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Helden: David Bowie und Berlin
"Berlin has the uncanny ability to make you write only the important things" (David Bowie). "Heroes" tells the story of David Bowie's years in Berlin. As one of the greatest living rock stars in 1976 from Los Angeles to Europe comes home - a drug wreck, plagued by hallucinations, delusions of persecution and Nazi visions. Tobias Rüther tells how the London Bowie moved to the town of his childhood dreams - to Berlin. Where he slowly gesundet with Iggy Pop, housed in an old building and Schöneberger rediscovered his passion: painting.
This well-researched biography tells the story of cycling in the divided city (the weekend out at the Wannsee), of visits to the Brücke Museum of nocturnal escapades, from Romy Haag (his then girlfriend), the Hansa-music studio. Bowie in Berlin turns his perhaps most emotional film: "Schöner Gigolo, Armer Gigolo". Alongside Marlene Dietrich (their last film), he plays a decadent, Prussian nobleman, a womanizer who gets caught in the crossfire of the Nazis and the Communists. Bowie in Berlin invents the punk and new takes in the shadow of the Wall (with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti), the two most radical and most timeless plates of his life: "Low" and "Heroes."
"Heroes" is the story of an artist and a city. The story of an alien in nostalgic scenes. The future history of music from the spirit of the past. The story of a man who went out yesterday, today and tomorrow to live at the same time.
This well-researched biography tells the story of cycling in the divided city (the weekend out at the Wannsee), of visits to the Brücke Museum of nocturnal escapades, from Romy Haag (his then girlfriend), the Hansa-music studio. Bowie in Berlin turns his perhaps most emotional film: "Schöner Gigolo, Armer Gigolo". Alongside Marlene Dietrich (their last film), he plays a decadent, Prussian nobleman, a womanizer who gets caught in the crossfire of the Nazis and the Communists. Bowie in Berlin invents the punk and new takes in the shadow of the Wall (with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti), the two most radical and most timeless plates of his life: "Low" and "Heroes."
"Heroes" is the story of an artist and a city. The story of an alien in nostalgic scenes. The future history of music from the spirit of the past. The story of a man who went out yesterday, today and tomorrow to live at the same time.
220 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
9 people are currently reading
174 people want to read
About the author
Tobias Rüther
5 books2 followersTobias Rüther, geboren 1973, studierte Geschichte und Deutsche Literatur in Berlin und St. Louis, absolvierte die Henri-Nannen-Schule und arbeitete unter anderem als Textchef beim Kunstmagazin «Monopol». Seit 2010 gehört er dem Feuilleton der «Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung» an, seit 2020 ist er verantwortlich für das Literaturressort. 2008 erschien sein Buch «Helden» über David Bowie, 2013 «Männerfreundschaften».
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 13, 2024
David Bowie left his adopted home of Los Angeles in the fall of 1976 to live in Berlin, West Germany, during a relatively tumultuous time in his life. At the time, Bowie was coming off the success of his albums Young Americans and Station to Station, each representative of his (respectively) Philadelphia Soul period and his Thin White Duke phase. While the albums were financial and critical successes, Bowie himself felt that he was in a rut in his career.
He was also heavily into drugs at this time, especially cocaine and other hard narcotics. He used with reckless abandon. Indeed, many people who knew him and were close to him in these days were amazed that he even survived the ‘70s.
His (open) marriage with Angela Bowie was coming to an end, although this was, according to many, a long time in coming. Still, divorce is never an easy thing, even between two people as messed-up as David and Angie were in those days.
Then, there was the “Nazi” controversy, based on several bone-headed statements he had made in interviews and a famous photograph of Bowie hanging out the rooftop window of a limousine giving what appears to be a “Sieg Heil” Nazi salute. This, not surprisingly, did very little to help his career and did much in the way of alienating and pissing off many of his fans. (Again, keep in mind: he was on a shit-load of drugs...)
Bowie needed a change. And fast. And Berlin seemed as good a place as any for a necessary period of soul-searching and radical lifestyle paradigm shifts.
And for nearly three years, until his departure from the city in the spring of 1979, Bowie did undergo a major change, one that may have saved his life but certainly changed the face of modern rock music.
Journalist Tobias Ruther, in his book “Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin”, examines the three years of what he calls Bowie’s Berlin phase, an incredibly prolific period in the musician’s life in which he successfully collaborates with Brian Eno to create three incredible albums: Low, Heroes, and Lodger. Indeed, Low and Heroes are considered by many critics to be two of Bowie’s best albums, and Low is considered by many critics to be one of the best rock albums ever.
