berlin of the airlift is on the approach to Templehof airport where a soaring fan shaped sculpture with three gigantic arcs points west in the direction of the air corridors that kept Berlin alive through the winter of 1948/49 with 2.5 million tonnes of food and supplies on some 280,000 flights. The names of the 73 Allied airmen and 5 Germans that were killed during the year long operation are carved on its surface.

The Berlin crisis defined the beginning of the Cold War proper, battle lines were now drawn across Europe, across what would be termed the Iron Curtain. Berliners had been transformed from a defeated, disgraced enemy people into a new western ally. The Americans who had expressed confidently that they would leave by 1952, realised that they had to remain to protect western Europe from the Soviet threat. There were now two giant superpowers brushing against one another and if Berlin was the flash point. Templehof was the symbol of defiance.

Rambling around the site of Templehof airport today is very interesting. Relatively few bombs were dropped on Templehof during World War II, partly because the Nazis protected it with antiaircraft guns, it was also because the Allied forces knew they could use it after the war. so most of the airport remained intact. When bombs did fall on Berlin during the war, these air-raid shelters in the depths of Templehof would be filled with people. The shelter rooms still contain original paintings from the war that were designed to distract children from the chaos above, looking at the gaudy Wilhelm Busch sketches, it is difficult to see that they would do anything more than add to the terror of the poor children.

During their time occupying the building, the Americans set up various function rooms. There was a bar, a bowling alley, a full size basketball court, a disco area, a supermarket, a cinema and there was a baseball pitch on the pan. In 1962, the Americans removed a 5-metre sculpture of an eagle perched on a globe from the main terminal roof and replaced it with radar equipment. The eagle’s head now sits outside the terminal building.

Templehof’s capacity was stretched to the limit in the 1960s, and operations at Templehof were suspended after the construction of Tegel airport in West Berlin’s French sector in 1975. ​In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Templehof started to operate domestic flights once again. In 1993, the US Air Force handed the airport over to the Berliner Flughafengesellschaft, and it was used on and off for commercial purposes until November 2008.

Berliners do love their Templehof, in 2011, plans were mooted for a huge development on the site, proposing building 5,000 houses on the site, as well as commercial areas and offices. However, the Templehof Field Initiative gathered enough signatures to hold a referendum, the result, 65% voted to keep it as it is. Well, the airport, after all, is an old war-time hero, it saved the city, kept it breathing when the Soviets tried to strangle it.

Speak of David Bowie and before long, Berlin is spoken of, almost before his native London or New York where he spent decades. It is his couple of years spent in Berlin that enthrall, inspire and puzzle fans. He produced arguably his greatest work while living here in the late seventies; putting out in quick succession, the three albums; Low, Heroes and Lodger, collectively known as the Berlin Trilogy in collaboration with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, with his spiritual companion, Iggy Pop shadowing him. Bowie referred to those records, as his DNA. He also produced, The Idiot and Lust for Life, two of the greatest records in Iggy’s solo canon. Yet, Bowie’s presence in the city is not in bright lights, there are no statues, no plaques, no museums pointing the way to him; as usual, he is more elusive than that. But, he is of course still here, beautifully alluring in the eaves.

Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station to Station ensured Bowie had only gone and conquered America, and as Elvis and Lennon learned, you don’t want to go doing a thing like that. Into the void, Bowie dove, scurrying about borrowed houses, sustained on a diet of milk and cocaine, or so goes the myth, there’s a lot of that about Bowie, the old myths. Yes, there is valid evidence on Alan Yentob’s 1975 documentary, Cracked Actor, where Bowie’s fragile state is apparently illuminated. Still, in one scene, he looks pretty content and well, wearing a large felt hat, motoring through the Californian desert, sitting in the back harmonising to Aretha Franklin’s Natural woman, gulping milk , Tony Mascia and Coco Schwab sitting up front like his auld pair, as they pass a wax museum, he grins “A wax museum in the desert, you’d think it would melt.” How much was he putting us on?

