Through sites like GetYourGuide, fans can visit the places that inspired David Bowie's most innovative work β including "Heroes". David Bowie desperately needed a change of scenery in early In fact, his life depended on it. Surviving on a diet of cocaine, red peppers and milk , his body grew frail and his mind slid dangerously close to psychosis as he stayed awake for days on end, ruminating on the occult and watching films repeatedly on loop.
He overdosed on at least one occasion, narrowly avoiding death thanks to a quick-thinking friend who placed him in a warm bath.
Interviews from the period reveal a distressingly detached man whose grasp on reality seemed to be slipping. The back-to-back global success of Young Americans featuring his first American No. The title of a Omnibus profile pegged him perfectly: Cracked Actor. Stretched physically and creatively to his breaking point, Bowie believed he was heading towards the abyss. I had almost resigned myself to the fact that [I was] not going to be able to stop, and that would be it.
I started to get very, very worried for my life, and just had to get myself out of that situationβ¦ So I ended up in Berlin. The city would be both his savior and muse. This was where I felt my work was going. The prototypical Englishman abroad regaled Bowie with tales of his time in Weimar Republic-era Germany, immortalized in his memoir, Goodbye to Berlin β later adapted into the Oscar-winning film, Cabaret. Though Isherwood maintained that Berlin was no longer the den of depravity, decadence and artistic freedom that it had been between world wars, Bowie heard enough to be intrigued.
For a start, Allied troops had bombed much of the city into rubble during the war. What little remained was divided by the Berlin Wall, a grotesque and deadly symbol of the geo-political fault line between Eastern Communist repression and Western capitalism. Germany as a whole was bisected along similar lines, with West Berlin as a Democratic oasis administered by the Western Alliance deep within the Soviet controlled Eastern territory.
