David Bowie’s interest in Nazism has been investigated in a new book nearly a decade after his death.
Often regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, the performer rose to fame with his single Space Oddity in 1969 and launched his alter ego Ziggy Stardust a few years later.
Over the subsequent decades, he won six Grammys and four Brit Awards, and during his lifetime, sold over 100 million worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time.
He died aged 69 in 2016 after being diagnosed with liver cancer 18 months earlier.
Now, nine years on, a new book is looking into a side of the musician that many will be shocked to discover.
This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich delves into how – and why – so many of the music genre’s celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theatre’ of the Nazis.
One particular focus is Bowie, who’s been said to have ‘flirted with some extremely dangerous ideas’.
In 1976, he infamously told Playboy magazine that Adolf Hitler was ‘one of the first rock stars’, and soon after was photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute when greeting fans outside a train station in London; he denied doing so, saying he was just waving to fans.
There are no suggestions that the musician was himself a Nazi; however, he did become obsessed with the political ideology.
In 1969, he had told Music Now!: ‘This country is crying out for a leader. God knows what it is looking for, but if it’s not careful, it’s going to end up with a Hitler.’
In the next few years, he’d go on to release several songs that explored the ideas of fascism.
Lyrics in 1971’s Oh! You Pretty Things mentioned ‘make way for the homo superior’, while Quicksand that same year declared: ‘Himmler’s sacred realm of dream reality.’
He went on to create his Thin White Duke persona – who was emaciated, fuelled by cocaine and infatuated with the Third Reich.
During the planning for his Diamond Dogs tour in 1974, Bowie wanted the set to reflect ‘Power, Nuremberg and Metropolis’.
‘I want tanks, turbines, smokestacks, fluorescent lightning, alleyways, cages, watchtowers, girders, beams, Albert Speer,’ he went on.
Three years later, he made comments about how he could have followed in the footsteps of the dictator.
‘Everybody was convincing me that I was a messiah, especially on that first American tour [in 1972],” he told Rolling Stone magazine.
‘I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy. I could have been Hitler in England. Wouldn’t have been hard. Concerts alone got so enormously frightening that even the papers were saying, “This ain’t rock music, this is bloody Hitler! Something must be done!’” And they were right. It was awesome.
‘Actually, I wonder…I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.’
His public comments on the Third Reich didn’t end there. In 1976, he declared to Playboy that rock stars were ‘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!
During his 1976 Isolar Tour, Bowie was also detained on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia.
Soon after, he was wrapped up in the ‘Victoria Station incident’. During his first trip home to the UK, it was claimed he gave passionate fans a Nazi salute.
While standing in an open-top Mercedes surrounded by fans, he raised his hand and greeted them.
The NME ran a photo of him with an extended right arm and the headline, Heil and Farewell.
Bowie denied the claims, saying he was ‘upset’ by the assertion he was replicating the salute.
In 1978, Bowie starred alongside Marlene Dietrich in the film Just a Gigolo, playing an aristocratic Prussian officer who finds work in a brothel after returning to Germany after the Great War.
His character Paul von Przygodski, was then killed in a crossfire between Nazis and Communists.
He also once planned to write a movie about Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels.
In 1981, the National Front claimed Bowie as one of their own. But a few years earlier, he’d called the far-right, fascist political party ‘an answer to an idiot’s dream’.
He also conceded the Thin White Duke had been a theatrical device ‘to show what could happen… which unfortunately backfired’.
When asked about his fascination with Nazism years later, he told Arena magazine in 1993. ‘It was this Arthurian need. This search for a mythological link with God. But somewhere along the line, it was perverted by what I was reading and what I was drawn to. And it was nobody’s fault but my own.’
‘The idea that it was about putting Jews in concentration camps and the complete oppression of different races completely evaded my extraordinarily f***ed-up nature,’ he told NME soon after.
He later blamed his pro-fascism comments and behaviour on his cocaine addiction.
After moving away from Germany in 1979, Bowie reflected on seeing neo-Nazis and how the environment in the country had ‘started to get quite nasty’.
‘I thought — this is not a place for [my son] to be growing up. This could get worse.’
Speaking to The Times, This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll author Daniel Rachel, a music historian, explained that it ‘felt important to collate pop music’s history with the swastika and the Third Reich’.
His book also investigates how other musicians expressed interest in fascism.
John Lennon had a collection of Nazi memorabilia, The Who’s Keith Moon once dressed up as a Nazi and paraded through a Jewish neighbourhood in London, and The Sex Pistols wore swastika armbands on stage.
After writing the book and discovering how many beloved musicians who he is also a fan of flirted with Nazi ideology, Rachel said it was ‘really hard to write’.
‘I love many of these artists’ music and I don’t want to be denigrating people who have meant so much to me. But the book asks: how much longer can we separate the art from the ideas? I’m not saying we stamp on our record collections but that we need to move forward.’
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