In those short three years, Bowie discovers a love of German Expressionist Art, poetry, relative sobriety, and inspiration from the famous Dutch transsexual actress Romy Haag (whose alleged love affair with Bowie was never totally corroborated by either Bowie or Haag). He also discovers something about himself, as a musician, and how powerful making music for one’s self can be just as exhilarating as making music for the masses.
Ruther’s book is a short, concise history of an extremely short, concise period in Bowie’s life, but it was an extraordinarily important period in his life.
He was also heavily into drugs at this time, especially cocaine and other hard narcotics. He used with reckless abandon. Indeed, many people who knew him and were close to him in these days were amazed that he even survived the ‘70s.
His (open) marriage with Angela Bowie was coming to an end, although this was, according to many, a long time in coming. Still, divorce is never an easy thing, even between two people as messed-up as David and Angie were in those days.
Then, there was the “Nazi” controversy, based on several bone-headed statements he had made in interviews and a famous photograph of Bowie hanging out the rooftop window of a limousine giving what appears to be a “Sieg Heil” Nazi salute. This, not surprisingly, did very little to help his career and did much in the way of alienating and pissing off many of his fans. (Again, keep in mind: he was on a shit-load of drugs...)
Bowie needed a change. And fast. And Berlin seemed as good a place as any for a necessary period of soul-searching and radical lifestyle paradigm shifts.
And for nearly three years, until his departure from the city in the spring of 1979, Bowie did undergo a major change, one that may have saved his life but certainly changed the face of modern rock music.
Journalist Tobias Ruther, in his book “Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin”, examines the three years of what he calls Bowie’s Berlin phase, an incredibly prolific period in the musician’s life in which he successfully collaborates with Brian Eno to create three incredible albums: Low, Heroes, and Lodger. Indeed, Low and Heroes are considered by many critics to be two of Bowie’s best albums, and Low is considered by many critics to be one of the best rock albums ever.
In those short three years, Bowie discovers a love of German Expressionist Art, poetry, relative sobriety, and inspiration from the famous Dutch transsexual actress Romy Haag (whose alleged love affair with Bowie was never totally corroborated by either Bowie or Haag). He also discovers something about himself, as a musician, and how powerful making music for one’s self can be just as exhilarating as making music for the masses.
Ruther’s book is a short, concise history of an extremely short, concise period in Bowie’s life, but it was an extraordinarily important period in his life.
January 21, 2018
Bowie is surviving on cigarettes, cocaine and milk and looks like a corpse. Moving to LA has made him an international superstar but he is broke (having paid off his managers) and his latest persona 'The Thin White Duke' is harming not only his health but his sanity. So he decides on a complete change, he moves to Berlin partly to save money and partly because of his childhood interest in German expressionist art. He comes off drugs and enters one of the most creative sections of his career - the albums Low and Heroes (and to a lesser extent Lodger) - where he makes music so different from mainstream seventies rock that he could be channeling the future. Berlin has an equally fascinating history: the Bohemian experiments in art and lifestyle in the twenties and thirties, the rise of the Nazis, flattened by allied bombers in the second world war and divided by a wall in the sixties and economically and culturally isolated from the rest of Germany. How much has Berlin shaped Bowie? And how much has the cultural history of Berlin been shaped by Bowie (where even today there are numerous tours allowing visitors to follow in his footsteps or bicycle where he bicycled). Tobias Ruther should be the man to answer these questions. He is a Bowie fan (without being an obsessive) and, as a journalist on the Frankfutter Allgemeine Sonntageszeitung, he's steeped in German history and culture.
The central problem of the book is that Ruther does not have an overarching theory, so I was never quite certain if he thought Bowie came to Berlin to be himself, to escape himself or to try on some new character (for example serious artist or become a character from a German Expressionist film or even if wearing shirts bought at a petrol station he was playing at being a 'regular' guy). The second problem is that Ruther has no new material. Everybody connected with Bowie's time in Berlin has been interviewed so many times that they are either fed up (and have shut up) or they have polished their stories into a legend. So he has to rely on the main protagonists memoirs - eg: Viscounti and Angie Bowie - or quoting interviews from the time with other journalists. There is nothing about how Bowie came off the drugs or his relationship with Iggy Pop (who lived with him in Berlin and continued to use heroine).
