Still the world mourns David Bowie, and rightly so. He’s had an amazing career and he made the world a little brighter by being in it. He was a source of inspiration for countless musicians and other artists, not to mention an icon for the LGBTQ+-community. However, a celebrity’s death inevitably also unearths their more problematic characteristics, which people are usually quick to dismiss in the face of their virtues. In David Bowie’s case, something that came up a lot (which I was hitherto unaware of) was his flirtation with fascism and his admiration of Adolf Hitler, whom he once compared to a rock star. It is widely accepted that his persona the Thin White Duke, who he discarded once he settled in Berlin in 1977, was modelled on the Aryan idea of the Übermensch; in fact, he himself described the character as “a very Aryan, fascist type; a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all.” It is a delicate subject; there are those who attribute the remarks Bowie made about Hitler to “cocaine psychosis and extreme misjudgement”, saying that the media exaggerated and “wilfully misunderstood” them (source). Others are not so quick to forgive Bowie and accuse him of having been a Nazi sympathiser and a white supremacist. What I want to do in this essay is merely explain why he was seen as such; in no way do I defend his ideologies just because I like his music, nor will I condemn outright the things he said during a period where he claims to have been “politically naive” and likely under the influence of certain substances.
In a 1975 interview with NME, Bowie proclaimed that rock and roll was dead and in need of a dictator: one leading figure to revive rock and roll from its ashes, just like the galvanization that happened in the early 1960s. (source) This wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned fascism in connection to his music; in 1971, his album Hunky Dory had featured the song “Quicksand”, which starts off with the lines: “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn / Immersed in Crowley’s uniform / Of imagery /I’m living in a silent film /
Portraying Himmler’s sacred realm / Of dream reality.” As he is “torn between the light and dark”, “sinking in the quicksand of my thoughts”, it’s clear Bowie has crept into the role of a (former) fascist sympathiser. It wasn’t until 1974, though, that Bowie invented his Thin White Duke persona while working on the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which he plays an alien who crash-lands on Earth and becomes a victim of human greed and corruption. He was in the throes of his cocaine addiction, living in L.A., apparently surviving on milk and red peppers, and “in a state of psychic terror” according to his biographer David Buckley. All of this culminated in the slicked-back hair, black-and-white suit and gaunt, pale features that ushered in a new era in Bowie’s career. Ziggy Stardust’s red mullet and makeup were definitely out of the window. The Thin White Duke, Bowie’s self-proclaimed nastiest persona, is a nihilistic and aristocratic “Aryan Superman” who sings about “love, loss and emotion with a profound intensity, but feeling nothing.” (source) The album that followed this period, Station to Station (1976) is eclectic to say the least, and contains plenty of references to themes like Nietzsche’s Übermensch (“ I’m ready to shape the scheme of things”), and mysticism (“Here are we, one magical movement / From Kether to Malkuth”), as well as making frequent mention of demons. And could we take his lyrics from the funky “Golden Years” to refer to the thousand-year Nazi empire? “I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years / Nothing’s gonna touch you in these golden years.”
While touring Station to Station, Bowie’s admiration for nazism became apparent. In an interview with Playboy, he said:
“Rock stars are fascists. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. . .Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for 12 years. The world will never see his like again. He staged a country […]. People aren’t very bright, you know? They say they want freedom, but when they get the chance, they pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler because he would march into a room to speak and music and lights would come on at strategic moments. It was rather like a rock ‘n roll concert. The kids would get very excited — girls got hot and sweaty and guys wished it was them up there. That, for me, is the rock ‘n roll experience.” (source)
Although the term “rock star” seems in poor taste, there is no doubt about Hitler’s famous charisma, the way he roused millions of people into sharing his ideology with his speeches, the many resources he used — architecture, posters, stage design for his rallies and expensive propaganda films, to name just a few — to give himself a cult status, and the adoration from fans — mostly women — he enjoyed. Of course, Hitler also greatly benefited from technological advancements, mainly the radio, and the propaganda carnival headed by Joseph Goebbels. Without these attributes he would certainly have had a much smaller reach. The effect of his charisma, amplified by these means, on a society that was destitute and shamed by the losses inflicted on them during the Great War, cannot be understated. The German people weren’t simply brainwashed into supporting the Nazis; the seeds of poison that were sown found fertile soil. They were receptive to anyone that promised to make them feel like a great people again. The Nazis didn’t stay in power just because people feared them, but because they propagated a certain unifying attitude that made both the intellectual civilian and the “working man” proud of their heritage. Bowie was quite right to point out that Hitler, a painter, worked the German people like an artist, using his artistic imagination to shape them into a glorious people, getting rid of any subhuman elements that stood in the way of their destiny.
