Replies

From VOX:

In June 1987, David Bowie returned to the divided city of Berlin for a concert that some Germans, rightly or wrongly, still view as having helped change history.

Bowie knew West Berlin well. He'd lived there for three years in the late 1970s, sharing an apartment in the Schoneberg neighborhood with Iggy Pop, escaping from the drugs and over-the-top glam of his early career into the city's expressionism and art pop. It was there that Bowie recorded three of the albums for which, upon his death today from cancer at the age of 69, he is still remembered and cherished.

In 1977, the year Bowie recorded Heroes, the second of his three Berlin albums, East German border guards shot and killed 18-year-old Dietmar Schwietzer as he tried to flee west across the wall; a few months later, 22-year-old Henri Weise drowned trying to cross the Spree River. Heroes was haunted by the Cold War themes of fear and isolation that hung over the city. Its still famous title track tells a story of two lovers who meet at the wall and try, hopelessly, to find a way to be together. "It was one of the most emotional performances I've ever done. I was in tears."< said Bowie.

A decade later, when, in 1987, Bowie returned for the Concert for Berlin, a three-day open-air show in front of the Reichstag, he chose "Heroes" for his performance. By then the city's Soviet-dominated East had become safer, but it had not become more free. Rock music was treated as a destabilizing threat.

But the wall couldn't keep out radio waves; the West German operated, US run radio station Radio in the American Sector was popular in the East, and had secured rare permission from the performing acts to broadcast the show in its entirety. (Record labels typically opposed this in the 1980s, knowing listeners would record the broadcasts, undercutting album sales.) The concert was held near enough to the border that many East Berliners crowded along the wall to listen to the forbidden American and British music wafting across the city, allowing these two halves of the city to hear the same show, divided but together.

"The mood was one of enjoying forbidden fruit," Olof Pock, then a 15-year-old kid living in East Berlin, later told Deutsche Welle. "We knew that this was somehow being done for our benefit."

When Bowie performed on the second night, he began by telling the crowd, in German, "We send our wishes to all our friends who are on the other side of the wall." He sang "Heroes", the song he'd recorded in Berlin a decade earlier amid the city's Cold War fear and violence.

Though "Heroes" is today remembered as an anthem of optimism and defiance, its lyrics capture the hopelessness and desperation of a city divided, friends and family in the East kept apart from their loved ones in the West by violence and terror. The song's narrator pleads, "I wish you could swim / Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim," a reference to the East Germans, like Weise, who died trying to cross the Spree.

The lyrics, remembered in this context, are tragic, each verse ending with the line "nothing can keep us together":

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side

The song ends with a plea that eventually things will change, if only for a day: We're nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we're lying, then you better not stay
But we could be safer, just for one day

Here is the performance