Fortunately, Ruther is stronger on Berlin and German Culture and I was able to use this book as a spring board for further reading - rather in the way Bowie has opened the eyes of my generation to so many artists and movements through his passing magpie interest in them. However, even here, there is a problem. Ruther assumes knowledge many of his readers won't have. I do know the Brucke Museuem - where Bowie used to regularly cycle to ingest the Expressionist Art- but I don't have a proper understanding of the artists who made up the movement. I know nothing about the pre-war Expressionist German films and had to flip over to wikipedia to fill in my gaps.
There is one final problem, which can't be blamed on Ruther, but the book was written before Bowie's death so it finishes with Bowie's return to Berlin - via the 'David Bowie Is' exhibition - which features a postcard from Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin novels fed the young Bowie's fascination with the thirties) and Bowie's keys to his apartment in Berlin - almost as if by holding onto them he would always remain a citizen of Berlin.
And perhaps in our collective imaginations, he will always live in Berlin...
The central problem of the book is that Ruther does not have an overarching theory, so I was never quite certain if he thought Bowie came to Berlin to be himself, to escape himself or to try on some new character (for example serious artist or become a character from a German Expressionist film or even if wearing shirts bought at a petrol station he was playing at being a 'regular' guy). The second problem is that Ruther has no new material. Everybody connected with Bowie's time in Berlin has been interviewed so many times that they are either fed up (and have shut up) or they have polished their stories into a legend. So he has to rely on the main protagonists memoirs - eg: Viscounti and Angie Bowie - or quoting interviews from the time with other journalists. There is nothing about how Bowie came off the drugs or his relationship with Iggy Pop (who lived with him in Berlin and continued to use heroine).
Fortunately, Ruther is stronger on Berlin and German Culture and I was able to use this book as a spring board for further reading - rather in the way Bowie has opened the eyes of my generation to so many artists and movements through his passing magpie interest in them. However, even here, there is a problem. Ruther assumes knowledge many of his readers won't have. I do know the Brucke Museuem - where Bowie used to regularly cycle to ingest the Expressionist Art- but I don't have a proper understanding of the artists who made up the movement. I know nothing about the pre-war Expressionist German films and had to flip over to wikipedia to fill in my gaps.
There is one final problem, which can't be blamed on Ruther, but the book was written before Bowie's death so it finishes with Bowie's return to Berlin - via the 'David Bowie Is' exhibition - which features a postcard from Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin novels fed the young Bowie's fascination with the thirties) and Bowie's keys to his apartment in Berlin - almost as if by holding onto them he would always remain a citizen of Berlin.
And perhaps in our collective imaginations, he will always live in Berlin...
August 7, 2020
This book. No. An earlier commenter said it lacks a thesis and I heartily agree. This book is incredibly slapdash. Perhaps it could be a reasonable first draft of a book, but it definitely needs a good developmental editor, just for starters. The problems with structure, theme, thesis and a lack of organization both overall and within the chapters, makes this book a maddening read. Add to that the numerous mixed metaphors, lack of explanation, or the explanation of the obvious such as brinkmanship with an example of brinkmanship that feels completely unrelated to the argument at hand (who knows?) and the author's cutesy "voicey" additions, just irked me so much. I cannot recommend this book at all. Find something else to read on this subject matter.
January 21, 2026
I almost gave up on this because I just wasn't getting on with Tobias Rüther's narrative voice, until, about a quarter of the way through, this:
The time at the château is about to come to an end. For the reason that it’s haunted!
...cracked me up so much that I decided to keep reading. I'm glad I did, because I ended up absolutely loving this book.
I assume that English is not Rüther's first language and that this goes at least some way towards explaining his often interesting word choices and sentence and paragraph structures, but I came to really appreciate his poetic musings and offbeat remarks on Bowie's life in Berlin; his erratic switching of tenses and viewpoints and the quirkiness of it all.
It is said to have rained a lot when Bowie moved into 155 Hauptstrasse, so we’d better get in right away, straight up the staircase that he is soon to make a painting of, with its dark stairs, the carpet deadening your footsteps, holding on to the wooden banisters. Here we are, in front of the two doors to his apartment.
Bowie in his green check shirt really looks now as if he is going to be stopping on his way home to fill up his Mercedes or fetch some tomatoes from the Turkish shop round the corner. And what’s more, he is starting to look sort of heterosexual, perhaps the first time for years. Only his remarkable Boysie moustache – or whatever it is that Bowie is sporting underneath his nose that is slowly recovering from the cocaine – only the slightly arty look shatters the image.
