“Standing by the Wall”. David Bowie’s Berlin: from Christopher Isherwood to the Thin White Duke

Abstract

In order to speak about David Bowie’s Berlin, it is worth to focus first on Bowie as a “man of theatre” and in particular on his creation of one of his most famous masks, namely The Thin White Duke and on its metamorphosis into the protagonist of Bowie’s Berlin narratives. Bowie left Los Angeles for Berlin in 1976 as a remedy to the self-destructive conduct which had characterized his LA days and after the influential reading of Christopher Isherwoood’s fascinating literary descriptions of pre-war Berlin. In his most famous novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939) Isherwood offers us a picture of a world on the verge of collapse, which foreshadows the horror to come: we read about the last happy moments of a society which will be destroyed by the Second World War and by Totalitarianism. Berlin is the perfect setting for two of the three masterpieces composing Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, that is Low and Heroes; it’s indeed a fractured city, perfectly responding to Bowie’s inner fractures. What seems particularly interesting is Bowie’s conception of each of these two albums with two distinct sides, that is Side A including sung tracks and Side B featuring instrumentals which stand as doors of access to different, unpredictable worlds. If Bowie is the author in which a powerful synthesis of opposites and contradictions takes place – that is, male/female, avantgarde/accessibility, life/death – his Berlin albums become metaphors of the wall itself, of two ways of conceiving the world which they apparently seem to separate but which are always involved in a dialogical relationship.