Look Good in Ruins (or: Twenty-five Tangents about Bowie in "Berlin")

1.

By all accounts, he had to get away from L.A. That much is a matter of undisputed public record. Some claim it was little more than a tax dodge, but others argue it was Bowie's attempt at breaking the maeslstrom of drugs and increasing psychosis that was consuming his life -- the obsession with Aleister Crowley, the traffic, escalating paranoia, the $500-per-diem cocaine habit supplemented by a diet of milk and peppers. Or maybe it was all of the above. But it had to start with leaving, getting out and getting away, extricating oneself from certain endangering circles, breaking with destructive habits and everything that fuels or enables them, and hopefully changing course and salvaging what's left of one's creative energies before it's too late. First to Switzerland, then -- eventually -- to Berlin. Leaving Los Angeles and all of its snares and poisonous associations behind. To hell with it all. Looking back, he would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the planet."


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2.

No big surprise, really, that Bowie would inevitably wind up in Berlin. He'd been enthralled with Germany for some time -- fascinated, as some recent recorded comments and reputed gestures suggested, to a worrisome or problematic degree. He was deeply taken with its art and its music, with the decadent cabaret culture of the Weimar era, and -- more alarmingly -- with a certain sordid chapter of its 20th-century history.

But mainly it seemed like a good place to go to detox and collect one's wits. Bleak, depressed, somewhat coldly (and dingily) modern, furtively wrestling with its own history in the most repressed of ways, physically divided, socially and politically adrift in the throes of its Cold War limbo. That was the impression of the place as it existed at the time, anyway – the picture that the word "Berlin" commonly painted in a person's mind. A "come-down" city if ever there was one. You wander down a given city street, only to come to its sudden and abrupt end, the point of stoppage at which you find yourself facing the Wall. Some histories aren't so easily left behind, some histories leave harsh reminders.


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3.

It was Christopher Isherwood who put the idea of moving to Berlin into Bowie's head. Bowie had long been a fan of Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin had undergone a recent revival in popularity from loosely providing the inspiration for the musical Cabaret. Attending the Los Angeles stop of the Station to Station tour in 1976, Isherwood and artist David Hockney had made their way backstage to converse with the singer afterward. The topic of Berlin came up. Isherwood would later claim that he tried to disabuse Bowie of the notion of going there, going so far as to dismiss the city as "boring." No matter, as it prompted Bowie to decide that a lack of distractions and some anonymity were what he needed to clear his head, and it wasn't much later that he started packing his bags.


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4.

Bowie wasn't the only one fascinated by Berlin in the 1970s. Far from it. A quick survey of the American cultural landscape revealed that a certain number of people in the U.S. shared a similar interest. Lou Reed's Berlin LP might've played some small part in the matter, with the way it sketched its setting in the gloomiest and starkest of tones. And there was also the popularity of the Broadway and film productions of Cabaret. Plus, the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass sold modestly well, with the films of Herzog and Wertmüller and Fassbinder and Wenders drawing crowds at the cinema in New York and reviews from urbane film critics.

As far as how the idea of Berlin was conceived and held in the American public imagination -- it represented something, must've served as some kind of metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Nobody ever said precisely, and perhaps nobody actually knew. Something having to do with trauma and unthinkable sins, with atonement and the weight of history, about rebuilding from the wreckage without looking back, of not being able to speak of the past, of living in a historical limbo. And about modernity. Because Berlin seemed deeply modern, but in a way that was as hard-won and enburdened as any form of modernity could be.


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Heroisch

Literal:



Ironic:



Literal:

Nazi Operations

The cinema of the 1970’s conjured up a great many revenant ghouls, but few more memorable than the aging Nazis who returned from the South American jungle armed with scalpels, dentist’s drills, and improbable schemes to implement the Fourth Reich.

The fate of the Nazi diaspora that "slipped" through Allied hands at the end of the Second World War had long been the subject of myth and speculation, from Neo-Nazi mythologists to pot-boiling thriller writers. Behind the more fantastical stories of secret Arctic bases, contacts with UFO’s, and the continued survival of Hitler himself, lay the basic truth that a great many Nazis and former-Nazis had, where possible, inveigled their way back into everyday German life, and where not possible had smuggled themselves to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The first worldwide indication of the scale of the migration came in 1960, when MOSSAD agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, the director of the transportation of Jews to the concentration camps, in Buenos Aires, and returned him to Israel for trial. It was claimed that the same Israeli team had had the opportunity to also seize the notorious Joseph Mengele, but declined to do so for lack of resources.



Nevertheless, for all the hand-wringing over Nazi war crimes, few international governments were really inclined to bring Nazi fugitives to justice. The main Allied powers had elicited the aid of Nazi scientists in their weapons and space programmes, and were sensitive to charges of hypocrisy in pursuing what were often more minor figures in the National Socialist regime. Similarly, the West German government’s BND security service employed thousands of ex-Nazis, as reputedly did the East German Stasi. The fledgling West German state was also prepared to turn a blind eye to the Nazis who had quietly brought their technical and administrative expertise into the re-born industrial conglomerates. Likewise, the Nazis’ South American hosts were uninterested in exposing what had become discrete and productive citizens, whose political philosophy was far from incompatible with that of their hosts. By the 1970’s even Israel, the nation most motivated to track down the criminals, had far more pressing tasks to allocate to its security services.

The return of the original Nazis as a socio-political force to be reckoned with was therefore a purely cinematic phenomenon, but that shouldn’t lead us to underestimate the enormous impact that films such as "The Odessa File", "Marathon Man", and "The Boys From Brazil" had on the public imagination. The Nazis, because of their real existence, had always been the creepiest of villains, but their exile to the past ultimately rendered them harmless to contemporary audiences. The idea that they could still return amongst us, their cruelty becoming even more twisted with age, was both thrilling and shocking. And because everyone knew that the Nazis were capable of anything, their diaphanous schemes to genetically replicate Hitler, or subject Israel to biological warfare, may have stretched credulity to breaking point, but never actually shattered it.



In reality though, if these films were guilty of anything, it was of grossly over-rating the Nazis themselves. "The Boys From Brazil" portrayed Mengele as a genetic engineering genius, whereas the "experiments" he conducted in real life were little more than aimlessly sadistic exercises in morbid curiosity. Similarly, the purported ODESSA organisation, far from being a sophisticated underground network dedicated to National Socialist renewal, was in actuality little more than a series of impromptu and disorganised rat runs.

And this helps to give another explanation as to why international governments where so disinclined to pursue the escaped Nazis - the fugitives themselves were no longer the men they had once been. Once the spell of Der Führer had been broken, these formerly aristocratic and ruthless arbiters of life and death, reverted, like princes who turn back into frogs at midnight, to the harmless minor industrialists, back-scratching businessmen, and clubbable bourgeois shopkeepers that Nature had probably always intended them to be.