More controversy chased Bowie during his Station to Station tour; he was detained in Eastern Europe for the possession of Nazi memorabilia (source) and, according to his biographer, was quoted in Stockholm in the same month as saying that “Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader.” Back on his home turf, a photograph taken as he arrived at Victoria Station in London in an open Mercedes convertible cooked up a storm. Bowie, who later said he was simply caught “mid-wave”, was said to be giving a Nazi salute to the crowd. Around the same time, he also said in an interview with Rolling Stone:
“Who knows? Maybe I’m insane too, it runs in my family, but I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human. I felt very very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superman.’ I guess I realised very early that man isn’t a very clever mechanism. I wanted to make better.” (source)
Given his interest in the Nazis during this time, he may actually have meant the idea of the Übermensch when he said “superman”, shaped like the Thin White Duke.
Looking back on the Thin White Duke, Bowie defends himself by admitting that he barely remembers recording Station to Station, and recalls that he was not interested in the atrocities the Nazis had committed but in their obsession with the myth of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. He admitted that the charge of racism “has been raised ‘quite inevitably and rightly’”, but that the very idea of racism didn’t occur to him then, as he was working with black musicians and actually discussing these ideas about the Nazis with them. (source) He also reflected later on that of all the characters he’d played over the years, the Duke was “the most scary of the lot. . .he was an ogre to me.”
The Nazis’ interest in occultism, and what Bowie called “Himmler’s sacred realm / Of dream reality”, is public knowledge by now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, a tide of general occult revival swept Germany and Austria, which derived its ideology from historic German paganism and theosophy (which tries to understand the mysteries of the universe and the connections between humanity, the universe, and the divine). This amalgam of Germanic mysticism and Germanic culture gave birth to groups of Ariosophists and Armanists (proponents of Aryan-esoteric beliefs connected to the völkisch movement) and rune-occultists. Important elements of their ideologies included the idea of the pure and noble Aryan race and the use of runic symbols and the swastika. It’s thought that the Ariosophic movement was not a direct influence on Nazi ideologies, but Hitler admits in Mein Kampf to have read readily accessible pamphlets about topics like racial theory when he lived in Vienna. (source, p. 194) Thus, it’s likely that the similarities between Ariosophy and his own black-and-white visions of a glorious thousand-year Aryan empire, wherein a divinely ordained master race of blond, blue-eyed Übermenschen were served by enslaved inferior races, concreted and rationalized his worldview. (idem, p. 198) Thus, the Nazis were not merely a bunch of megalomaniac bullies who exploited Germany’s economic low point, as was stated by the Allied leaders after the Nüremberg Trials that convicted most Nazi leaders, but “men of the highest caliber; the caliber of the atom splitters and the V-bomb designers” who would stop at nothing to carry out their mission and racial ideology (source). As the definitive work on this topic, Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism, states (p. vii): “Only religious beliefs and myth could explain the success of an ideology concerned with special racial and esoteric knowledge, the belief in a nefarious world-conspiracy of scheming Jews and other racial inferiors, and the apocalyptic promise of group salvation in a millenarian apotheosis of the German nation.” (This absorbing work can be found as a pdf here for those interested.) SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s efforts to back up Nazi racial ideology and policy with ancient myths, archaeological finds, pseudoscientific theories and mythology-based rituals and ceremonies that corroborated his vision of the noble Aryan race became as much a part of the Nazis’ image as the Panzers, the U-boats and the steel helmets. Many high-ranking Nazis, Himmler and Hitler included, were not of noble birth, but dearly wanted to identify with an aristocratic race of ancestors and craved a link to the past to make themselves a part of German history.
