For Joyce it was Dublin, for Bowie it was Berlin. And yesterday Berliners came together in the city that inspired him like no other. As the traffic roared by, fans laid flowers, held back tears, held each other and serenaded their former neighbour with a spontaneous rendition of Space Oddity.
"You've really made the grade," they cheered before the apartment block where Bowie lived for three years with Iggy Pop from 1976. It was the then divided city that inspired Bowie's crucial Berlin album trilogy of Heroes, Low and Lodger. And the title track of Heroes remained in the hearts of generations of lovers here, a city divided by the Berlin Wall: "Standing, by the wall, and the guns, shot above our heads / And we kissed, as though nothing could fall."
Bowie was close to burnout when he came to West Berlin in the autumn of 1976 and into a seven-room apartment in the Schöneberg district. Here he wanted to work, reinvent and kick his drug habit. And he managed that, living anonymously in the grey tenement block with Berliners and Turkish immigrant families alike.
Iggy Pop eventually had to find another apartment, allegedly because he stole the food Bowie bought from the expensive KaDeWe department store.
Those were the stories swapped among the crowd yesterday. Among them was Katrina Schulz, who remembered Bowie coming and going from the nearby Cafe M. By fluke she introduced her 10-year-old nephew to the singer’s work yesterday afternoon. “He was such a hero for me,” she said. “And Berlin was such a cool place then, where people could invent or reinvent themselves, as he did so often – here and after here.”
Some 40 years on, Bowie's former landlady Rosa Morath told the Tagesspiegel newspaper yesterday that she is still proud she "kept shtum" about her famous tenant and kept away the groupies.
There was no such luck on Monday as news of the singer’s death spread. The first fans turned up in the early morning, and by late afternoon the groupies, fans and rubber-neckers had grown to several hundred, blocking the footpath.
“It’s wonderful that people have come: normally Berliners are too cool to do anything like this,” said Brian Pereira, a Bowie fan since the early days.
Next door at the bar where the singer used to drink, regulars and guests held a spontaneous party, rocking out to the Bowie back catalogue and swapping stories – “most of them made up,” said Freya Stewart, a local woman who once saw the singer at the infamous Dschungel club. “I was 15 and cut school and he cut quite a figure when he arrived. The crowd parted in the middle like the Red Sea; not many in Berlin commanded that effect or respect.”
During his time here Bowie was a regular sight at West Berlin nightspots, including Kreuzberg’s SO36 club and the drag club of the entertainer Romy Haag.
“David’s friendship was the light of my life,” said the 68-year-old Haag yesterday. He was also a meal ticket: in the decades since, Haag has dined out on claims that she had an affair with Bowie during his Berlin years and broke up his marriage. (Bowie disputed the claim.) Haag also claimed that Bowie lifted much of his androgynous stage persona from Haag’s act.
Another German from whom Bowie borrowed liberally was the singer Klaus Nomi, infamous in Berlin and New York for his alien-like stage persona and outrageous costumes.“Yes, Bowie definitely borrowed – quite generously – from Nomi and other artists in Berlin, but he developed it further and gave so much back, too,” said Steve Morell outside the singer’s former Berlin apartment. “He took fringe musical tastes and brought them into the mainstream. Without him so much wouldn’t have been heard by the upper echelons of the music industry.”
The artist Ana Schönsteiner said: “He never got old, he kept fresh and kept changing.”
As the light faded yesterday the party continued to build. The Bowie music got louder in the singer’s old local, the beer flowed at Bowie-era prices, and by 5.30pm the wine had run out.
Although the lodger never returned, Berliners were touched when Bowie made a final, nostalgic musical return in 2013's Where Are We Now? : "Sitting in the Dschungel, on Nürnberger Strasse / A man lost in time near KaDeWe, just walking the dead."
