Christiane F.

A recent conversation with a pair of Italian musicians and an Iranian composer living in Berlin put an end to the symbolic romanticisation that the city had been subjected to for decades. Major tech companies have settled there and neoliberal pragmatism is now the city’s prevailing rule. High rents, an expensive life, difficulties for artists.

In the 1970s, West Berlin was a kind of Trojan Horse of the so-called West: the euphemism used by capitalism to signify itself. We know the legend of this famous Greek military device that infiltrated enemy territory in a deceptive form so that it could later destroy it by surprise. West Berlin was an island/enclave enclosed within the designated territory of actually existing real socialism in the German Democratic Republic. The device in question is, in this case, purely symbolic. A metaphor, therefore. The city/Horse exuded a libertarian, creative and “progressive” energy that attracted many people. But, due to its peculiar situation, it was also the site of major geostrategic upheavals and various interests, often obscure.

The word “vanguard” originally appears in military terminology to denote the part of the troops who go ahead and take risks (just like the Horse), thus acquiring knowledge and experiences that will later be shared with those behind them. Some time afterwards, the term was appropriated by the arts, while keeping the same meaning. Perhaps for this reason, the attraction West Berlin held for artists was enormous. And so, a vanguard was built there which, across various creative fields, expanded its influence throughout the world. In music, from the most experimental and obscure krautrock to the famous Berlin techno.

The city presented itself as a place where one could put into practice the recent maxim “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll”, here transfigured into techno (Berlin’s musicians developed a very distinctive aesthetic for this genre, lived intensely in its famous nightclubs) mixed with drugs and sex. It enabled the longed-for freedom to do whatever one wanted—consciously, unconsciously, but above all, the sheer power of being able to do so. Fascination and bewilderment at the highest levels. It is therefore easy to understand how, from outside the city, all the supposed glamour it radiated turned it into a kind of “zone”, where, as in Stalker by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, all desires would be fulfilled, and yet entry was absolutely forbidden. Surrounded, likewise, by electrified fences and guarded by armed men.

The images of the city are placed deliberately inside the Horse. The images are mostly dark and nocturnal. But it is at night that fascination is at its greatest. In the dark, we free ourselves more easily. And yet, there, in the shadowed interior of the device, the glamour disappears and turns into anxiety and survival. Into individual struggle. In this enclosed space, the Wall is non-existent (a few years later, Wim Wenders would film the exterior of the “Horse”, and all the truth would become visible in his light-soaked, desolate black-and-white images); there exists only the adolescent naïveté of wanting to experiment. Of wanting to go further. Just like the artists of the avant-gardes.

David Bowie, like so many others, passed through and marked his career with several absolutely indispensable albums. It is, indeed, one of the high points of his career.

One of his most famous songs begins with a reference to the exaltation of freedom that existed in that very special city, and to its capacity to liberate bodies and thoughts. And yet, there is a strange temporal precariousness: only for one day. The musician says:

“I, I will be king

And you, you will be queen

Though nothing will drive them away

We can beat them, just for one day”

Bowie knew, unlike the city’s teenagers, that the promised liberation was suspended in a short, though intense, span of time. Afterwards, nothingness. Afterwards, pure, difficult and insurmountable reality. Perhaps death.

Later on, still within the same song—so important to its time—Bowie deepens his gaze upon the city. After all, this is a track entitled Heroes. The teenagers of 1970s Berlin longed desperately to be that. Even if it cost them their lives. But we know well: heroes are like that. And so Bowie gives us anti-heroes, who manage to step outside the interior of the Horse and look at reality. Their reality. Let us then return to the musician’s words:

“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

Oh, we can beat them, for ever and ever

Then we could be heroes, just for one day”

We would be heroes, but only for one day. Ephemeral. Just like on the day the Wall fell. And when we, like Berlin’s teenagers, believed that all walls would vanish from then on.

Naïveté is so beautiful… until it collapses into nothingness. Into the void.

Like an ordinary shot of heroin.