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| Where are we now? Here are some hints, Bowie | Where are we now? Here are some hints, Bowie |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| 19sec: The Wall | 19sec: The Wall |
| Aah, the Wall. You can't make a film about Berlin without mentioning the Wall. Here it is, grey and miserable as ever. Looks like archive footage, until you see the "Tacheles" graffiti. Tacheles was the city's most famous post-unification squat, a scuzzy tenement housing a warren of art studios that occupied prime real estate in the now almost completely gentrified Mitte district. | Aah, the Wall. You can't make a film about Berlin without mentioning the Wall. Here it is, grey and miserable as ever. Looks like archive footage, until you see the "Tacheles" graffiti. Tacheles was the city's most famous post-unification squat, a scuzzy tenement housing a warren of art studios that occupied prime real estate in the now almost completely gentrified Mitte district. |
| It was considered by many to be the city's last big bastion of anti-capitalism – until a bunch of the squatters accepted €1m from the property developers to shove off in 2011. The final occupiers were evicted in September last year – a move our art critic described as "a sad moment for anyone who believes art can offer alternative visions of the world". Anyone who had actually seen the art produced by those who lived there in later years might beg to differ, but it sucked that yet another piece of Berlin's alternative history was going to be turned into more yuppie flats. | It was considered by many to be the city's last big bastion of anti-capitalism – until a bunch of the squatters accepted €1m from the property developers to shove off in 2011. The final occupiers were evicted in September last year – a move our art critic described as "a sad moment for anyone who believes art can offer alternative visions of the world". Anyone who had actually seen the art produced by those who lived there in later years might beg to differ, but it sucked that yet another piece of Berlin's alternative history was going to be turned into more yuppie flats. |
| 28sec: Potsdamer Platz | 28sec: Potsdamer Platz |
| Just around the corner from Hansa Studios, where Bowie made some of his most famous recordings, this was Berlin's ritziest, raciest square in the golden 20s. Now it is a thoroughly depressing traffic junction with a rubbish shopping centre, some terrible chain restaurants and a load of overpriced hotels attached. It is often said that some of the world's best architects – Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, Richard Rogers, Arata Isozaki and Rafael Moneo – did their worst work here. | Just around the corner from Hansa Studios, where Bowie made some of his most famous recordings, this was Berlin's ritziest, raciest square in the golden 20s. Now it is a thoroughly depressing traffic junction with a rubbish shopping centre, some terrible chain restaurants and a load of overpriced hotels attached. It is often said that some of the world's best architects – Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, Richard Rogers, Arata Isozaki and Rafael Moneo – did their worst work here. |
| In the 20s Potsdamer Platz was the place to be, full of sexy lesbians in smoking jackets and the sort of boys Christopher Isherwood fancied. Then we bombed it. After the war, the East Germans built the Berlin Wall around it, placing it in a no man's land. If you've seen Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire, you'll remember the old man sitting on a sofa in what purported to be the deserted Potsdamer Platz. (It wasn't, of course: Wenders and his crew would have been shot by the East German border guards if they'd gone anywhere near it). | In the 20s Potsdamer Platz was the place to be, full of sexy lesbians in smoking jackets and the sort of boys Christopher Isherwood fancied. Then we bombed it. After the war, the East Germans built the Berlin Wall around it, placing it in a no man's land. If you've seen Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire, you'll remember the old man sitting on a sofa in what purported to be the deserted Potsdamer Platz. (It wasn't, of course: Wenders and his crew would have been shot by the East German border guards if they'd gone anywhere near it). |
| 34sec: Fernsehturm | 34sec: Fernsehturm |
| Now Bowie has gone further into town. What you can see rising in the distance is the Fernsehturm, the TV tower, Berlin's tallest landmark. Built by the East Germans in the 1960s, it was essentially a big "up-yours" to the west, a willy-waving exercise designed to showcase eastern design and technological prowess. It allowed the German Democratic Republic to spy on its neighbours and the antenna on the top beamed terrible programmes to the long-suffering GDR population. It is better than London's BT Tower because it's still open to the public. The bulbous bit at the top houses a revolving restaurant where you can eat an overpriced and overseasoned meal – after paying the €12 lift fee. | Now Bowie has gone further into town. What you can see rising in the distance is the Fernsehturm, the TV tower, Berlin's tallest landmark. Built by the East Germans in the 1960s, it was essentially a big "up-yours" to the west, a willy-waving exercise designed to showcase eastern design and technological prowess. It allowed the German Democratic Republic to spy on its neighbours and the antenna on the top beamed terrible programmes to the long-suffering GDR population. It is better than London's BT Tower because it's still open to the public. The bulbous bit at the top houses a revolving restaurant where you can eat an overpriced and overseasoned meal – after paying the €12 lift fee. |
