The Banality of Stella’s Evil - Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo

Amazon Studios’ miniseries Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo (We, the Children from Bahnhof Zoo) splits Christiane F's perspective into six characters:  Christiane, Stella, Babsi, Axel, Benno, and Michi.  Some of the ensemble meet fatal ends.  Some piece their lives back together and carry on as normal people would.  Some find true love when on the verge of death.

And then there’s Stella.

Of the six Zoo children, Stella has suffered the most.  At the beginning of the story, Stella and her very young siblings greet her mother who returns from rehabilitation for her alcoholism.  Stella works in the pub run by her family, where the escape of alcohol dangles before them as low hanging fruit.  One pivotal day, while closing up the pub, Stella is raped by a regular barfly as her mother lies in a drunken stupor.  When Stella demands that her rapist be taken by the police and sent to jail, her attacker shrugs it off as “fooling around.”

One night, while she and her fellow Zoo kids try to scam their way into a David Bowie concert, Stella is the only one apprehended by the venue’s security.  She is carried off by the police back home to her mother with a warning.

Exasperated by the hypocrisy of all the authority figures upon whom she tried to rely, Stella runs away to the apartment of a lecherous pedophile named Günther - who runs the pet store frequented by Stella’s siblings.

For the occasional handjob, Günther gifts her with Deutschmarks and a foil full of heroin.  Stella suffers Günther’s dream of the two of them being married the year she is of legal age.  In time, Stella invites her fellow runaways Christiane and Babsi to find refuge in Günther’s home.  Christiane and Babsi endure Günther’s unwanted advances.  Babsi even poses for photographs taken by the old man.

When an enraged Günther attempts to rape Stella, she fights back and runs out of his apartment.  As Stella runs down a flight of steps, Günther - dressed in a cruddy tank top - calls after her screaming her name, “Stella!  Stella!”  I’ll be damned if that wasn’t a tongue in cheek reference to Marlon Brando’s primal yowl in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Stella takes to the streets as a full blown heroin addict and a failed purse snatcher.  She is immediately arrested by the police and jailed for a month.  During her incarceration, her cellmate reads passages of a feminist tract to give Stella direction.  The day of Stella’s release, her cellie asks to stay in touch.  Stella agrees, but you know her promise is full of shit.

Trying to find purpose, Stella attends a few communist meetings.  As a member of the group gives her the elementals of the class struggle between the proletariat and capitalist class, she snaps back “Do I look stupid?”

Stella reaches the bottom of her tether as she lies on the streets near Zoo Station on cardboard, her face pocked with sores.  One day, a tall, shaven-headed john passes her.  She leaps to her feet and propositions him.  “You’re too old,” says the john.

Stella is approximately fifteen to sixteen years old.

It is at this moment when Stella makes a fateful decision that leads her to a near unforgivable darkness.

Stella chases after the john and strikes a deal with him; she will find girls even younger than herself to satisfy his lusts for a certain amount or Deutschmarks, plus cash up front for her services.

“Who do you think you are?” the john asks.

Stella answers, “I am a capitalist.”

Stella is as good as her word.  Within hours, she has two underage girls waiting to be picked up by the john.  She makes her money and gives a small cut to her child hookers after the rape, yes rape, is fulfilled.

Stella is no longer just a victim.  Stella is a victimizer.  Stella is a pimp.

Stella is evil.

Stella cleans up her appearance and gets a new wardrobe.  She casually explains her arrangements as a pimp to none other than her younger sister.  Stella isn’t trying to procure her sister.  She’s not that far gone.  However, Stella explains her scheme with the same enthusiasm  as one in the present day would say, “I’m starting a podcast!”

Stella is brought as a witness to a trial where Günther is charged with statutory rape and making pornography with a minor.  While her friend Christiane takes the stand and recounts her experience with the corpulent pervert, Stella giggles mockingly at the plight of her one time “benefactor.”  She is shocked and bemused when Günther turns to face her - in court! - to ask for her hand in marriage when she is of age.

Ultimately, Stella and Christiane’s witnesses were judged as not credible and Günther is out on parole.  Stella seems unfazed by Günther’s liberation.  She delivers the news to Christiane with a smile.  Knowing that she and Christiane were probably meeting for the last time, Stella offers her a foil of heroin.

In reality, there is nothing new about Stella’s ordeal and her heinous choice to pimp girls.  Many women pimps in Bahnhof Zoo - and elsewhere - often come from dysfunctional homes and were victims of abuse and rape.

But the background of their own abuse does not exculpate their horrible choices, nor does it justify Stella’s evil.  Nonetheless, Stella and her real-life analogues are spokes on the cycle of abuse.

When we the average people are asked to define evil, we may invoke the names of Hitler or Stalin.  We may even offer such fictional icons as Darth Vader and Satan.  Holocaust survivor and philosopher Hannah Arendt points to a strain of evil which is by no means so grand.  In reference to a ranking member of the Nazi Party, Adolf Eichmann:

“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil

Does Stella recognize that enabling young girls to be raped is evil?  Does Stella look at herself in the mirror and confess privately, What I do, who I am, is evil?

Stella is not a mustache twirling Simon LeGris.  She does not strut down a public plaza in a crisp brown uniform with jackboots.  She does not fit any iconic image of evil, not even the cartoonish manifestations seen in a Marvel movie.  

Yet Stella is undeniably evil.

- JJB