Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (12 page)

2.2 Unsalubrious work conditions of a Stasi functionary.

The East-West distinction still has an impact in spatial thinking. Berlin, always a part of eastern Germany, was always inspiring mixed feelings in the west. The first post-war German chancellor Konrad Adenauer had a lifelong repulsion towards this city, in his opinion, too ‘Eastern’. It was only Willy Brandt, who started to take the bad associations away from Berlin again. Yet, with cultural workers leaving for Munich, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, before the slow re-emergence of the New German Cinema of engaged directors, like Kluge, Fassbinder or Schlöndorff, of Serielle/Elektronische Musik with figures like Stockhausen, writers like Heinrich Boll, Gunther Grass, playwrights Peter Handke, Peter Weiss, it really was the way Kraftwerk described it in interviews: Germany was a cultural desert, and initially the only culture there was straightforwardly American, clubs didn’t have other music to play. And Berlin? In the opinion of the robots, it was ‘just a museum.’

This museum started provoking culture within its rubble. Feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger describes living there in the early 70s, in districts like Kreuzberg: desperately poor, full of refugees, but still with immense artistic ferment. Berliners themselves created a culture based on trash valued positively, art growing upon political tensions, with the Neue Deutsche Welle in particular, and since the late 70s a defeatist response to the country’s ultimate civil death after the killing of the RAF’s members. For guests from the outside, those tensions – the Wall, the wars, Nazi past, ruins - were an antidote to the blandness of living in their respective countries. And the electrifying knowledge of the Bloc round the corner was everywhere.

What I’ll be calling ‘Berlinism’ is the twentieth-century phenomenon of the German capital as a dreamland for both easterners and westerners. Arguably, it starts after First World War, when the Weimar era turns it into a capital of all sorts of
debauchery and transgression, in culture, politics, literature, art, music and theatre. What built Berlin’s reputation is a combination of German expressionism and cheap rents. Arguably the first Anglo who set foot there solely with the wish of participating in the cool was Christopher Isherwood, who came there in the 1920s in the search of forbidden homosexual carnal pleasures; for not only was Berlin permissive, it was also cheap. Years later, the writer recalled in his memoirs: I wish we went to Paris, but Berlin had the boys. So Berlinism means the conscious use of this ambiguous cultural capital, made of sweat, camp and danger. The current career of the city is a complex coincidence between its history and the decline of cities as we knew them, through the disappearance of their industry.

Thirty years after the war, the characters of Wim Wenders’ early films are shipwrecks of this post-industrial world, raised on the scraps of American pop culture, giving up their life for the sake of a certain form of American dream. Hence their uprootedness, solitude, abandonment, their Quixotic relations with the world and
Weltanschauung.
Those West German easy riders long for something more than their flat life. But what the hero of
Alice in the Cities
discovers is the artificiality of his American dream. Not only that, but the little girl he meets in New York and then drives around the Ruhr, Alice, is in every respect a child of Wenders’ post-hippie depressed generation, mature too early, all-too-understanding of her elders’ neglect and decrepitude. Looking at her sage little face, we see Christiane F., the famous author of the teenage drug addict memoir, a few years earlier. When Wenders’ characters feel let down by their American dream, they start to look inward, to Germany itself. By this time, he wasn’t the only one.

The 1970s were the era of defeat. As the 60s were extremely intense in terms of political and social change, from the early 70s the flux went steady. David Bowie, who debuted in the late 60s, marked this change when he invented Ziggy Stardust in 1972: no more real heroes, from now on the most desirable thing was to be fabricated. What is genuine, authentic, is boring. The only hero that really matters, is pure artifice, cut out from the comic books, movies and dressed in everything that’s glamorous. Bowie more than anyone contributed to the cherishing of artifice in pop music, realizing the idea of a “hero for a day”, only following the course mass culture had been taking for decades. Was he conscious of that? Some of his lyrics of the era mark the mourning of the depoliticization of his generation: in the lyrics to the song ‘Star’, he mentions “Bevan (who) tried to change the nation”, and posing himself instead as someone who “could make a transformation as a rock & roll star”. Facing the growing nihilism of his generation, he still believes that as a star of artifice, he can carry on their political task. ‘All the Young Dudes’, a song he wrote for Mott the Hoople in ’72, reeks of the youth’s disappointment and disillusionment, forming a kind of “solidarity of the losers” anthem. Bowie, always too erratic to make any firm political commitment, was rather in love with various dubious figures, “cracked actors”, (the inspiration for Ziggy was a forgotten singer who was believed to be a combination of god and an alien), necromantics like Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger’s satanism, Fascist dictators. He was, nevertheless, obsessed with certain elements of modernity. He was driven to German culture, especially the Weimar period, expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, theatre, Brecht. His first break-through hit concerned a man lost in space, after all, and the space age gets a strongly melancholic treatment from Bowie, as his character Major Tom is rather terrified by the silence of space. Another obsession, as we will see, was Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bowie’s fixation with ‘totalitarianism’ applied to both sides. At one point he planned to stage an adaptation of the Soviet-Czech
comic book
Octobriana
, about a socialist she-devil super-heroine - a samizdat publication, that was circulated between creators only through the post. Bowie could only have learned about it from its 1971 American edition. On the other side, his dalliance with the far right was something more than just the famous Sieg Heil he made to fans in 1976 at Victoria Station. It’s not an accident pop bands are very rarely left-wing, and Bowie’s reaction to the economic crisis of the 70s was to imagine becoming a right wing politician who’ll “sort things out”. ‘I believe strongly in Fascism’, Bowie said; ‘the only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air is to speed up the progress of a right wing tyranny. People have responded always more efficiently under a regimental leadership.’ Bowie recognized, if only half-consciously, the appeal and meaning of the pop idol as a dictator. In Peter Watkins’ film from some years earlier, 1967’s
Privilege
, a young, cherubic, mega-popular singer is hired by the fascistic authorities, who use his popularity to ensure their control over the masses, in a truly Orwellesque, Big Brother-like take on the police state (which here has much more to do with Nazi Germany than communist states). Yet Watkins’ scared, weakened, traumatized singer, terrified of the masses, couldn’t have been further from Bowie, who relished in fame.

So Bowie’s fascination with Germany and Berlin was only partly expressionism – much of it was also quite simply, fascism. He became a chief
Schwarzkarakter
for Rock against Racism, whose magazine pictured him next to Enoch Powell and Hitler. The press deemed his Thin White Duke look ‘more Nazi than Futurist (sic)’. He also caught the attention and sympathy of the National Front, who in an article called “White European Dance Music”, said that ‘Perhaps the anticommunist backlash and the aspirations towards heroism by the futurist movement, has much to do with the imagery employed by the big daddy of futurism, David Bowie. After all, it was Bowie who horrified the establishment in mid 70s with his favorable comments on the NF, and Bowie who might have
started an “anti-communist” music tradition which we now see flourishing amidst the New Wave of futurist bands’. Who might the NF’s publicist have meant as the “futurist movement”? It was the growing synthpop and New Romanticism that was emerging from the post-punk bands. Punk by itself might have evoked a resistance towards the establishment, but by then it was dissolving. Although we are used to seeing industrial/synthpop/postpunk as ruthless modernists, the bands were actually rarely openly left wing. The political message, if any, was rather vague. Bands dwelling on the space age came often from dispossessed areas, which they then made topics for their music, but the result didn’t have to be politically sound. It was this later, new romantic period that brought Bowie to the left, with the stern words about ‘fascists’ on
Scary Monsters.

But even if we treat those remarks as just the drugged out delirium of a coked-up degenerate, which they were, it can’t be denied they had an influence on popular music. If you take the whole fascination with the Germanic in post punk bands, like Siouxsie and the Banshees or, omen omen, Joy Division, the twisted outpourings of their leaders weren’t just simply teasing their parents. They were flirting with the outrageous (Siouxsie), against the war generation, or they were openly right wing, like Ian Curtis. They had little to do with the struggles of Baader-Meinhof that ended tragically few years back. Curtis was confusing his obsession with Hitlerism with another obsession with a concentration camp prisoners (Stephen Morris has said in an interview that Joy Division were supposed to look like Nazi camp
victims
) or wider, the idea of the underdog, which tapped into their Bowieesque Eastern Bloc fantasies, like that of ‘Warszawa’, an eternally concrete, sinister city. Yet Bowie’s image of contemporary Berlin must’ve been seriously twisted, if he thought he could find shelter there with another drug addict, Iggy Pop, in a place that had already become one of the most narcotics-dependent places on earth. West Germany and West Berlin had for years been a territory
of political dysphoria. The New Left’s legacy was melting. In a context of pseudo-denazification, militancy reached its peak around 1968 and the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. By 1976, when Bowie moved to Berlin, it had become the armed terrorism of RAF, the Red Army Faction.

If you look at any footage of the West Berlin in 70s, you see a murky city, gravitating around the Wall. Living next to a prison, even if theoretically you’re not the prisoner, you can develop symptoms of suffocation. Knowing people can be killed over an illegal crossing of the Wall, not being able to walk all of your city, imagining what there can be on the other side. Rainer Werner Fassbinder felt shame for the post-war West Germans, for the way the West stuffed their mouths with consumerism and told them to shut up. During his 1978 film
In a Year of Thirteen Moons
, he punished the viewer with a ten minute sequence of rhythmic murder and quartering of animals in the slaughterhouse, a senseless death that is then wiped out and put into neat plastic boxes. Half of his films are acerbic commentaries on the situation of the left, until they start to look more like funeral elegies. Fassbinder was friends with Holger Meins, who was a cinematography student when he joined the RAF. He later died in prison after a hunger strike. In May 1976 Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide or was killed, followed by Ensslin and Baader. In the 1981 film
Christiane F. Wir sind Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
, when Christiane and her boyfriend Detlef have awkward, clumsy teenage first sex, it’s on a lair of bloodied, dirty sheets cobbled together in their drug den. Poor kids, they and their teen friends have all their injections, trips, they hunger, shake, ejaculate and overdose under one and the same face of Ulrike Meinhof torn out of a newspaper.

One of the reasons the punk generation reads dystopias like
Nineteen-Eighty-Four
and
A Clockwork Orange
as if they were their lives, and looks longingly towards the communist East in their aesthetics, is their depoliticization. The generation of their grandparents was the one who survived the war, believed in socialism, was changing the world, joined political parties. Earlier, to piss off your parents, you’d join a Communist Party. By the 70s, those who wanted to change the world were discredited and all they had left was the aesthetics. A generation or two before, people believed in the modernist ideal for living: built estates for collective life, in which neighbors were to meet in the patio and socialize. The 1960s and 70s also marked the crisis and decline of the nuclear family. In the regress towards private life and individualism, with a growing number of divorces, this generation was paying for the necessary experiment of their parents by not having anything in return for what they’d given up. The counter culture as a resource/channel of political culture also began to decline. What was left were the drugs. Berlin since the 70s started having an enormous population of drug addicts.