Jim Tomlinson explores the idea that “Declinism can aptly be described as an ideology a set
of ideas and assumptions which are popular and largely unquestioned, articulated in both
elaborate and more cursory treatments”. 6 The idea is that decline is a historical product and
the purpose is to explore where it came from. The most common idea and cause of decline
emerged at the end of the 19 th Century where Britain began to respond poorly to Germany
and America’s economic growth in comparison to their own.
However, ‘decline' does not have an absolute form. Rather, it adapts to relate to different
concerns that are present in various periods of history. We must think of decline in relation to
specific periods of time, as it is ever-changing. We see Bowie incorporate this into the
language of the Berlin Trilogy in his depiction, both musically and although sparsely,
lyrically throughout each album. Bowie only talks about two specific periods of German
history in which he incorporates a declinist narrative. His primary focus is upon the post-war
Berlin of the 1970’s – the Berlin he experiences first hand, which is the Berlin that he subtly
draws in comparisons of between the political climates of both Germany and Britain during
the 1970’s. Of course, he adopts a similar approach when weaving in Weimar and
Expressionist influences that still inhabit the space in which he finds himself. I would argue
that the language of declinist narratives present within the trilogy are influenced by the
culmination of influence from four seemingly different cultures that are categorised as
Western or Eastern cultures. However, Bowie navigates his way through them using the
common thread of declinist narrative which is used to talk about various post-war periods.
British Culture was what inspired him to write music in the first place, but paradoxically it
was also what he wanted to escape. Bowie reached a similar fate after living in LA which
Jim Tomlinson, "Inventing 'Decline': The Falling Behind Of The British Economy In The Postwar Years", The Economic History Review ,
49.4 (1996), 731 .
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