Song of the Day: David Bowie, Berlin "Hero"

When Bowie went up against the Berlin Wall, mofo.

David Bowie was born on this date in 1947. A key moment in his life (among many) arrived 40 years later with his groundbreaking concert in Berlin…at the Berlin Wall. He may have even hastened its fall, at least a little bit, a short time later. When Bowie died several years ago, the German Foreign Office noted as much in a memorial tweet: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.”

Bowie’s June 1987 performance was remarkable on several levels. The Soviet-aligned East Germans, facing youth unrest, had started relaxing cultural restrictions just a little. The stage was set up in West Berlin, very close to the wall, with the old Reichstag building as a backdrop. Unlike most Western performers, David had a fitting song for the occasion: “Heroes,” written a few years earlier and purportedly inspired by Bowie’s time living in Berlin. The line about standing by the wall while “the guns shot above our heads” may refer to dramatic attempts by East Germans to escape the East—which happens to be the subject of my bestselling 2016 book, The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill.

You can watch Bowie’s performance of “Heroes” that day, below.

And here, from a 2003 interview, is how he described it:

It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears…And there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. When we did “Heroes” it really felt anthemic, almost like a prayer. However well we do it these days, it’s almost like walking through it compared to that night, because it meant so much more. That’s the town where it was written, and that’s the particular situation that it was written about.

Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen would soon play at or near the Wall themselves, also described in my book, but Bowie helped make that (and maybe a lot else) possible. Here he is on a return to a (now united) Berlin in 2002, again with “Heroes”—enjoy but please subscribe, it’s still free!

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s atomic bomb movie twisted by the White House and Pentagon), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His 2021 film, Atomic Cover-up, drew extraordinary acclaim, and his current one, The First Attack Ads, aired over hundreds of PBS stations this past fall. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.