Zoo Station, A Memoir, The Story of Christiane F - Book Review

People who are clean and sober wonder what the factors are that would draw a kid in their early teens into the drug scene.  Poverty is the usual answer, and it’s true, but do we really know what poverty is?  It isn’t just a lack of money, or the negligence of a child’s parents.  It often takes root in the simple fact that a child may live in a building complex where there is no playground.

Zoo Station, A Memoir (1978) is based on a series of articles in Stern magazine where the main interviewee is one teenager going by the name Christiane F.  She methodically goes through her youth from the age of six to fourteen where abuse and deprivation molded her into a junkie and a prostitute.

Her family came from a rural area in Germany.  Christiane, her sister, and her mother were led to West Berlin by her father who boasted of a new opportunity of founding a telephone dating service.  Christiane’s father rented a large apartment with promises of making it big.  As an aside, Christiane’s mother recounted how her husband’s father described him as “a useless son of a bitch” and tried to warn her away from marrying him.

The father’s business doesn’t get off the ground, and Christiane’s family soon find themselves in a cramped apartment in the Gropiusstadt estate houses in the seedier part of West Berlin.  Fights between Christiane’s parents become increasingly violent, and she and her sister were often the subject of beatings given them by her father by the slightest provocation.

Eventually, Christiane’s mother separates from her husband and kicks him out of their tiny apartment.  Christiane reaches an age where she and her sister venture outside on their bicycles to a playground in their neighborhood.  They read a sign which delineates what times the playground is open.  It is closed by the time the girls leave school.  When they try to pedal around the park, they are chased away by the building manager.  Soon, the playground is torn up with a grass patch left in its place with the warning KEEP OFF THE GRASS.

Soon another playground is set up near the kids’ elementary school.  When the authorities find out the kids are innocently racing their bikes up and down the ramp at the playground, it is soon gated and chained off.  Eventually it is torn down and paved over.  The places where children can be children shrink further and further.

Christian and her sister go to a small ranch at the periphery of the complex area where they can ride horses they way they did in the sticks.  Once again, the ranch is closed down.  There is nowhere to run, ride, or play.

You may ask yourself, “Why the fuck was building management and the authorities so god damned cruel to these kids?  Don’t they realize they’re… well, kids?”  The answer given us by Christiane is frankly no.  The kids were seen as a nuisance.  Older kids caused trouble and no one wanted to pay the expense for some form of security detail.  As a result, Christiane and the others grew up and grew up fast.

Eventually, Christiane and her mother are by themselves when her sister elects to live with their father, who claims to have turned over a new leaf.  In the meantime, Christiane goes to school where she describes the kids as “more competitive than cooperative.”  The teachers barely pay attention to the kids, which spurs Christiane to be the greatest instigator of trouble in class.  She talks back to the teachers, even to the point of shouting and cursing at them.  When she gets in fights, she turns to the tactic of swinging her arms and scratching with her fingers as ferociously as she can.  Soon the teachers leave her alone and some of the kids look up to her as a cool rebel.

Christiane soon goes to a youth center in the basement of a Lutheran church whose intent is to provide a safe place for kids to get together and have a good time.  Christiane finds herself involved in a clique of kids who smoke weed and drop acid on the premises.  Where are the youth ministers and counselors, you ask?  Oh, they’re on site, but Christiane lets you in on a little secret about them:  In the sixties, they were all college kids who rebelled against mainstream society by dabbling in drugs when they weren’t convening at student protests.  How could these hypocrites police the drug ingestion of Christiane’s generation when they themselves indulged?  At least that was the rationalization Christiane and her friends would fling in the adults' faces.  The youth ministers and counselors, therefore, didn’t keep the kids on a tight leash.

Christiane describes her clique as loving and understanding.  They didn’t force drugs on the younger kids, but they didn’t shoo them away if they decided to take it.  These kids provided the warmth and support Christiane couldn’t get from the cutthroats at her school.  She spent her weekdays at school eagerly awaiting Saturday so she could hang out with her new friends.

When a new nightclub named The Sound was opened, Christiane and her friends moved their base of operations there.  Tiring of pot and acid, they soon turned to popping pills.  Christiane moved from one clique to another as the old gang was only held together by their former drugs of choice.

