It was the fastest-selling show the Victoria and Albert Museum has ever staged. But when the David Bowie Is exhibition moves to Berlin this summer, there will be a few notable tweaks.

Bowie's cathartic years in the chrysalis of divided Berlin are counted as among the singer's most innovative. And so the show will be transformed from the excesses of glam to the more subtle influences that mid-1970s Europe exerted on the Thin White Duke.

Gazing out of a studio window at the Berlin Wall one day, the story goes, David Bowie watched a couple kissing under a watchtower. Inspired, he scribbled the lyrics for Heroes, in which a pair of star-crossed lovers are briefly reunited across the Iron Curtain.

The anthem forms the audio backdrop to the specially curated Berlin version of the exhibition, which opens in May at the Martin-Gropius-Bau near Potsdamer Platz, a stone's throw from Hansa studios where the artist recorded part of his Berlin trilogy, Low, Heroes and Lodger.

"The song revolves around the idea that anyone can be anything, which is fundamental to Bowie," said Geoffrey Marsh, director of the V&A's Department of Theatre and Performance and co-curator of David Bowie Is. "Berlin played such a critical part in Bowie's development, we wanted to include more about the city while there."

The reworked multimedia installation, envisaged as a highlight of the exhibition's two-year international tour, will trace Berlin's influence as a treasure trove of history, art and culture on Bowie's avant-garde views on personality and self-expression.

Landing in west Berlin in the summer of 1976, on the run from fame and excess, Bowie found release in the anonymity of the enclaved city state. "He disappeared," said Marsh. "It was critical not only for his health but also his musical and cultural development."

With no cameras in his face and no one breathing down his neck, Bowie was free to reinvent himself musically. In collaborations with Iggy Pop and minimalist artist Brian Eno, he ushered in a new era of sound with cutting-edge synth equipment, some of which appears in the exhibition.

Yet Berlin had a profound effect on more than Bowie's music. Intimate items from his own personal collection, including clothes, diary entries, handwritten lyrics and sketches inspired by visits to the Brücke expressionist museum, show how he worked Berlin "like a scavenger picking over the ruins and assembling them", said Marsh.

One exhibit, a letter from Bowie's hero and Berlin chronicler Christopher Isherwood, lays bare the singer's fascination with the German capital's layered history, from Weimar and nazism up to the brutal cold war division outside his studio window.

But the exhibition shows it was chiefly this sharp contrast between bohemian, libertarian west Berlin and the drudgery Bowie saw on visits to the authoritarian east that meant he returned to the US two years later a changed man.

"Suddenly he was thinking differently in the way people saw him, communicating differently with the world," said Marsh.

By the time he left, Bowie's sketches and film clips show his politics was firmly based on the idea that anybody should be what they want to be.

"A lot of that came from being a natural rebel, but also from being in Berlin and seeing those two sides," Marsh said.

David Bowie, 20 May-10 August, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Tickets on sale here