Rory Maclean: “Bowie wanted to initiate me in the ways of the city…”

Why are we drawn to certain cities? Perhaps because of a story read in childhood. Or a chance teenage meeting. Or maybe simply because the place touches us, embodying in its tribes, towers and history an aspect of our understanding of what it means to be human. Paris is about romantic love. New York means energy. London is at once trendy and hard.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful and fallen so low. No other capital has been so hated, so feared, so loved. No other place has been so twisted and torn across five centuries of conflict, from religious wars to the Cold War, at the hub of Europe’s ideological struggle.

Hence history broods in Berlin. Its legends both real and imagined, stalk the streets: Lenin drinks at the same café as David Bowie’s heroes, Wim Wenders’ trench-coated angels wing above torch-lit Nazi processions, Dietrich shops alongside Sally Bowles at KaDeWe, le Carré’s George Smiley watches the packed trains leave for Auschwitz.

I was a young assistant director on a Bowie film, fresh out of film school

I first came to the city because of one of its legends. I was a young assistant director on a Bowie film, fresh out of film school. Bowie wanted to initiate me in the ways of the city, so invited me and others to his favourite transvestite club, the Lützower Lampe.

The club’s star, a 60-year-old drag queen named Viola, sat on my knee and crooned German love songs in my ear: “Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo, denke nicht mehr an die Zeiten…”

I’d heard the gossip about Bowie before we met, of course, the stories of a paranoid, egotistical thin white duke who flirted with fascism and the occult. But over the months we worked together I saw only a gentle, articulate, warm and affable man filled with self-effacing good humour, and on the cusp of finding his own true self.

Over the three-month shooting schedule he danced with Maria Schell, woke up in bed with Kim Novak and – on day 51 – was shot by a nutty Nazi. With blanks. Early one morning, after the director and I had spent the night reworking dialogue, I knocked on his trailer door and delivered a wad of new lines for him to memorise. Bowie scanned the list, smiled weakly and said: “Now melody I can handle…”

Above all, two memories endure for me from those days. The first was the evenings spent in his Hauptstraße apartment. Bowie played records for me and others, explaining how musicians and groups come together then break up in the pursuit of creative goals, likening the process to Die Brücke artists earlier in the century: The Beatles and Lennon, Roxy Music and Brian Eno, Der Blaue Reiter and Kandinsky.

At the end of the happy evening I followed him downstairs to the huge, ceramic lavatory

The second was Christmas together: Bowie and my boss with partners, children and add-ons like me. At a secluded restaurant in the Grunewald, the deep and dark urban forest that hugs the city’s western fringe, we ate and drank too much and Bowie gave me a copy of Fritz Lang’s biography. At the end of the happy evening I followed him downstairs to the huge, ceramic lavatory where – as we stood before the urinals – we sang Buddy Holly songs together (or, at least, a line and a half from Good Golly Miss Molly).

I’ve been coming to Berlin for more almost 40 years now, falling in and out of and back in love with the brash, volatile city, moved again and again by its legends, Walls and open doors. Today I’ve made it my home, like so many outsiders.

Berlin is the place where I decided to become a writer, where I grew up, where I began to understand that – like the city itself – we are all always ch-ch-changing, growing… yet somehow forever remaining the same.

Berlin: Imagine a City (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) by Rory MacLean is out now in hardback