Where Are We Now? raises challenges during David Bowie’s nostalgic Berlin city tour that his fans expect to decipher. Lesser mysteries were quickly cracked this week: 1 – The woman’s face on the cuddly toy is the video director’s wife Jacqueline Humphries. 2 – The T-shirt slogan “m/s Song of Norway” refers to both a retired and renamed cruise ship (Royal Caribbean has used Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in its commercials), and an operetta that was made into a film starring Bowie’s onetime girlfriend Hermione Farthingale who inspired a song. 3 – The closing shots of the Siegessäule (Victory Column) resonate also as the title of Berlin’s gay community magazine. 4 – The lyric’s curious non-idiomatic phrase “walking the dead” coincidentally references the title of an American drama about a transgendered person. But the real Poirot Puzzler raised by the opening line of the song is this: *How* did Bowie “get the train from Potsdamer Platz” (incidentally, or deliberately, misspelt on screen) to reach his Berlin haunts in the 70s? Today any of us can easily take the U2 towards Nürnberger Strasse, the lyric’s next destination, where once, he sings, he would sit in the cool Dschungel nightclub frequented by assorted popstars (his favourite seat was on a balcony overlooking the bar). We can also take the S1 line south from PP to the trendy Schöneberg district where Bowie used to share rooms with Iggy Pop. But not when Bowie lived in Berlin, during the years now identified with his Berlin Trilogy of albums, 1976-79. Why not? Because of the 12-ft high Wall, fortified with minefields, anti-tank defences and ruthlessly guarded, the symbol of communism which had divided the city since 1961. As we see from the map (above) both the stations for the S-Bahn surface train line and the U-Bahn underground line lay on the East side of the wall within the Soviet sector. In the late 70s the site of Potsdamer Platz was a wide-open wasteland on the East of the Wall, a No Man’s Land chillingly known as the Kill Zone, where guards could gun down the continuing stream of desperate East Berliners courageous enough to make a dash for the West. Thanx to Shapers Of The 80s
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 14:52:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015