“The stench of Manson”: The Nazi book David Bowie wanted to make into a movie
The legacy of some musicians is so hallowed that they are deemed essentially infallible by their droves of acolytes, who take offence at any suggestion that the music, or the person behind it, isn’t as God-like as they think. One man who has an intensely dedicated fanbase and extensive cultural relevance is David Bowie. Still, even the great musical chameleon and glam rock hero had moments that bring into question his character, particularly his strange, drug-fuelled dalliance with Nazism. It’s funny how this period is omitted from the mainstream narrative.
In the mid-late-1970s, as Bowie sought to capture the imagination of America as he had done with his homeland, he relocated to Los Angeles, was rapt by heavy cocaine use, and morphed into his next guise: The Thin White Duke. This period of extensive sniffing led the already thin and pasty rocker to lose more weight and become increasingly pallid as the dark side of the City of Angels took its toll.
Dying his hair red and opting for black suits with white shirts – an aesthetic based heavily on Nazi posters – strangely, this metamorphosis would produce 1976’s Station to Station, one of his best albums. On the other side of the coin, his personal life was a mess, and was characterised by a fascination with the occult and Nazism. Reportedly, he kept odd pieces of history in his apartment, such as Egyptian artefacts and Nazi memorabilia.
Bowie’s obsession with the Nazis would also see him dance dangerously with cultural oblivion. “You’ve got to have an extreme right-wing front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up,” Bowie told the NME in 1975. Beating Kanye West by many decades, he even glorified Adolf Hitler, calling him “the first rock star.”
He also said: “Britain is ready for a fascist leader… I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism… I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership.”
Things were made much worse in 1976, when Bowie was papped by a photographer for the NME in mid-wave, making it look like he was greeting fans out the back of his car with a Nazi salute at London’s Victoria train station.
Naturally, after he ditched Los Angeles and cocaine for West Berlin and started to come back down to earth, Bowie would spend the rest of his life making up for supporting the murderous ideology, and to be fair to him, he did own up to it. He blamed it on drugs and life in Los Angeles, later saying of the Californian hub: “The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth”.
Speaking to Tony Parsons – a man with his own controversial opinions – in Arena in 1993, Bowie reflected on his fascination with Nazism and one particular book. Discussing the point that his refusal to fly in the 1970s kept him alive because he was forced to have downtime in boats, cars and trains, he recalled one moment taking the sprawling Trans-Siberian Express, reading about Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. While he didn’t name the book, he laughed that he was so messed up he wanted to make it into a movie.
“Goebbels intrigued me more than any of the other Nazis because of the way he used the media. He was an extraordinary guy. He used the media the way nobody used it. It was at his instigation that Hitler flew everywhere – it had never been done before,” Bowie explained. “Goebbels had a club foot. There were rumours that he had a Jewish heritage. It made him an intriguing specimen. This was 1975 I also took along a book on the cabbala. All this stuff was going on at once.”
Tapping into his former life as a hippie, inspired by the countercultural writings of William S. Burroughs and other purveyors of esoteric texts, Bowie asserted his “other fascination” with the Nazis was their search for the mythical Holy Grail. He said: “There was this theory that they had come to England at some point before the war to Glastonbury Tor to try to find the Holy Grail. It was this Arthurian need, this search for a mythological link with God.”
Somewhere down the line, though, this fascination became “perverted” by the more Bowie read, with his brain heading down a truly dark road. Conceding that it was nobody’s fault but his own, he affirmed that “the stench of Manson” filled the air of Los Angeles during the time, which also impacted his twisted imagination. He admitted: “It all happened in LA. There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days. The stench of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders.”
Bowie knew that during this period, he was experiencing some form of religious fervour and also conceded that he was naive to not even think about the Nazis’ maniacal genocide. He eventually realised that he needed a change of course and scenery, and taking off to West Berlin proved to be a significant stroke for his career. He sought to plug into the city that had been the artistic centre of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Despite discovering when he got there that it was the continent’s heroin capital, it was full of excitement and creativity, with young people ruling the roost.
It was in Berlin that, ironically, Bowie would come face to face with the brutal ideology that had consumed his awareness in the mid-1970s. Just before he left the city in the latter stages of the decade, he would witness the very explicit rise of the Neo-Nazis, with their crew cuts and Dr. Marten’s, marching regularly on the streets. One day, the coffee bar below his apartment was destroyed by the Nazis, with the workers pulled out and beaten up.
