Berlin, Germany – When David Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour arrived in West Berlin on June 6, 1987, the city was the world’s de facto capital of geopolitical turmoil, cleft in two physically and politically by 168km (104 miles) of machine-gun-guarded concrete wall.
The stage on which Bowie was to perform lay to the west of the division line on the derelict lawn of West Berlin’s Platz der Republik, a grassy square in front of the imperious Reichstag building. The building had once been the seat of the German government (and is again today) but in the late 1980s had stood largely unused since World War II due to its proximity to the Berlin Wall looming directly behind it.
