V-2 Schneider David Bowie (2017 Remaster)
We Can Be Heroes, Just For One Day - The V2 Connection
“V-2 Schneider” is Bowie’s poisoned tribute to Florian Schneider, one of Kraftwerk’s founders, with Bowie
prefixing Schneider’s name with one of Hitler’s last gambles, the Nazi rockets that fell on London in 1944-45.
It's lyrics are simply a refrain, "V-2 Schneider, V-2 Schneider". What can it mean?
The V-2 rocket, the first ballistic missile, which had been developed for the German Army during World War II,
and whose design (and engineers) played a key role in the American space program.
“I think there are two bands who now come close to a neo-Nazi kind of thing: Roxy Music and Kraftwerk,” Bowie
told Ben Edmonds in 1976. “It’s not Nazism so much as nationalism. I think it may be too cliched to use the
Nazi thing; it’s more nationalistic.” Of course this interview came at the height of Bowie’s Thin White Duke,
fascist-sympathizing, cocaine-addled public incarnation, whose public excesses Bowie would later recant.
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/v-2-schneider/
Visconti said that Bowie had been “too impatient” to track down a vocoder, so “we had a cheap little synthesizer
in the studio and found sounds that had a vowel shape that resembled: Vee-Too-Schnei-Der. The idea was to use
those four separate patches for each note and David would supply just the consonants with his voice filtered
electronically (all the ‘body’ taken out), i.e.: V-T-Sch_D…and it kind of worked…”)
V-2 Rocket
The propulsion unit from a V-2 that broke up in air on display (with exhaust-exit pointed up) Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation
Museum
2019 marked the 75th attack of the first V2 rocket on London. The first attack on London, on 8 September 1944,
gouged a crater 10m (32ft) across, killed three people and injured 22. More than 1,300 V2s were fired at England
and, as allied forces advanced, hundreds more were targeted at Belgium and France. London's industrial area was
gutted in the process.
Ruined buildings at Whitechapel, London, left by the penultimate V-2 to strike the city on 27 March 1945; killed 134 people
Although there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile -
2,724 in Britain alone. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing
the V2s themselves.
Left: Occasionally, craters are still visible, as here on Leyton Marsh.
Right: Often, whole blocks were obliterated, as can still be seen in this aerial image of Brockley.
Mittelbau-Dora in the National Socialist Concentration Camp System
The prisoners - many pulled from other concentration camps for their technical skills such as welding - worked
around the clock in an underground factory called Mittelwerk near the Buchenwald concentration camp in central
Germany. They lived under appalling conditions, with no daylight, little sleep, food or proper sanitation.
Many were executed for attempted sabotage. Eyewitness accounts describe prisoners being hanged from cranes
above the rocket assembly lines.
A rusty V2 rocket engine in the underground production facilities of the Nazi concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau
(Nordhausen, Thuringia, Germany)
Between 1943 and 1945, some 60,000 persons from nearly all the countries of Europe, above all the Soviet Union,
Poland and France, were deported to the Harz Mountains as concentration camp inmates to perform forced labour
for the German armament industry. One in three of them died : https://www.buchenwald.de/en/29/
Mittelbau-Dora in the National Socialist Concentration Camp System
Supervised by American soldiers, German civilians from the town of Nordhausen bury the corpses of prisoners
found at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_camp
**Ben Edmonds, attending an early show in Vancouver in ’76, watched as Bowie’s audience at first were intrigued
by Kraftwerk, then grew restive and finally angry, mocking the vocals, clapping to drown the music out.
Hitler reacts to Kraftwerk MoMa two ticket limit
The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, "Retribution Weapon 2"), technical name Aggregat 4 (A4), was the world's
first long-range guided ballistic missile.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-nazis-space-age-rocket
The gleaming Trans-Europe Express, celebrated by Kraftwerk, could easily have been a Nazi invasion, crossing a
Europe without borders because it was all one cleansed Reich.
Written by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider (1977)
dr. π (pi)
♫
enjoy!