The Isolar world tour to support the album, Station to Station marked Bowie’s journey away from Los Angeles and towards Berlin. That record, in the words of Allan Jones, writing in Melody Maker in 1976, “captured the spiritual malaise of the decade.” Through it, Bowie was leaving the decadence and America behind and pointing towards the technological phenomenon of the Berlin LPs. The train was leaving town, Bowie was on it. On the opening track, he haunts the vocal –

Tall in this room overlooking the ocean
Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth
There are you, drive like a demon from station to station

He’s taking the freight train from Kether, the celestial crown on the kabbalistic tree of life, to Malkuth, the most earthly of the kabbala’s ten stations –

It’s safer than a strange land
But I still care for myself
And I don’t stand in my own light
Lord, Lord, my prayer flies
Like a word on a wing
My prayer…

He wasn’t partying in LA, he told John Robinson, “I didn’t really use drugs for hedonistic purposes, I didn’t go out very much. I wasn’t getting totally out of it and going to clubs and all that; I’d never really done that to a major extent. i was really just working, I’d work days in a row without sleep. it wasn’t a joyful, euphoric kind of thing. I was driving myself to the point of insanity…I was in a fragile state at that time, it was time to get out of this terrible lifestyle that I had put myself into, and get healthy, it was time, to pull myself together.” Glenn Hughes, whose house he was staying in said, “David told me the thought his demon had caught up with him. He told me he had to get out of LA.

Whilst touring Station to Station, Bowie had met the writer Christopher Isherwood backstage at the Forum in Inglewood, California. Isherwood had lived in Berlin during the early 1930s, and the city became the backdrop to his works including Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin – which became the basis of the 1972 film Cabaret. Bowie was fascinated by Isherwood’s memories of Berlin and coupled with his avid digesting of German expressionism, he began considering the city for his next destination. He began to Berlin as “the center of everything that is happening and will happen in Europe over the next few years”, he wished to, “experiment, to discover new forms of writing; to evolve, in fact, a new musical language.” Six months later he moved to Berlin. His assistant, Coco Schwab found him a modest, first floor apartment, above a car repair shop in an Art Nouveau building in the modest area of Schoneberg.

Life in Berlin changed Bowie, Rory MacLean in his chapter on Bowie, in his fascinating book, Berlin, provides a delicious description of a day in the life of Bowie in West Berlin in the late seventies, “The cyclist swung off Hauptstrasse onto the deep, tree-lined streets. His bicycle tires thrummed on the cobbles. The warm air ruffled his hair. He pedaled past the buildings where Isherwood and Riefenstahl had lived. At a co-op cafe pale-faced students in PLO scarves looked up from their copy of Kierkegaard and ordered another espresso. Above them ‘US Army Go Home” was graffitied on the walls of a squat… At Brecht’s blitzed apartment block on Spichernstrasse he veered north, retracing the old playwright’s daily stroll to the Romaishces Cafe. Over coffee and chess – the cyclist had read – Brecht and Grosz had called for a new kind of art and gifted it to the world. Some mornings the cyclist turned left rather than right and rode south to where Ernst Kirchner – one of the fathers of Expressionism – had had his studio…the cyclist past the vacated bunkers, the demolished Sportpalast where Goebbels had declared Total War, the People’s Court where Hitler’s would be assassins had been sentenced to death. Templehof’s vast arrivals hall and cold stone eagles rose behind him…At Mie van der Rohe’s New National Gallery, built on the abandoned foundations of Speer’s Germania, he turned right to follow the canal..into Kothenerstrasse, avoiding the tracks of the trams which no longer ran, and glided towards the Wall. At the edge of no man’s land he coasted to a stop and rolled his bike into Hansa Sound Studio.” In this imaginative piece, I feel that Rory MacClean sums up better than anyone, the new Bowie, the Bowie who wrote in his diary, “I have now got the will . I will be and I will work. “

MacClean succintly puts it, “Many come to Berlin on a search, often for themselves. Bowie found himself in Berlin. He pulled away from addiction and shed his false personas.” Bowie said of the period, “Life in LA had left me with an overwhelming sense of foreboding. I had approached the brink of drug-induced calamity one too many times and it was essential to take positive action. Berlin was one of the few cities where I could move around in virtual anonymity. I was going broke, it was cheap to live. For some reason, Berliners just didn’t care. Well, not about an English rock singer…”

