It is June 6, 1987. David Bowie, who had long lived in Berlin, performs in the former German capital. Obviously in the western part. The venue chosen for the concert has a special significance, in front of the Reichstag, the former Nazi parliament that since 1945 is a semi-destroyed building, of which only the disturbing skeleton remains after being bombed and occupied by the Red Army. Nobody has touched it anymore, it remains a warning of the horror of that war, also because the capital of western Germany has been transferred to Bonn, while the Reichstag is located in the western part of Berlin. The building is located not far from the Wall which has divided the city into two for more than twenty years. David Bowie did not randomly choose this location. Most of the speakers are in fact headed for East Berlin.
While the paying public of the western part fills the open space, behind the wall along the avenue Unter den Linden thousands of young people gather there too. They won't be able to see anything, but they will be able to hear. At one point in the concert, Bowie says, in German, in a loud and clear voice: "We greet all our friends who are on the other side of the Wall". The first notes of the song Heroes start. The young people gathered in East Berlin explode with joy and forget the police forces that control them, starting to shout "Down the wall". They do the same to the west. You can build walls, but you can't stop the music.
"I'll never forget it. It was one of the most exciting performances of my life. I was in tears. They had placed the stage on the wall itself, so that the wall acted as our backdrop. It had come to our ears that the inhabitants of East Berlin would have had the chance to hear the show, but we could not know how many there were. And there were thousands of them on the other side, who had gathered near the wall. So it was like doing a double concert. We could hear people on the other side singing and applauding. God, even now this memory takes my breath away, it breaks my heart. I had never done anything like this in my life, and I don't think it will happen again. When we did "Heroes" ... the song really looked like a hymn, almost a prayer. However good we can play it today, it is always a bit like going through it with respect to the intensity of that night, because then it meant much more "the English artist will say years later.
That evening of June 6, 1987 the first brick of the Wall fell, which two years later, on November 9, 1989, would have been definitively destroyed.
Heroes was already the anthem of all those who hated the building that had divided, separated, killed, hundreds of families. The most ruthless construction in modern history. That song had been released exactly twenty years earlier in 1977. Bowie had written it during his stay in Berlin, when he published a trilogy of records that went down in history: Low, Heroes and Lodger.
According to the artist himself, the text of the piece was inspired by two boys that Bowie, while he was in a building not far from the building, saw near the Wall while they were kissing.
The song is not triumphalistic, on the contrary. Then, like everyone else, Bowie didn't think that the wall would ever collapse. But the song affirmed the possibility of being free, even if only for a day, even only in our hearts, because people can be physically dominated, but nobody can but dominate the heart.
After that concert, the East German regime would have relaxed the reins. A few months later, again in 1987, Bob Dylan would even perform in East Berlin, in front of hundreds of thousands of people, followed a year later by Bruce Springsteen. That bloody regime that had stifled millions of people for decades, found itself unable to suppress the strong wind of freedom rock music was launching. In their logic, these concerts were just moments of granting a space so that young people could be distracted. The opposite happened instead. Those guitar notes were making the Wall itself waver.
When David Bowie dies, in January 2016, the then German Foreign Minister reunited writes on Twitter: "" Goodbye, David Bowie. You are now among the heroes. Thank you for helping us bring down the Wall. "
Unfortunately, thirty years later, the walls are back. Almost everywhere, in the world, barriers of separation, of division, of estrangement are built, in a metaphorical sense but also in a physical sense. The fear of the other is, thirty years after a moment that seemed to mark forever the end of separation, more alive and evil than ever. We would need new "heroes".
[ Translation and adaptation of the original article in Italian:
https://www.ilsussidiario.net/news/crollo-del-muro-di-berlino-quando-david-bowie-dedico-heroes-ai-giovani-dellest/1942472/ ]
