Remembering Berlin: David Bowie’s “‘Heroes’” (1977)

Abstract

ABSTRACT David Bowie’s “‘Heroes’” (1977) is typically considered to be a song about Cold War Berlin. This paper provides a detailed discussion and textual interpretation of the song’s musical actualization and its lyrics and shows that it does not explicitly reference the city. It also examines Bowie’s idealized time in the divided city to illustrate that, instead, the close association of song and city derives from the contexts of the song’s production and the subsequent discourses around it, so that, in terms of cultural memory studies, “‘Heroes’” can be seen as mnemonic product that contributes to the collective memory of 1970s Berlin.