Alastair Mackay, writing in Uncut, says, “Bowie, enjoying his isolation in Berlin, remained enthralled by the electronic music of Neu! and Kraftwerk and was heavily under the influence of Eno. But the real sense you get from Heroes, is of an artist relaxing into a new identity…What you hear is a kind of alienated psyche music; European, and narrated, as ever, in the Mockney patois of Anthony Newley. There’s no denying the influence of the Cold War’s divided city on the mood. The three instrumentals on side two – Sense of Doubt, MossGarden and Neukoln – are like a soundtrack to the geopolitical anxieties of the day.”

Hansa’s Studio Two had been used as a dance hall by the Gestapo, and was known by Bowie as ‘The hall by the Wall’. “It was a Weimar ballroom,” he told Uncut in 2001, “utilised by Gestapo in the ’30s for their own little musical ‘soirées’. The studio itself was a relic. My first impressions were of the curtains surrounding the studio, and the darkness in the studio. It was not foreboding, just that the air was thick with a darker vibe. You have got to remember, we’re painting a picture based on our emotional disposition and you’re thinking: Germans, Nazis, the Wall, oppression. These things are hanging in the air, and when things get darker physically, you kind of think of darker themes too. Berlin was a rather dark, industrial place to work. There was one point when we wanted to see a bit of light and we asked them to open the curtains. There were these gigantic, heavy curtains and when they did that we saw the walk where the gunner is and that was a rather rude awakening. Although it gave us a cold slap in the face as to where we were, it also gave us a heavier resolve about the intensity of what we were doing.

All five albums that Bowie made during his time in Berlin are extraordinary pieces of work, but the one that is most firmly rooted in Berlin is “Heroes”. Tony Visconti, in his book, A New Career In A New Town, writes, “The music and lyrics on the album were informed by cultural and physical differences between East and West, the Russian Red Guards that could see into the studio, and the sheer scale of Berlin’s recent history all contributed to a darker, more claustrophobic atmosphere than that on Low.”

The defining track on the album was lead single, “Heroes”, it was to to become a anthem for the divided city. It’s constant fascination lies in it’s open interpretation, but the lyrics

I remember
Standing by the wall
And the guns, shot above our heads
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall

firmly rooted it in Berlin and the insane situation in which people had to live.

Visconti writes, “The couple’s kiss in the shadows of the Berlin Wall famously inspired the lyrics of the title track. After a few days of lead vocals David decided to have a go at “Heroes”. He had to write the lyrics first and it seemed to be taking a long time. Antonia was visiting and our conversation, albeit a quiet one, was distracting him. He asked us to literally ‘take a walk’ so he could finish the lyrics. The area around the studio only had a few shops and a coffee house and it was late evening. It was kind of bleak. The control room window faced a forsaken empty lot sometimes used as a gypsy encampment, with the ubiquitous Wall looming in the distance. Antonia and I had a coffee and walked around a bit but didn’t go very far as it felt unsafe. We stopped beneath the control room window to look at the Wall. We had a little chat about it that somehow turned into a little snog. We chatted some more and then returned to the studio.”

Heroes became a Berlin anthem. Bowie returned to the city almost thirty years after writing it, MacClean eloquently describes that night , “In June 1987, his driver drove him past the old Hauptstasse apartment, by the Brucke Musuem and Hansa, to a stage in front of the Reichstag. As night fell, her performed to 70,000 fans, their candles and sparklers glittering around the Platz der Republik. Towards the end of the show, he read a message in German, ‘We send our wishes to all our Friends who are on the other side of the Wall’ . Then he sang ‘Heroes’. On the other side of the hateful divide, hundreds of young East Berliners strained to hear the echoes of the concert. They caught sight of stage lights flashing off blank, bullet marked walls. They heard Bowie greet them. They listened to his song. Their song. Berlin’s song. As ‘Heroes’ reached its climax some of the East German crowd pushed towards the Brandenburg gate, whistling and chanting, ‘Down with the Wall’. They threw insults and bottles and the Volkspolizei, rising together against the thugs in a rare moment of protest. On stage Bowie heard the tears from the other side. He was in tears.”

