Christiane Felscherinow wouldn’t recognise any more the area around Berlin’s Zoo Station. The vacant, scrubby site opposite is now a Waldorf Astoria hotel; the adjacent neon-lit arcade of kebab shops and sex shops was torn down and replaced with a Primark.
A few of the alcoholics remain, between the coffee chains and sandwich bars, but the station has been renovated and the drug scene has gone online – along with the prostitution.
Ask Germans of a certain age, though, and they can still remember the physical shock of encountering the young woman known as “Christiane F”: in her ghost-written 1978 memoir or the subsequent film about a West Berlin life gone wrong. Cannabis and alcohol at 12, heroin at 13, prostitution at 14.
The book spent 95 weeks at the top of Germany’s best-seller charts; the 1981 film was a worldwide hit.
Christiane came from a dysfunctional home on the outskirts of Berlin and found ample distraction in the walled-in city’s hedonistic nightlife. She met a heroin-addicted boyfriend and fell in with his a free-for-all clique. After taking her first shot at a David Bowie concert, a steady slide into addiction began.
Swinging between recovery and relapse, she watched one friend after another from her gang fall victim to suicide and drug overdose.
Christiane F survived, more or less, and the film – with an appearance and soundtrack by (a similarly drug-addicted) Bowie – remains an important document of West Berlin that is uncomfortably at odds with more recent, nostalgia-tinted portrayals.
The film made staggering demands of the underage cast of first-time actors, who shot scenes involving passing out in urine- and faeces-filled urinals in the station and collapsing in pools of vomit, while surrounded by real-life addicts as extras.
These fresh faces were not how West Germany, or most of the western world, wanted to perceive drug addiction – or addicts – in the early 1980s. These were children from “good” homes, places that were often more respectable in appearance than reality.
The blowback was huge. Rather than acknowledge the grim reality it portrayed, the film and its creative team were attacked for “glamourising” drug addiction.
“This tendency is supported . . . through an uncritical aesthetisising of drug addiction, which in some scenes almost becomes a heroisation of the main figures,” wrote one leading child-rearing expert at the time.
Critics rarely explained what was glamorous about scenes so stark that some were cut from the UK/Ireland version of the film on its release.
By the mid-1980s, of course, Ireland had its own denial problem about heroin, the epidemic ravaging north inner-city Dublin and highlighted in a lonely crusade by the late Tony Gregory. The issue finally had its watershed moment in 1986 with the heroin addiction and fatal overdose of a lead character in the BBC school drama Grange Hill.
New mini-series
Now Christiane F is back for the streaming generation, in a new mini-series for Amazon Prime, released on Friday, that has lost none of its shock value.
If anything, the broader canvas offered by the extended running time gives greater scope to explore how social circumstances capture – and chance condemns – Christiane’s entire circle of friends: Benno, Axel, Babsi, Michi and Stella.
The screenwriters also have time to explore the circumstances of the parents’ generation: themselves the product of traumatised parents and authoritarian child-rearing, practices transferred to their own children.
Assisting them were the original journalists for Stern magazine and hours of tape-recorded interviews with the teenage addict. Long forgotten, these recordings are now the basis of a series tie-in podcast.
The new Christiane is Jana McKinnon, a 22-year-old Australian-Austrian actor who moved from Vienna to Berlin in 2019. She picked up the book shortly after her arrival, read it in two days and found herself walking the streets to visit the sites mentioned.
“While reading I thought it would be amazing to play a role like that,” she said. “Then two weeks later I was invited to a casting for the series; I had no idea it was happening.”
Producer Oliver Berben says when he spotted McKinnon sitting in the background of another casting he “knew immediately: it’s her”.
One of the new Christiane’s regrets is that she didn’t get to meet the real Christian Felscherinow.
The now 58-year-old has battled addiction most of her adult life and has withdrawn from public life after losing custody of her teenage son a decade ago.
It’s not quite Normal People but, as pandemic limbo enters its second year for an entire generation of young people, Christiane F offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of extended boredom and social isolation.