Wild theories surround Himmler’s stronghold, Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia in central Germany, which according to some Himmler chose “because it lies on a nexus of ‘ley’ energies.” There are rumours of rituals carried out by SS cults at Wewelsburg, and even claims that “the castle’s north tower was such a storehouse of powerful magical energies that all attempts to destroy it at the end of the war were in vain.” Himmler wanted to make the SS not just a racial elite, but a knightly order like the medieval Teutonic Knights: a disciplined and austere military order with secret rituals. Such an order necessitated a quest for knowledge, power, and conquest. The SS’s desire for “Lebensraum im Osten” was based on the Teutonic knights’ battles against the Slavs, which they lost (for example in the Battle of Grunwald). The historical fantasies they based their ideology upon would lead to the murder of millions. Himmler required every SS member and their spouse to prove the purity of their bloodline as far back as 1800 (1750 for officers). All this would lead to the establishment of a pseudo-pagan state religion based on ancient Germanic rituals that would eventually supplant Christianity and safeguard the racial superiority of the German people. Wewelsburg was to be its Mecca. Himmler even placed a round oaken table for twelve senior SS officers in the Obergruppenfürhersaal in the north tower, and dedicated each room to a great figure from Germanic mythology. There was a room named for King Arthur, one for the Holy Grail, and his own room was dedicated to King Heinrich, the founder of the First Reich: the Holy Roman Empire, of whom he believed himself to be a reincarnation. He also had a crypt built in the basement which was intended to house the Eternal Flame. (source)
So what was it about the Nazi ideology that particularly appealed to Bowie? He seemed to be particularly interested in the idea of the ever-strong Superman, around whom peoples gather in times of national weakness; on Station to Station, he sings: “Once there were mountains on mountains / And once there were sunbirds to soar with / And once I could never be down.” The Nazis’ obsession with King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail interested him most. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade springs to mind, an action film that showed us fanatical Nazis obsessed with finding the Grail, thinking it would give them supernatural powers — and when I started reading about it I realised that this portrayal was not at all far off. At the time, the grail and the Aryan knightly order that searched for it were popular topics in academic circles. Some even believed the grail really existed, though many simply saw it as a symbol of a glorious German past. In mythology, the grail represented eternal, spiritual values that the knights, tired of the earthly, materialistic plane, tried to obtain. (source, p. 108) Heinrich Himmler once visited Montserrat Abbey, near Barcelona, because according to Wagner’s Parsifal that was where the Holy Grail, said to have been used by Jesus Christ to consecrate the last supper, was to be found. He came away empty-handed. (source) Archaeology was at that time in full swing, and Germans were excavating traces of the world’s most important sites, such as Babylon and Troy. Himmler’s archeology taskforce, the Ahnenerbe, took advantage of German ubiquity at archaeological sites, and started digging for traces of their own glorious Aryan past.
Hitler was also partial to the operas of Richard Wagner and his “chivalrous portrayal of the grail, its guardian knights and their idealism.” He liked the idea of stopping “racial decay” by forming an elite Order around “the holy grail of pure blood.” (idem, p. 197) One of the few pieces of music later deemed appropriate by the Third Reich was Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera in three acts based on the myth of the Arthurian knight Percival and his quest for the grail. The opera was performed 23 times between 1939 and 1942 in the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Wagner was known for his anti-Semitic views and pro-Aryan musical themes. (source)
David Bowie said: “[Hitler] was a terrible military strategist, the world’s worst, but his overall strategy was very good, and he was a marvellous morale booster. . .He was a perfect figurehead. . .He was a nut and everybody knew he was a nut. They’re not gonna let him run the country.” (source) Disregarding Hitler as a “nut” and not the agent of all the horrendous acts perpetrated by the Third Reich seems horrifyingly callous, but to give Bowie the benefit of the doubt here, he was probably saying that despite not being a good military strategist, from a Nazi point of view he remained a good mascot for their cause. In this, Hitler is similar to Wewelsburg and what that represented: the deadly serious dedication of hundreds of thousands intellectual men imagining themselves to be the heirs of a mythical master race. Everything they did, from every signature on a transportation form, every stone of every edifice, every bullet that was fired, every death, every cup of tea Himmler poured from his special rune-engraved teapot, was in service of this ideal.
It can well be imagined that his cocaine habits gave Bowie, who by then was already notoriously sensitive to identity complexes and riding the waves of adoration from millions of fans, the delusional idea that he, too, descended from a superior race that trod on inferiors on its way to the top. However, to my knowledge, for all his controversial statements, he did not act on them; he may have talked a lot about the impeding rise of Fascism and right-wing movements, but he followed it up with the claim that liberalism would then triumph. “You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. Then you can get a new form of liberalism,” he said in Creem in 1975. (source) He was likely simply looking for the most provocative way to get his point across — he was still an artist, after all, and still Bowie. And in the posthumous overviews of his career that popped up everywhere shortly after his death, he was praised for accusing MTV of not including enough black artists in their programming (source). Bowie lifted the yoke of the Thin White Duke when he moved to Berlin together with Iggy Pop, and made three albums that are widely considered to be among his best: Low, Heroes and Lodger.
*For more info on the topic I recommend the documentary Hitler’s Search for the Holy Grail, which can be found on YouTube.
**One of my favourite writers, Neil Gaiman, wrote a short story about the Thin White Duke in his new collection, Trigger Warning, and published it when Bowie passed away. It’s a wonderful story about a quest. There are no references to Nazism in there, though. It can be found here.