“It was one of the most emotional performances I have ever done, he said later, It was breaking my heart…that’s the town where it was written, and that’s the particular situation that it was written about. It was just extraordinary.

So, where is Bowie in Berlin? On the physical level, there is Hauptstrasse 155, you can stand across the road and look over at it, and imagine back, to young Bowie and Pop, barely in their 30s, strutting in their East Berlin duds down to Neues Ufer for a beer, which you can do too. There is Hansa, which for a princely sum, you can get a tour of; there is the Brucke museum where you can walk in the footsteps of Bowie gazing at the works of Kirchner, Kollwitz and Heckel.

But much of Berlin is steeped with Bowie, or Bowie is steeped in Berlin; stick on your headphones, listen to the album Heroes and wander Neukolln the open streets and through the crowds spilling out of the shopfronts – chatting, laughing, eating, drinking, smoking and cavorting, Explore the tree lined avenues of Schoneberg, diving in and out of the book, antique and junk stores listening to Sound and Vision. Embrace the sonic experimentation of Eno on the second half of Low, and wander about the Wall at Nordbahnhof and through the quiet cobblestreets of Prenzlaeur Berg with Warszawa, Art Decade, Weeping Wall and Subterraneans. Go to Potsdamer Platz and listen to Heroes and Where are We Now?. Ride the U-Bahn listening to Lust for Life, The Passenger, Success and Tonight; and you’ll find Bowie permeates the city in that willow the wisp enchanting way of his.

Standing in the glass dome of the Riechstag, taking in the views across Berlin, I saw giant white domes on the horizon, upon asking, I was told that’s Devil’s Mountain. So, I went there. Man, it is one of the most compelling sites in Berlin and one that I had never heard of before.

I took the S-Bahn to Heerstrasse and then walked a few kilometers to Teufelsberg. So what is Teufelsberg? Get this, Teufelsberg is German for Devil’s Mountain, and it was an NSA spy station built on the site of a Nazi college. Wow. That is Vanishing Berlin gold. The Nazi college was called the Wehrtechnische Fakultat and stood deep and hidden within Grunewald Forest. In May 1950, the Allies turned it into the graveyard of old Berlin as they dumped tons and tons of rubble and a mountain, Devil’s Mountain, Teufelsberg began to rise above the trees of Grunewald, built from the ruins of the buildings of war torn Berlin. It now stands 400 feet creating fine views of the forest and Berlin away in the distance.

What lies beneath? Old historical Berlin. In keeping with the thinking of Stunde Null (Zero Hour), Germany’s past was to be written off and the nation was to begin again. in hindsight a madness perhaps but in many ways understandable. It led to the destruction of all remnants of the past and their replacement with legions of concrete high-rises. Many historical buildings which may have been saved were torn down; treasures such as nineteenth century townhouses and the Anhalter Bahnhof along with 400,000 other buildings now form part of Devil’s Mountain.

The destruction of historical buildings was viewed as a path of cutting Germany off from the Nazi past. Traditional styles were seen as tainted and international modernism was embraced. If you take the case of Anhalter Banhhof, which was the railway terminus for Berlin, it was severely damaged by Allied bombing during World War II, however it may have being resurrected but perhaps elements of its past did for it. 55, 000 Jews, around one third of Berlin’s Jewish population were transported to extermination camps from Anhalter Banhhof.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall, the US National Security Agency (NSA) built a radio measuring, intelligence gathering field station at Teufelsberg. The facility, known colloquially as “The Hill” contained massive twelve metre satellite antennas and the most sophisticated spying equipment, enabling the field station to intercept satellite signals, radio waves and microwaves; which they would then intercept and analyse. The station continued to operate until the fall of the Berlin Wall and its closure, the US removed the equipment but left the buildings and the radomes standing. They are the moon like globes. Why are they so unusual looking? The name, radome is a portmanteau of radar and dome; they are weatherproof enclosures that portect the antenna and are constructed by material that minimises the electromagnetic signal received by the antenna.

