David Bowie & Berlin

David Bowie wrote the song "Heroes" originally in German as "Helden". It was about life in the isolated and walled in West Berlin in the mid-70's. It was about escaping across the wall. It was about about what would come to Berlin if there were a nuclear war.

We used to wonder what would happen if there were nuclear war- whether where we were would be directly hit or marginally effected. (Garland has a major ordnance factory where they make the large shell casings for battleship guns. We "knew" we'd get it.)

There was no doubt for Berliners in the 1970s and 1980s about what would come of the city in nuclear war. Nowhere was a certain to have missiles pointed at it than both sides of the border. Heck, all of Germany toiled under that certainty for most of that time. But in Berlin, you were already surrounded. It was a city under direct siege and threat of annihilation for 30 years. That made a scar, as did all the other triumphs and calamities of the city.



We call the register or trace of these events and effects on a city its palimpsestic quality. A palimpsest is the aggregate surface of traces over time, like a chalkboard that has been written on and erased but not cleaned. Cities with deep, easy to read palimpsests are great devices in teaching the history and structure of architecture in cities. Rome is the most obvious such site with 2000+ years of obvious trace. Berlin is excellent because of the depth of its traces because they were made up of very physical, structural events. The trace of the cold war, not just the wall, is still a very strong trace in the city but it is not its most obvious.