Bowie has always had that ability to cross over – to have a huge audience and to give that huge audience some taste of something else, some darkness, some experimentation. Bowie makes a world that is a rich, dark, strange, and beautiful world, full of culture and oddity, available to largely working-class boys and girls. (Critchley 2017)
Integral to Bowie’s darkness is his association with the city of Berlin. Bowie’s time in the city has hardly gone unnoticed in scholarship. No self-respecting Bowie biographer would dare leave it out, and two studies devoted expressly to that period of Bowie’s creation were published, both in 2008: Thomas Seabrook’s Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town (Seabrook 2008) and Tobias Rüther’s Helden: David Bowie und Berlin (Rüther 2008).2 Bowie’s bond with Berlin is something he himself drew attention to, singling out his Berlin triptych of Low, ‘Heroes’, and Lodger as special:
For whatever reasons, for whatever confluence of circumstances, Tony, Brian and I created a powerful, anguished, sometimes euphoric language of sounds. In some ways, sadly, they really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass. It is some of the best work that the three of us have ever done. Nothing else sounded like those albums. Nothing else came close. If I never made another album, it really wouldn’t matter now. My complete being is in those three. They are my DNA. (cited in Buckley 2015, p. 215)
Possibly for that reason Bowie returned to Berlin in his 2013 comeback. As is by now well known, the city figures prominently in the lyrics and images of the surprise-release ‘Where Are We Now?’ while for the cover for its album, The Next Day, after considerable consideration of previous album covers a repurposed version of ‘Heroes’ was chosen, the album of his most associated with the city and, as Will Brooker reminds us that David Buckley reminds us, the only one actually made in the city (Brooker 2017, p. 109). However, there seems to be general acceptance of Tony Visconti’s claim that ‘Where Are We Now?’ ‘isn’t so much about Berlin. It’s about a time when everything was good in your life, a period where you think: “I could stay in this spot forever” (Visconti 2013)’ (Buckley 2015, p. 215). Indeed, as the title of Tiffany Naiman’s article suggests, the real question seems to be not ‘where’ but ‘when’ are we now (Naiman 2015), while Brooker’s detailed examination reveals that Bowie’s general engagement with place was rather minimal: ‘Bowie’s mentions of London suburbia were sparse, despite the decades he spent there, and… his references to New York, where he apparently felt most at home in his later years, were also surprisingly modest and minimal’ (Brooker 2017, p. 108). Indeed, ‘Neuköln,’ the one song on ‘Heroes’ named after a place in Berlin, was misspelt (Brooker 2017, p. 111), just as the place names in the subtitles of the ‘Where Are We Now?’ video are (Ingram 2014, p. 235). The answer to Brooker’s query as to where Berlin is in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy turns out to be a question not of where but of what: it is ‘the city-sized canvas onto which Bowie projects… internal conflicts’ (Brooker 2017, p. 114), ‘a conceptual map, through which he could explore the emotional issues that he’d acquired during his manically accelerated fame then locked in to fester during his period in Los Angeles’ (Brooker 2017, p. 116). Brooker makes a strong case that Berlin ‘was less important in [Bowie’s] work in its specificity that in its concept and its identity: what it represented to him, the ways in which he could map that onto his experience and then, in turn, express it through the albums’ (Brooker 2017, p. 120).
Whatever the city meant to Bowie, the fact remains that, as Shelton Waldrep notes in his 2015 Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie, ‘Increasingly in recent years critics and fans have lavished praise on the Berlin period, which has perhaps begun to eclipse the Ziggy one’ (Waldrep 2015, p. 9). Buckley revisited Bowie’s Berlin for the 2015 edited collection David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Buckley 2015), and there are a number of contributions on Berlin in the 2015 volume Enchanting David Bowie edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond: Jennifer Otter Bickerdike and John Charles Sparrowhawk look at Bowie tourism to Berlin (Otter Bickerdike and Sparrowhawk 2015), something the David Bowie Tours one can now go on in the city were developed to cater to; Darryl Perrins analyses ‘Where Are We Now?’ in terms of video art practice (Perrins 2015); Naiman reads its melancholy as a critique of neoliberal capitalism (Naiman 2015); and, in a different venue, I further this critique by drawing on the triad of pornography, nostalgia, and montage that Slavoj Žižek established in Looking Awry (Žižek 1992) to compare ‘Where Are We Now?’ with Comrade Couture: Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (2008, dir. Marco Wilms), ‘a documentary made by a former East German fashion model about the underground fashion scene on the other side of the Wall from Bowie’s Berlin’ (Ingram 2014, p. 228). The four-stop Australian ‘Bowie in Berlin’ tour (of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth) in January 2017 to mark the first anniversary of Bowie’s death, the fortieth anniversary of the release of Low, and what would have been his seventieth birthday would seem to indicate that interest in the Bowie-Berlin nexus is far from abating.