In the 1990s, after German reunification, a group of investors bought the former listening station area from the City of Berlin with the intention to build hotels and apartments and there was talk of preserving the listening station as a spy museum. But for whatever reason, no building has taken place on the site; there are rumors that the city is seeking to buy the hill. But still nothing happens, the domes stand tattered, fluttering in the wind, harking back to a time when they were the ears and eyes of the West and a pain in the arse for the East. Overtime, the site has become a mecca for street artists and is now one of the best street art galleries in the city.

I walked back towards the city through Grunewald Forest, be careful, if you take this route, as it is quite easy to get lost and in a forest that is nearly 8,000 acres, you don’t want to be thrashing about blindly in it. There are tree people too living in the high branches, enjoying Amazonian accommodations on the edge of the sprawling metropolis.

The route brings you to the Olympic stadium and you can take an S-Bahn or U-Bahn from there back into the city. I looked back, but could not see the randomes from where I was, obscured as they were by the forest. What a strange place, a man-made mountain built from the ruins of war scarred Berlin on the ruins of a Nazi college on which the NSA built a futuristic spying station, then abandoned to the impending forest and street artist invaders who transformed it into an eerily beautiful art installation. I’ll leave the last words to TOBO.

Hitler and the Olympics. The greatest oxymoron. I had to go and see it. Ciaran Fahey is the King of Urban Exploration in Berlin, in a town like Berlin, that is some title to hold. His site, Abandoned Berlin, is a great piece of work, mapping out in great detail all of the abandoned sites, and there are quite the amount, which he has explored. I found his post regarding the abandoned 1936 Olympic village fascinating. So, I took a regional train to Wundermark, Elstal, and walked the few kilometers to the site.  

Wow, it’s incredible. As Olympic villages go, Elstal broke the mold, prior to it, villages were basic affairs with little or no training facilities and simple huts serving as accommodation. The Berlin Olympics 1936, was viewed by the Nazis as the perfect platform in which to promote their ideals and government. Everything was aimed at superseding Los Angeles 1932, Hitler had a one hundred thousand seat track and field stadium built and the games were the first to be televised with over seventy hours of coverage been broadcast to special viewing rooms in Berlin and Potsdam and some private viewing sets.

All detail was looked at it, they pioneered the modern convention of moving the flame via a relay system from Greece to the Olympic venue. Check out Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary, Olympia, in which she documented the relay from ancient Athens to the packed and roaring Olympic stadium and the flags of the world fluttering in the breeze, Great Britain and Japan beside one another. Watching the huge crowd in the stadium welcoming all the teams and Hitler with the Nazi salute is disturbing as is the German team marching by him doing likewise. The crowd are deliriously content, their country which had been on its knees for so long, was hosting one of the greatest, if not the greatest event in the world, all eyes were on them and their magnificent stadium.

A well fed Hitler takes off his hat and announces the Games open and thousands of pigeons are launched into the sky. Then the torch relay is shown running under the Brandenburg Gate, down Unter den Linden and into the stadium and the Olympic flame in the stadium is lit. The desired link between Ancient Greece and the Third Reich is all too apparent.

The Olympic Village was revolutionary in its design, illustrating both the technical ability and ideological absurdity of the Nazi regime. When it was built, it included state of the art dormitories, dining areas, training facilities, a swimming pool and was home to almost five thousand athletes who it must be remembered were all amateur and had never seen anything like it. It was designed to portray an idyllic and peaceful Germany and was laid out to resemble a German village with each accommodation building been named after a German town. But chillingly, it was built with darker motives, as Germany was already planning war, it was constructed to be easily converted into an army barracks and hospital after the Games. The Gestapo were also monitoring all letters and telephone calls the athletes made home, so dare you say anything anti-German or anti-Nazi, because down the line it may be used against you. Again, the idea is deeply troubling that there was a sinister side behind everything, a plotted dastardly plan shadowing the purest and noblest of events.