Bowie is in search of himself in the city. He sees himself in relation to it. ‘Berlin is a skeleton that aches in the cold’, Christopher Isherwood wrote. ‘It is my own skeleton aching.’ Bowie must have identified too clearly with the strange fate of the city. The fate of having become great, politically and architecturally, too quickly and therefore condemned to suffer growing pains for ever.
Bowie learned to create texts according to the cut-up technique from Burroughs; in Cracked Actor he showed how to do this. He writes down sentences, cuts them into strips and then sorts them again into verses. There is probably therefore no such thing as a straight solution either to his music or to his lyrics or titles, just a mystery consisting of that which the eye of the beholder constructs like strips of text – but no truth. Truth has been done away with, Ziggy Stardust saw to that (along with the Sixties). It’s the same as with Isherwood: people often forget what a good storyteller Bowie is.
I learned a lot about the places I've already visited in Berlin and finished the book with a list of new places to seek out. Looking forward to a breakfast of coffee and Gitanes in Neues Ufer the next time we're there.
The time at the château is about to come to an end. For the reason that it’s haunted!
...cracked me up so much that I decided to keep reading. I'm glad I did, because I ended up absolutely loving this book.
I assume that English is not Rüther's first language and that this goes at least some way towards explaining his often interesting word choices and sentence and paragraph structures, but I came to really appreciate his poetic musings and offbeat remarks on Bowie's life in Berlin; his erratic switching of tenses and viewpoints and the quirkiness of it all.
It is said to have rained a lot when Bowie moved into 155 Hauptstrasse, so we’d better get in right away, straight up the staircase that he is soon to make a painting of, with its dark stairs, the carpet deadening your footsteps, holding on to the wooden banisters. Here we are, in front of the two doors to his apartment.
Bowie in his green check shirt really looks now as if he is going to be stopping on his way home to fill up his Mercedes or fetch some tomatoes from the Turkish shop round the corner. And what’s more, he is starting to look sort of heterosexual, perhaps the first time for years. Only his remarkable Boysie moustache – or whatever it is that Bowie is sporting underneath his nose that is slowly recovering from the cocaine – only the slightly arty look shatters the image.
Bowie is in search of himself in the city. He sees himself in relation to it. ‘Berlin is a skeleton that aches in the cold’, Christopher Isherwood wrote. ‘It is my own skeleton aching.’ Bowie must have identified too clearly with the strange fate of the city. The fate of having become great, politically and architecturally, too quickly and therefore condemned to suffer growing pains for ever.
Bowie learned to create texts according to the cut-up technique from Burroughs; in Cracked Actor he showed how to do this. He writes down sentences, cuts them into strips and then sorts them again into verses. There is probably therefore no such thing as a straight solution either to his music or to his lyrics or titles, just a mystery consisting of that which the eye of the beholder constructs like strips of text – but no truth. Truth has been done away with, Ziggy Stardust saw to that (along with the Sixties). It’s the same as with Isherwood: people often forget what a good storyteller Bowie is.
I learned a lot about the places I've already visited in Berlin and finished the book with a list of new places to seek out. Looking forward to a breakfast of coffee and Gitanes in Neues Ufer the next time we're there.
March 18, 2022
Um excelente relato dos três anos que Bowie viveu em Berlim (1976-1979) e de tudo o que envolveu a produção musical do “tríptico” de Berlim: Low, “Heroes” e Lodger. Mas, acima de tudo, do reencontro consigo próprio depois do poço em que se encontrava em Los Angeles, e de como Berlim mudou para melhor o rumo da sua vida e da sua carreira.
April 1, 2024
Could have done with a little more editing and focusing at bits but overall quite lovely. Really gives you a nice picture of Bowie in Berlin and the surrounding cultural currents. Very well researched, and the pictures alone are fascinating.
September 3, 2020
Muy interesante y con todos los datos de la época
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August 23, 2023missing Berlin and missing Bowie even more
„there’s an artistic tension in Berlin that i’ve never come across the like of anywhere else. Paris? forget it. Berlin has it.”
„there’s an artistic tension in Berlin that i’ve never come across the like of anywhere else. Paris? forget it. Berlin has it.”
