In the winter of 1992 a friend of mine was listening to music at an ear splitting level in a parking lot at Western Piedmont Community College in Morganton, North Carolina. He said to me, “you have got to hear this song”. According to him, there was nothing else like it. That song was the opening track from U2’s newest album. What I heard next was not the band that had become world famous for the Joshua Tree album and political anthems such as Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year’s Day. Instead, bursting from the speakers was a surge of sonic post-modernism, a euphoric eclecticism quite unlike anything I had ever heard before or since. The song was “Zoo Station”, a head trip of decadent giddiness. I did not realize it at the time, but this was the sound of Berlin on the cusp of a massive transformation channeled through U2. For me, the song captured the essence of Eastern and Western Europe colliding into a convergence. One world being consumed by another and in the process creating something entirely new. The song turned into a soundtrack of the early 90’s for me. Fifteen years later I went to Berlin, in search of the place that had inspired the song, a trip to the Zoo Station.
Transformation – U2’s Achtung Baby (Credit: Wikipedia)
By Faith Rather Than Hope – Breaking Into One
Berlin was the pivot point on which the entire world turned for much of the Cold War before the inexplicable happened as communism collapsed. The wall built to protect it came crashing down. Berlin was suddenly forced into another reinvention of itself. The moody and dark crucible of the east-west division slowly morphed into the epicenter of an optimistic, united Europe. That transition though was fraught with anxiety. Into this context stepped U2, a rock band struggling with its own transformation, from a wholesome, earnest, super serious group into whatever they could dream up. U2 came to Berlin looking for inspiration, what they found was a city much like the band, struggling through an identity crisis. U2 was looking for inspiration in a city beset by a gloomy, gray winter. The band’s mood was worse than the thick, heavy skies which loomed over the city. Uncertainty clouded everything.
The band was nearing the point of a breakup, with lead singer Bono and guitarist the Edge pushing hard to change the band’s sound with industrial and dance inspired grooves. They were pitted against the more traditional U2 sound preferred by bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. For months they suffered through recording sessions in the crumbling Hansa Ton studios, a place that had once been a Nazi ballroom, then was later used as creative haunts for the musical heroics of David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Now it was little more than a half-dilapidated recording studio with a glorious past and uncertain future. It was there that the band came close to dissolving. By faith more than hope, they managed to stumble upon a moment of artistic brilliance. It came in the form of “One”, a song about breaking up that paradoxically brought the band back together. From that moment onward, the band’s creative spirits soared, the upshot was the commercially and critically successful album “Achtung Baby”. And the first song on that album was the one that drew me all the way from a community college parking lot in the foothills of North Carolina to the underground of Berlin. It took me a decade and a half before I finally arrived at the Zoo Station.
Berlin Zoologischer Garten Railway Station (Credit: Arne Huckelheim)
Primal Instincts – A Trip To The Zoo
The actual Zoo Station referenced in U2’s song is officially known as the Berlin Zoologischer Garten Railway Station. Found in the district of Charlottenburg, the station gets its name from the nearby Berlin Zoo. Bono, U2’s vocalist, was inspired by a surreal tale involving the zoo during World War II. Due to bomb damage, the animals were freed from their confinement and wandered around the ruined city. Giraffes, lions, zebras and a plethora of other exotic creatures were seen on the streets. The Zoo Station of the song deals with human rather than animal instincts. These instincts happen to be primal ones. During the Cold War, Zoologischer Garten was West Berlin’s Main Railway Station, with the only line going into and out of communist East Berlin. A point of transition, where those coming from a strictly controlled environment were confronted with western decadence. The station was known for its seedy atmosphere, both inside and out. Drug dealers, prostitutes and pick pockets were among the various hangers-on that could be found loitering around the station. It was a place where all the forms of human behavior were on display.
On my first full day in Berlin, I made my way by U-Bahn to the station. Lines into the station included the U2. My expectation level rose in anticipation of what I might find there, perhaps heroin addicts strung out in the station’s bowels, beggars accosting innocents with a litany of mad sayings or transsexual harlots trolling vacant corridors. My pulse level rose as my train arrived at the station. I was, as the song said, “ready for the laughing gas”, that burst of otherworldly energy that comes from giving oneself over to dark fantasies. I imagined stepping back in time to the decadence of something approximating 1920’s era Weimar Berlin, a fairytale-esque world filled with the sultry and sordid. I got off the train and what did I see? A world of normalcy. The Zoo Station was filled with the usual hustle and bustle that could be found at most any metro station in a large European city. People hurrying between trains or standing impatiently on station platforms. Heading up to the surface I thought things might get a bit more interesting. I was disappointed to find hardly anything of interest. The station itself showed few signs of its former dynamism. There was no tension or transients, nothing but coffee shops, newsstands and people headed in hundreds of different directions.
Station for the U2 line at Zoologischer Garten (Credit: calflier001)
Lost In Transit – Outside The Zoo
The truth of the matter was that Zoo Station had lost almost all of its former prominence. First, after the wall crumbled. Then later, with the opening of the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof in 2006. The seedy, surrealistic station that U2 had channeled through their song had long since vanished. The animals had all wandered away from the zoo. Physically the station still existed, but the feeling was lost. The only way to recapture a semblance of it was by listening to the song, but its lyrics were a forceful reminder why that feeling could never be recaptured:
Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass
Europe Between East And West 