Hitler had tried to implement anti-Semitic and racist ideology on the Games, attempting to ban Jewish and Black athletes from competing, however when countries threatened to boycott, he relented. Jessie Owens and some of the other American athletes were to become the fly in the ointment. In Olympia, you watch him in his 100m heat beating with ease all the other competitors, all white, with ease. Borchmayer, the German, defeats the field in a similar fashion in his heat. Six make it through the final – Borchmayer, Wykoff, Owens, Strandberg, Osendarp and Metcalfe. Riefenstahl’s close-ups of Owens under starter’s orders, show a Hollywood handsome, supremely focused athlete; he of course wins, the other American Metcalfe, also black, is the only one running him close. The lanky American, Woodruff, wins the epic 800m finals, beating the favored Italian, Lanzi into second place, the commentary begins by stating the two black Athletes, Woodruff and the Canadian Edwards are against the best white athletes of Europe. Riefenstahl shoots Owens beautifully at the Long Jump as he covers 8.04 metres, a new world record. You can’t see Hitler being too impressed with the way she shot him, it is so iconic. And the footage of the the American flag ascending above of the Swastika and the Japanese flag must have stuck in his craw something shocking. Another black athlete, Cornelius Johnson wins the High Jump with a world record of 2.04 metres, only bothering to get out of his tracksuit for the final heat. In the women’s 4×4 relay, the Germans way out in front, get struck by commentator’s curse when, at the final handover, he states, “the Germans cannot lose!”, they drop the baton, Helen Stephens wins for the Americans the camera then shows Hitler in classic Chaplin mode, pretending to be jolly and a good sport, as the commentator lists, one, two and three, America, England and Canada, Hitler then turns and says something to someone off camera, what’s he ordering there you wonder. But overall, the Germans won the Games, winning eighty-nine medals with the Americans in second place with 56. It is strange now to see the Swastika being raised as the flag of Germany each time a German athlete won a medal.

Rambling around the Olympic village, abandoned since the Soviets withdrew in 1992, I was thinking about all those fine athletes and what an excellent month they must have spent in Germany in 1936. Living in state of the art facilities, surrounded by the finest athletes from 51 nations across the world, travelling to the 100,000 seat stadium, competing, seeing themselves on TV for the first time. Almost 400,000 visitors came to see the village before the athletes arrived in July 1936. It was comprised of 136 one story bungalows, with 28 athletes staying in each, two to a room and a room for two stewards, there was also a small common room and a tiny telephone exchange in each bungalow. There was a large horseshoe-shaped building which housed dining areas and kitchens for each team, so that their chefs could cook the food that their respective athletes wanted and were used to. In addition, there were state of the art training facilities on their doorstep. And all of this was set in the most tranquil of sites, indeed, over a thousand mature trees were dug up, transported and replanted on the site to make it look like a real village. Allies of the Germans got the best houses but all of the houses were in comparison to ordinary training facilities, were state of the art. So it was paradise. Well almost, there were no women allowed on site, including the Olympic female competitors, who stayed in housing near the stadium.  

The two-story Hindenburg Haus – named after the field marshal and German president Paul von Hindenburg, patron of the Games up to his death in 1934 –was the main administration center with its own theater/television exchange. It was here that the first tests were done on live TV transmissions. The 1936 Olympics provided the first live sports broadcasts to the world.

But what sad times would befall the site, during World War II, it was used as a hospital and a training academy for German soldiers, indeed with weeks left in the war they were still churning them out. In 1945, it was taken over by the Soviets and used as a barracks until 1994. Since then the site has lay abandoned, but property developers have recently bought it, indeed, there are parts of the site, where they are working and are off limits as the complex is being developed into townhouses and apartments as Berlin encroaches into the suburbs.

All in all, I spent about three hours on the site, it was an amazing experience peering into show that the Nazis put on for the world, before they showed their real hand three years later. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is long left for these buildings, there were bulldozers on site knocking stuff down, as I walked about, so I guess it won’t be long before they are all resigned to just memory. It was of course a fantastic stage set, over one million people visited the city for the Olympics. Few saw through the facade, indeed Thomas Wolfe mocked the 3,000 journalists who were blinded by the masquerade that the Nazis put on in his novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. It is of course debatable whether this is a good or a bad thing, many people will want it razed to the ground, to eradicate the duplicity of what occurred here. But many others will have wanted it maintained, to remember what occurred here.