Hauptstrasse 155 — Iggy Pop and David Bowie, West Berlin

The apartment at Hauptstrasse 155 in the Schöneberg district of West Berlin was shared by David Bowie and Iggy Pop between 1976 and 1978 — a first-floor flat in a bourgeois nineteenth-century apartment building where both musicians were pursuing recovery, reinvention, and new creative territory after periods of severe personal crisis. Bowie had escaped Los Angeles and cocaine psychosis; Pop had escaped heroin addiction and a hospitalisation. Berlin offered anonymity, cheap rents, a vibrant art scene, and the strange atmosphere of a walled city in the middle of communist Europe. The music both made during this period — Bowie's Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger), Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life — is among the most celebrated in the history of rock.

The Schöneberg neighbourhood in 1976 was working-class, multicultural, and shabby in ways that suited two musicians who had fled the excess of their previous lives. Bowie and Pop rode bicycles, visited museums, attended cabarets, and worked at Hansa Studios across the city in Kreuzberg. The creative partnership was genuine and generative: Bowie produced both of Pop's Berlin albums and co-wrote most of the material; Pop's records arguably freed Bowie to explore the electronic and Krautrock influences that defined his own Berlin work. 'Lust for Life' and 'The Passenger' — the two songs most associated with Iggy Pop in popular culture — were both written and recorded during the Hauptstrasse period.

A plaque on the building at Hauptstrasse 155 identifies it as the former home of both musicians and marks it as a significant site of rock heritage. The building is in regular residential use. The Schöneberg neighbourhood is accessible by U-Bahn from central Berlin (Eisenacher Strasse station) and retains much of its residential character. The flat itself is not open to visitors. Hauptstrasse 155 has become one of the more visited music heritage addresses in Europe among fans of Bowie, Pop, and the broader post-punk era.