| 36sec: The Bundestag | 36sec: The Bundestag |
| The cobbles in the road mark the former route of the Wall. In the background you can see the back entrance of Germany's parliament. Not pictured: Norman Foster's finest work – the glass-domed cupola that brings the pre-war building into the present-day. | The cobbles in the road mark the former route of the Wall. In the background you can see the back entrance of Germany's parliament. Not pictured: Norman Foster's finest work – the glass-domed cupola that brings the pre-war building into the present-day. |
| 53sec: Nürnberger Strasse | 53sec: Nürnberger Strasse |
| Bowie knows the German for "jungle" – sehr gut, Herr Bowie! The Dschungel, natürlich, was the 1970s West Berlin nightclub, where Bowie would boogie with the likes of Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Sade, Carlos Santana and Frank Zappa. I'm not sure it's Nürnberger Strasse, however, which Bowie is about to name-check, minus the umlaut. These days Nürnberger Strasse is one of west Berlin's most upmarket streets, populated by posh women in fur coats with small dogs and too much hairspray. | |
| 1min 10sec: KaDeWe | 1min 10sec: KaDeWe |
| "A man lost in time near KaDeWe," sings Bowie, referring to what Germans like to think of as the Harrods of Deutschland. Before reunification, the department store was the ultimate symbol of western decadence, and was the first place many East Germans wanted to visit after the borders opened. These days, it's full of middle-aged Germans in beige slacks and cagoules up from Baden-Württemberg for the weekend, but at least it doesn't have a 3-metre high golden statue of Princess Diana, dancing on a beach with Dodi Al Fayed beneath the wings of an albatross. Confusingly, the video never shows KaDeWe and at this point is actually focused on the Dom, the city's domed cathedral. | "A man lost in time near KaDeWe," sings Bowie, referring to what Germans like to think of as the Harrods of Deutschland. Before reunification, the department store was the ultimate symbol of western decadence, and was the first place many East Germans wanted to visit after the borders opened. These days, it's full of middle-aged Germans in beige slacks and cagoules up from Baden-Württemberg for the weekend, but at least it doesn't have a 3-metre high golden statue of Princess Diana, dancing on a beach with Dodi Al Fayed beneath the wings of an albatross. Confusingly, the video never shows KaDeWe and at this point is actually focused on the Dom, the city's domed cathedral. |
| 1min 49sec: Brandenburg Gate | 1min 49sec: Brandenburg Gate |
| Germany's answer to the Arc de Triomphe, the gate was commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a sign of peace, modelled on the Propylaeum of the Acropolis in Athens. But you probably know it best as the landmark in the background when David Hasselhoff stood on the Berlin Wall and sang Looking For Freedom on New Year's Eve in 1989. | Germany's answer to the Arc de Triomphe, the gate was commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a sign of peace, modelled on the Propylaeum of the Acropolis in Athens. But you probably know it best as the landmark in the background when David Hasselhoff stood on the Berlin Wall and sang Looking For Freedom on New Year's Eve in 1989. |
| 1min 52sec: Bose Brucke | 1min 52sec: Bose Brucke |
| "Twenty-thousand people cross Bose Brucke," he sings, forgetting two more umlauts, but presumably meaning böse as in "evil" and brücke as in "bridge". The Bösebrücke is a bridge which used to house the Bornholmerstrasse border crossing between east and west. But the shot in the background, of a Trabant bursting out of some bricks, appears to be of the East Side Gallery, a 1.3km-long section of the Berlin Wall by the river Spree, which has been preserved and turned into an outdoor gallery. | |
| 2min 56sec: A Berlin mietskaserne | 2min 56sec: A Berlin mietskaserne |
| Anyone who has lived in a Berlin mietskaserne (tenement block) will recognise this sort of hallway, complete with resident hausmeister (handyman) up a ladder, ready to tell you off for being too loud, not wearing your hausschuhe (slippers), hanging out your washing on the wrong day, mixing up the recycling … | Anyone who has lived in a Berlin mietskaserne (tenement block) will recognise this sort of hallway, complete with resident hausmeister (handyman) up a ladder, ready to tell you off for being too loud, not wearing your hausschuhe (slippers), hanging out your washing on the wrong day, mixing up the recycling … |
| 3min 03sec: The archetypal Berlin art studio-cum-squat | 3min 03sec: The archetypal Berlin art studio-cum-squat |
| This is a modern cliche of the German capital. Bowie, in his enigmatic slogan T-shirt, looks like any other foreign immigrant who has come to Berlin to "do my art" (read: go to Berghain and get an asymmetric haircut). Like many of the city's young pretenders, he is carrying a notebook and no doubt tells people at squat parties he is a writer. What that generally means in Berlin is that you spend every afternoon on your Macbook drinking milchkaffee at your local junkshop-cum-coffee shop. | This is a modern cliche of the German capital. Bowie, in his enigmatic slogan T-shirt, looks like any other foreign immigrant who has come to Berlin to "do my art" (read: go to Berghain and get an asymmetric haircut). Like many of the city's young pretenders, he is carrying a notebook and no doubt tells people at squat parties he is a writer. What that generally means in Berlin is that you spend every afternoon on your Macbook drinking milchkaffee at your local junkshop-cum-coffee shop. |