2
The Postmodern Elements of The Berlin Trilogy
Fredric Jameson said that “ the last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism
in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by a sense
of the end of this or that […] taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly
called postmodernism” 7 . The postmodern style is characterized by a self-conscious mix of
various earlier artistic styles and conventions. So, the primary focus of this section will be the
exploration of various postmodern elements that present themselves within Bowie’s Berlin
trilogy and how they arise in his complex and ever-changing identity, in the eclectic mix of
electronica that he began to explore during the late 1970’s and how such factors impact and
reflect the discourse surrounding the postmodernity of the era. The roots of postmodernism in
this context can be seen most prominently in Bowie’s Heroes . Here we see how he draws in
the present-day context with the connotations of the past in relation to space he inhabited in
Berlin and begins to intertwine his own personal and emotional experiences, explores the
context of Berlin’s rich, conflicted past and writes his own nostalgic, emotional response to it.
This is something that I will explore later on in this section using Ernst Bloch’s work on non-
contemporaneity.
7
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New Delhi: Rawat, 2012).