August 12, 2011
Jemand anderes hat hier schon über dieses Buch geschrieben, es sei zu dünn, da stünde zu wenig drin. Da würde ich zustimmen - am Ende bleibt ein Gefühl von: naja, sooo lang und soo aufregend war Bowies Berlin-Aufenthalt ja dann doch nicht. Aber das, was der andere Rezensent noch bemängelt, nämlich das Hin- und Herspringen des Autors zwischen allen möglichen "Seitensträngen", finde ich gerade gut. Er bringt alles Mögliche ein, von den "Brücke"-Künstlern über Ernst Bloch, Michel Foucault, Hitler, Kabbalah bis hin zur deutschen Fußball-Nationalmannschaft von 2006, jawohl. Solche Querverweise gefallen mir ja immer; sie machen das Ganze zu einem umfassenden Kulturbild. Außerdem fühlte ich mich ganz gut in eine Siebzigerjahre-Atmosphäre transportiert und habe beschlossen, mal wieder "Christiane F." zu lesen, ein Buch, das ich in meiner Kindheit bestimmt zehn Mal gelesen habe und das mich sehr beeinflusst hat. So als Kulturessay fand ich das Buch also wirklich schön!
Was mich aber am Buch noch stört (außer, dass es zu dünn ist) ist, dass es komplett im Präsens geschrieben ist, was ich wirklich hasse, auch weil es nie so richtig funktioniert. Beispiel: "Damals ist es das Unternehmen Bertelsmann, das hier professionell produzieren lässt." oder "Es soll oft geregnet haben, als Bowie in die Hauptstraße 155 gezogen ist, also am besten gleich hinein, einmal die Stiege hinauf, die er bald malen wird" ... Lieber Autor, das Ganze ist schon vor 30 Jahren passiert!
Was mich aber am Buch noch stört (außer, dass es zu dünn ist) ist, dass es komplett im Präsens geschrieben ist, was ich wirklich hasse, auch weil es nie so richtig funktioniert. Beispiel: "Damals ist es das Unternehmen Bertelsmann, das hier professionell produzieren lässt." oder "Es soll oft geregnet haben, als Bowie in die Hauptstraße 155 gezogen ist, also am besten gleich hinein, einmal die Stiege hinauf, die er bald malen wird" ... Lieber Autor, das Ganze ist schon vor 30 Jahren passiert!
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February 6, 2016Einerseits ist "Helden" eine absolut faszinierende Lektüre für jeden Bowie-Fan - insbesondere für den, der gleichzeitig auch (Ex-)Berliner ist: Das Buch ist wirklich randvoll mit Anekdoten und (pop-)kulturellen Referenzen. Ich bin aus allen Wolken gefallen, als ich hier erfuhr, dass zweite Platten des Berlin-Triptychons gar nicht wirklich in Berlin entstanden sind.
Andererseits war ich genervt von den vielen Zeitsprüngen; und Rüthers Schreibstil ist, nu ja, Geschmacksache. Und dass kaum mehr als fünf Seiten "Lodger" gewidmet sind, ist schon ein bisschen enttäuschend/merkwürdig.
Vielleicht sollte man Thomas Jerome Seabrooks Buch gelesen haben, um einen Vergleich zu haben und ein eindeutigeres Urteil fällen zu können.
Andererseits war ich genervt von den vielen Zeitsprüngen; und Rüthers Schreibstil ist, nu ja, Geschmacksache. Und dass kaum mehr als fünf Seiten "Lodger" gewidmet sind, ist schon ein bisschen enttäuschend/merkwürdig.
Vielleicht sollte man Thomas Jerome Seabrooks Buch gelesen haben, um einen Vergleich zu haben und ein eindeutigeres Urteil fällen zu können.
January 27, 2016
On learning Bowie had died I wanted to read something - so chose this one on Bowie's Berlin period. A good choice, and wasn't disappointed. The chronology of the book is measured in albums from Station to Station to the Berlin triptych. Amongst some interesting writing on Bowie's place in European art, culture and philosophy there is some extended discussion of album sessions. But for me the extensive speculation on the identites of the characters in the song Heroes detracted from the rest of the book.
March 25, 2016
The title does suggest that this book will devote as much time to the city as the person, & fair enough. However, as interesting as it was @ times, I never got a handle on the point Ruther was trying to make. Disappointing.
January 31, 2016
Solid read. Lots of factual stuff I didn't know. some of the theorizing was a bit half-baked, but it was fascinating nonetheless. If you love the Berlin era Bowie, you kind of have to read this.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews