Germany thanks David Bowie for helping bring down Berlin Wall

Bowie moved to West Berlin for several years in the late 1970s as he was at the peak of his stardom and dealing with drug addiction. He ended up recording several iconic albums there and the title song of one of them, “Heroes,” was inspired by lovers who met at the wall each night to kiss. It includes the lyrics: “Standing, by the wall/And the guns, shot above our heads /And we kissed, as though nothing could fall /And the shame, was on the other side/Oh we can beat them, forever and ever/Then we could be heroes, just for one day.”

In 1987, Bowie returned to West Berlin and gave a concert near the wall — speaking German, and sending greetings to those trapped on the other side of the wall in communist East Berlin.

“I’ll never forget that,” Bowie said of the concert in a 2003 interview. “It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears. They’d backed up the stage to the wall itself so that the wall was acting as our backdrop. We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn’t realize in what numbers they would. 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. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again. 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. It was just extraordinary.”

The concert triggered riots.

A week after the concert, President Reagan returned to the city to give his famous, “Tear down this wall” speech. And the wall fell two years later.