.
“V-2 Schneider” is Bowie’s poisoned tribute to Florian Schneider, one of Kraftwerk’s founders, with Bowie
prefixing Schneider’s name with one of Hitler’s last gambles, the Nazi rockets that fell on London in 1944-45.
It's lyrics are simply a refrain, "V-2 Schneider, V-2 Schneider". What can it mean?
Click to viewThe V-2 rocket, the first ballistic missile, which had been developed for the German Army during World War II,
and whose design (and engineers) played a key role in the American space program.
“I think there are two bands who now come close to a neo-Nazi kind of thing: Roxy Music and Kraftwerk,” Bowie
told Ben Edmonds in 1976. “It’s not Nazism so much as nationalism. I think it may be too cliched to use the
Nazi thing; it’s more nationalistic.” Of course this interview came at the height of Bowie’s Thin White Duke,
fascist-sympathizing, cocaine-addled public incarnation, whose public excesses Bowie would later recant.
https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/v-2-schneider/
Visconti said that Bowie had been “too impatient” to track down a vocoder, so “we had a cheap little synthesizer
in the studio and found sounds that had a vowel shape that resembled: Vee-Too-Schnei-Der. The idea was to use
those four separate patches for each note and David would supply just the consonants with his voice filtered
electronically (all the ‘body’ taken out), i.e.: V-T-Sch_D…and it kind of worked…”)
V-2 Rocket
The propulsion unit from a V-2 that broke up in air on display (with exhaust-exit pointed up) Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation
Museum
2019 marked the 75th attack of the first V2 rocket on London. The first attack on London, on 8 September 1944,
gouged a crater 10m (32ft) across, killed three people and injured 22. More than 1,300 V2s were fired at England
and, as allied forces advanced, hundreds more were targeted at Belgium and France. London's industrial area was
gutted in the process.
Ruined buildings at Whitechapel, London, left by the penultimate V-2 to strike the city on 27 March 1945; killed 134 people
Although there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile -
2,724 in Britain alone. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing
the V2s themselves.
Left: Occasionally, craters are still visible, as here on Leyton Marsh.
Right: Often, whole blocks were obliterated, as can still be seen in this aerial image of Brockley.
Mittelbau-Dora in the National Socialist Concentration Camp System
The prisoners - many pulled from other concentration camps for their technical skills such as welding - worked
around the clock in an underground factory called Mittelwerk near the Buchenwald concentration camp in central
Germany. They lived under appalling conditions, with no daylight, little sleep, food or proper sanitation.
Many were executed for attempted sabotage. Eyewitness accounts describe prisoners being hanged from cranes
above the rocket assembly lines.
A rusty V2 rocket engine in the underground production facilities of the Nazi concentration camp Dora-Mittelbau
(Nordhausen, Thuringia, Germany)
Between 1943 and 1945, some 60,000 persons from nearly all the countries of Europe, above all the Soviet Union,
Poland and France, were deported to the Harz Mountains as concentration camp inmates to perform forced labour
for the German armament industry. One in three of them died : https://www.buchenwald.de/en/29/
Mittelbau-Dora in the National Socialist Concentration Camp System
Supervised by American soldiers, German civilians from the town of Nordhausen bury the corpses of prisoners
found at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_camp
**Ben Edmonds, attending an early show in Vancouver in ’76, watched as Bowie’s audience at first were intrigued
by Kraftwerk, then grew restive and finally angry, mocking the vocals, clapping to drown the music out.
Hitler reacts to Kraftwerk MoMa two ticket limit
The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, "Retribution Weapon 2"), technical name Aggregat 4 (A4), was the world's
first long-range guided ballistic missile.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-nazis-space-age-rocket
The gleaming Trans-Europe Express, celebrated by Kraftwerk, could easily have been a Nazi invasion, crossing a
Europe without borders because it was all one cleansed Reich.
Written by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider (1977)
dr. π (pi)
♫
enjoy!
.