Spandau: The Berlin District the World Still Argues About (While Dancing to Its Greatest Hits)

Spandau: A Four-Syllable Rorschach Test the World Still Can’t Pass
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Berlin Bureau

If you whisper “Spandau” in a Berlin kneipe, three things happen in rapid succession: an elderly regular eyes you like you’ve just confessed to war crimes, the bartender reaches for the schnapps no one ordered, and a tourist Googles “Spandau Ballet greatest hits.” Same word, three realities—none of them compatible, all of them true. Welcome to the international inkblot that is Spandau, a district, a prison, a ballet, and, increasingly, a metaphor for the West’s inability to decide whether it prefers its history gift-wrapped or still bleeding.

Let’s begin with the map. Spandau the borough sits on Berlin’s northwestern fringe like the city’s hangover: once the site of the mighty Spandau Citadel, now a pleasant collection of lakes and tax-dodging start-ups. Locals brag about their mediaeval walls and their IKEA, apparently unaware the two share a business model—flat-pack conquest followed by allen-key remorse. Tourists cycle in to photograph cobblestones, blissfully ignorant that beneath them lie enough unexploded ordnance to reboot the Thirty Years’ War. In short, postcard perfection with a thin crust of latent catastrophe. Very German, very now.

But say the name anywhere east of the Oder and watch the temperature drop. In Moscow, Warsaw, and Tel Aviv, Spandau is shorthand for the Spandau Prison that caged Rudolf Hess from 1947 to 1987. The Allies kept a single inmate in a fortress built for 600, a bureaucratic haiku of vengeance: one Nazi, four occupying powers, forty years of midnight tea kettles and rusted padlocks. The USSR vetoed every parole request with the gusto of a co-op board rejecting a rock drummer. When Hess finally hanged himself with an extension cord—an appliance even he found too German to resist— the prison was immediately razed and its rubble dumped into the North Sea, as though bricks could carry moral contagion. Today, a bland shopping center stands on the site, selling sneakers to teenagers who’ve never heard of Hess but can recite TikTok choreography. Progress, we are told, is non-linear.

Meanwhile, in every karaoke bar from Manila to Manchester, “Spandau” cues synthesized violins and the immortal question: “Is this the way to-oo Amarillo?” (Wrong Tony, but the drunk never notice.) Spandau Ballet, the New Romantic quintet, weaponized melancholy in shoulder pads and sold it back to a planet wearing Reagan-Thatcher economic shock collars. Their 1983 hit “True” has become the elevator music for post-Cold-War reconciliation, piped into Vietnamese nail salons, Chilean duty-frees, and Serbian wedding halls—proof that irony has frequent-flyer miles. The band’s name itself was reportedly chosen because it sounded “German and industrial,” which is how you brand genocide-adjacent chic when you’re too coked-up to read footnotes.

Culturally, then, Spandau is a palimpsest: citadel, prison, pop hook, each layer insisting the others don’t exist. The same word can mean freedom or confinement, nostalgia or nausea, depending on which passport you carry. Ask a Syrian refugee housed in a Spandau gymnasium about the district’s symbolism and you’ll get a shrug that translates roughly to “at least the bombs here are rhetorical.” Ask a Brexit negotiator who’s just discovered that Spandau Citadel still stores British military archives and watch sweat form like condensation on a beer stein. History isn’t past; it’s just on layaway.

And so the globe keeps orbiting this four-syllable black hole. Silicon Valley types appropriate “Spandau” for minimalist font startups—so clean, so Bauhaus—while QAnon message boards insist the real Hess was smuggled out in 1987 and now runs a pizzeria in Buenos Aires. Somewhere, a marketing intern pitches “Spandau Water: Taste the Absolution.” The rest of us refresh our feeds and wonder why the 20th century still feels like a recurring subscription we can’t cancel.

The lesson? Any place the world can’t decide how to remember becomes a mirror. Spandau reflects whatever we need it to be: fortress of civilization, dungeon of villains, soundtrack to our collective midlife crisis. The trick is to notice the cracks in that mirror—before we mistake our own reflection for destiny.