We, the Children from Bahnhof Zoo - A Review.

 

NOTA BENE:  This review contains spoilers.

Tribalism and alienation have been part of the youthful experience long before modern times.

In the late 1970s, a teenage girl going by the name Christiane F. was interviewed by two journalists from Stern magazine about her experiences as a heroin addict and prostitute in the seedy Berlin Zoologischer Garten station - commonly known as Bahnhof Zoo.  The series of articles soon became the bestselling book Christiane F. - Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo (We, the Children from Bahnhof Zoo).  It was adapted into a film in 1981, which received great critical acclaim.

Christiane’s misadventures were once again adapted into the 2021 miniseries Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo which was produced in part and released by Amazon Studios.  The series expands from Christiane being the sole protagonist to an ensemble cast of six and their individual experiences with life, love, drugs, joy, and sorrow.

Christiane begins her adventure nearly being killed in an elevator when its brakes fail and plummets down the shaft.  That same day, she tries to win the attention of her classmate Stella and an older boy named Matze.  Stella takes Christiane under her wing and gives her the nickname “Banana.”  Stella exposes Christiane to the nightlife of Berlin at a disco called Sound.  Sound soon becomes the gathering pace for a larger clique:  Babsi, a rich girl who has internal dialogues with her suicided father; Axel, an apprentice machinist and functioning heroin addict; Michi, a male prostitute; and Benno, the aimless son of a postman who falls in love with Christiane.

Their earliest encounters range from spontaneously busking aboard a train to taking a joyride on a brightly colored carousel in the middle of the night.  This is one of a few ecstatic moments in their friendship.  Another major event in their young lives is when they try to get tickets to see David Bowie in concert.  Axel buys two tickets for himself and Christiane, only to see her playing and flirting with Benno.  Axel sells the tickets for a hit of H.  One of his co-workers finds him slumped in the office restroom with the needle still in his arm.

In the evening, Axel redeems himself with his friends by wining six tickets for Bowie in an air guitar contest at Sound.  The night of the show, Christiane arrive at the arena only to find out that Axel, Benno, and Michi sold their tickets for H (again!) while Stella and Babsi carelessly lost them.  The Zoo Kids conspire to sneak their way into the show by jumping the barrier.  The result is a chase through the venue with concert security at their heels.  Stella gets caught, while Benno and Axel stumble through the exit.  Babsi grabs Christiane’s ticket and makes her way into the crowd.  Meanwhile Michi sneaks into a restroom and finds himself pissing in a urinal next to The Thin White Duke himself.  Unflustered, Bowie says to Michi, “This is the best part of the show.”  During all these misadventures, Christiane finds herself in the luxurious green room for the talent.  A masked, robed figure glides to her and offers Christiane her first hit of heroin.  So our heroine’s adventure begins its downward spiral.

Heroin wraps its tendrils around the six youths.  Beginning with Axel and spreading to the other five kids, they all take to it as a coping mechanism for their traumas.  Christiane takes it due to the violent disintegration of her parents’ marriage and nearly OD’s after learning through a newspaper that her first crush Matze died from an overdose.  Stella lapses into addiction because she was raped by a pub patron under the notice of her alcoholic mother.  Michi uses it to dull his unrequited romantic and sexual longing for Benno. Benno turns to it to avoid his father’s expectation for him to be a postman. Last but not least, Babsi takes it to escape the pressure of her grandmother to be a great artist and to dull the haunting memory of her father.

Christiane, Stella, and Babsi run away from home and ingratiate themselves with a pedophile named Günther.  The girls agree to satisfy Günther with the occasional handjob in exchange for money and H.  The deluded older man tells Stella that he wishes to marry her when she comes of age so he can consummate their relationship.

Other eerie characters include Dijan, the Albanian DJ at Sound who moonlights as a “cleaner” for the older aristocracy by taking the bodies of youngsters who OD’d at their mansions and buries them in the middle of the woods.  Dijan is an angel of death with whom innocent baby Babsi crushes.  Is Babsi figuratively flirting with death?  Whenever she makes an advance towards him, he brushes her aside.  She isn’t ready to be taken into his wings… yet.  Incidentally, “dijan” is Albanian for “they know.”  Cryptic.

In the end of the drama, the survivors of Bahnhof Zoo realize it is their union of friendship that is tearing themselves apart.  They are their own worst enemies.  They go their separate ways.  Some take on menial jobs.  Others go to the brink of death in order to find someone to love.  Christiane herself escapes to the quiet of her grandparents’ farm.

Yet, in my opinion, the most intriguing character in the ensemble is not Christiane, but her closest friend Stella.  Stella takes the straightest descent into a hell of her own design.  She goes from rape victim and junkie prostitute to pimping underage children to old men.  Stella went from someone to pity to someone any good person should abhor.  Stella is evil in its most banal form.  I will be writing more about Stella in a later blog.

One who has lived in relative comfort, such as myself, may first look down on Christiane and the Zoo Children as stupid losers.  Then, I recall that a lot of my friends made poor decisions and fell into pits of substance addiction.  I looked down on them with a snobbish sense of superiority as well.  

Then my daemon reminds me that I would drink myself into stupors to dodge the stress and dread of work and study.  One day I had the first of many seizures.  A doctor informed me that the seizures were exacerbated by alcohol.  I tried to play the odds with a drink here and there, only to collapse in bookstores, work cubicles, workout mats, or on the sidewalk next to my mother.  I grasped the reality that I could have seized at the ledge of a subway platform or in the middle of the street.  My drinking days were over.  Plus, I had married a beautiful woman and I didn’t want to ruin her life as well as mine.  I didn’t want Suze to mourn a husband who had died of his own carelessness and stupidity.

Now my friends don’t seem as stupid.  We were all desperate, fearful, and sad.  We were and are all equals.

Over the years, I’ve watched films that show the squalor of drug culture like Scarface, The Panic in Needle Park, Trainspotting, Traffic, Blow, and of course, Christiane F.*  Bahnhof Zoo veers between the manic irreverence of Trainspotting and the joyless world of The Panic in Needle Park.

*I skipped Requiem for a Dream because I have my threshold and I had the impression that it is TOO.  GOD DAMNED.  GRIM.  Even for me.

- JJB