Christiane F. - Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981).

After reviewing the 2021 Amazon miniseries Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo, I decided to travel back in time about 40 years to 1981, when the first film incarnation of the same title was made.  From the wayback machine, I present Christiane F. - Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo.  I will refer to the 1981 film as Christiane F. so as to avoid confusion.  Most importantly I will do my best to focus on the 1981 film without drawing comparisons with the 2021 iteration.

How I managed to purchase a copy of 1981’s Christiane F. is an adventure in and of itself.  My search for the film on Amazon came up dry, leading me to the 2021 miniseries.  After finishing the series, I widened my net beyond Amazon in search of the movie.  I found a BluRay copy for online purchase from Walmart.

You heard me.  Walmart.

Let that sink in.

The title read in what turned out to be Catalan Spanish:  Yo, Cristina F.  I checked in what regions it was playable.  It listed “Regiones A, B, C.”  Hoping “A” stood for Region I  (honestly, I could have googled that info), I made the order.

The BluRay arrived three days before the Christmas weekend.  The afternoon I received it, I popped it into my player, fingers crossed, hoping for a compatibility between disc and deck.

Success announced itself with an ear shattering sample of David Bowie’s “Heroes” playing over the main menu.  After I brought the volume to a tolerable level, I chose the original German dialogue track with English subtitles.  No problem.  Years ago, I caught an excerpt of Christiane F. on VHS at Kim’s Video Underground.  The English dub was wooden and the voice of teenaged Christiane sounded like a woman in her early 30s trying to sound like a fourteen year old.

The first shot opens on the half lit dead gaze of the thirteen year old Christiane.  She explains in a blunt voice, tinged with annoyance, with how the kids in her building feel forced to shit in the lobby of her estate house.  This is because of the slow, malfunctioning elevators.

The next shot is an elevated train which, due to David Bowie’s “V-2 Schneider,” sounds like a rocket ready to shoot into the stratosphere.

Christiane makes her landing meeting her busty friend Kessi in front of the new dance club “Sound.”  It is a shady basement dive, where the bar serves everything from cherry juice for  the minors to hard liquor for the older kids.

Christiane enters a small cinema in the club which projects George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead on a shoebox screen.  As a scene of a sunken eyed child ghoul killing her mother plays on the screen, Christiane shrugs off the vulgar groping of an older kid seated next to her.

Later that night, as Christiane vomits from a bad acid trip, a gallant young man introducing himself as Detlev offers her some napkins so she can clean up.  She is immediately infatuated by Detlev’s angelic face and for the next few Saturday nights, she follows Detlev into the lower circles of “Sound.”  She sees Detlev leaving a restroom labeled “H” - for “Herren,” the German word for men.  But the “H” could also stand for “heroin” as that was where Detlev went to score a hit of “H.”

Christiane is at first defiantly against her friends using “H,” opting instead for pot and acid, On the way to a David Bowie concert, she sees Detlev with another girl going into the venue.  Out of jealousy and a little curiosity, Christiane nags two skag boy friends to share a toot of “H.”  She snorts it, vomits, and lapses into a stupor.  Should you decide to watch Christiane F., prepare yourself for a lot of scenes with Christiane vomiting.

With increasing acceleration, Christiane slides into the hard drug culture of “Zoo Station.”  The users, boys and girls, are all prostitutes - including Detlev.  Detlev insists to Christiane that he “only does handjobs.”  Christiane wills herself to believe this.  I was immediately incredulous.

Eventually Christiane takes her first hit with a needle in the ladies’ room (Damen).  With her inexperience, she needs a veteran user to find a vein to shoot up.  A hustler, Axel, tells her that taking a hit was better than sex.  When she emerges from the “Damen” restroom, she says deadpan that it wasn’t what she imagined sex would feel like.  Almost immediately, she sets up a “play date” with Detlev to lose her virginity.

The day of her first sexual encounter, Christiane and Detlev mechanically remove their clothes and hop onto a mattress.  Christiane visibly feels ecstasy similar to the slumped joy she felt in the “Damen” restroom after her first hit.  “I love you so,” Christiane says to Detlev with all the cluelessness of a girl who just entered her 14th year on Earth.  In the adjoining room, a pale, ghoulish Axel experiences an ecstasy of his own as a needle slides out of his arm.

The whole of Act 2 is Christiane and Detlev making tentative vows to go clean, going through violent episodes of cold turkey, and becoming hooked to “H” once again for the sake of one more hit.  Note:  Christiane has her most violent vomiting fit while going cold turkey, spewing up a seemingly never ending fountain of red wine that she drank to take the edge off the shivers.

Christiane lapses into prostitution herself after hanging at “The Zoo” for too long all to score the next hit.  When not turning tricks, she shuffles past endless lines of sunken eyed boys and girls all in a stupor.  All of them, including Christiane, resemble the living dead of the Romero film.

In time, Christiane unveils how far Detlev is willing to go privately with a john for money as he is the receiving party of anal sex.  Christiane attempts to take the moral high ground, outraged that he would mingle his organs and orifices with strangers as well as herself.  Detlev explodes, “What am I supposed to do?  Tell me!  What am I supposed to do?”  Christiane rushes out of the john’s apartment.

During her time on the streets, Christiane has been counting the number of friends who vanish from “The Zoo” only to wind up on the front page of the tabloid news as yet another drug casualty.  After seeing her youngest friend Babsi splashed on page one “She was only fourteen!”, she decides to overdose in the “Damen” restroom.

Dissolve to the final scene of an icy farmhouse, “I survived,” says Christiane in voice over.  She says she has been recovery for eighteen months.  She fears for the safety of Detlev and hopes to share her strength with him.  For the moment, she must tend to herself.

Throughout my blog, I’ve written articles of drug casualties from Juice WRLD to Christiane F.  The topic of drug abuse and delinquent youth never ceases to fascinate me.  I can’t say why for certain.  Growing up, I saw many victims of drug abuse and I even saw drug paraphernalia littering the ground near my intermediate school playground.  Drugs even hit close to home in a manner that truly terrified me.  I’ll address my personal experience with drugs in a future blog.  For now, I am continuing my odyssey through Bahnhof Zoo.  My next blog will critique the book Zoo Station, the source of my critiques of the film and the miniseries.  I move from one station to the next.

- JJB