Christiane eventually establishes a dysfunctional tribe with her boyfriend Detlef, a hustler; four other junkie hustlers named Axel and Berndt with Stella and the “baby prostitute” Babsi.  Some, like Axel and Stella wear the ravages of addiction and abuse on their faces, while others like Babsi appear doll like and unblemished - for the time being.

Heroin is the adhesive that keeps the clique together.  When they are high the are convivial and loving towards one another, but between hits of “H” the knives come out.  Christiane reflects on her vicious rows with Detlef.

Detlef would say something like, “Do you really think I want to sleep with someone who sleeps with such nasty scumbags all the time?”  And then I’d respond with something like, “I’m not the one who gets butt fucked.” and so on.

Most of the time, one or both of us would end up crying.  And when one of us was going into withdrawal, then the other could really tear him or her down - until there was almost nothing left.

Things had gotten so bad… between Detlef and me, that we could see our own miserable, shitty selves reflected in the other.  Each of us hated the rotten mess he or she had become, and therefore attacked that same rotten mess in everyone else.

As time went by, Christiane and Detlef would witness each other’s face and bodies degrading as they lost weight and their eyes grew sunken.

Christiane and her young crew felt their vulnerability around the older, more callous junkies.  One, called “Rip-Off Man,” would even assault dealers to get his fix.  Christiane herself had an encounter with Rip-Off Man when he stalked her into the ladies’ room and mugged her just before she could inject herself.

Even in the pre-AIDS seventies, STDs were a concern for Christiane and her cohort.  Some johns wouldn’t do anything without a condom, yet at the same time girls caught a bug and feared going to the doctor, perhaps believing they would be handed over to the police.

Time and identity became a blur for Christiane during the holidays and the passage of 1976 into 1977.  She recounts, “I was totally numb at this phase….

“I didn’t think about anything… I didn’t feel anything or notice anything around me.  I was totally preoccupied with myself.  But I didn’t know who I was.  Sometimes I didn’t even know if I was still alive or not.”

Inevitably, Christiane’s mother discovered that she was a junkie after finding all of her drug paraphernalia in her battered handbag.  Christiane confessed everything but begged and haggled with her mom to go cold turkey with Detlef at the same time in her bedroom.  If you have already read my previous blog about the movie adaptation of Zoo Station (Christiane F. - Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo - 1981) I needn’t repeat the violent episode the two lovers undergo to leach the toxins out of their bodies without methadone to ease them down.  All they had at their disposal were sleeping pills, valium, quaaludes, and wine.

Now, I suppose you are asking in your enlightened frame of mind, “Why the fuck didn’t their parents bring them to the hospital?  Why didn’t they put them in a rehab clinic for treatment?  Most of all, WHY ARE CHRISTIANE AND DETLEF LEFT BY THEMSELVES IN THE SAME GOD DAMNED ROOM TOGETHER?”  The fact was that Christiane’s mother and Detlef’s father -  a government official, no less - simply did not have the frame of mind or the professional guidance to give them proper treatment.  I can’t say what the healthcare system was like in 70s West Berlin.  I wasn’t there.  Hell, in 1977, I was a four year old boy on a ticket holders line with my Pop to see Star Wars!  All I can say for certain was that drug counseling in the wake of the 1960s permissive society left a lot to be desired.

As Christiane and Detlef come down from the ordeal of withdrawal, they make plans for their future.  Christiane promises to return to school and work her way to college.  Detlev promises to return to his apprenticeship as a pipe fitter.  But what Christiane describes as “an invisible thread” leads them back to the Zoo to check in on Axel and Bernd.  Axel and Bernd congratulate the two for withdrawing from H, but an invisible thread tugs at the two hustlers back to their apartment to shoot up.  Christiane and Detlev tag along, already rationalizing how they will only take heroin in moderation and yet not get hooked.

In a brief interview in Zoo Station with Christiane’s mother illustrates how she could easily be deceived by her daughter’s behavior into thinking she wasn’t a drug addict.  She herself had been raised by a father with draconian family values, so she decided to raise Christiane with a freer rein.  She said that her boyfriend Klaus was highly suspicious of Christiane’s behavior, and expressed no surprise when she discovered her daughter’s “kit.”  While Christiane and Detlef suffered through the trauma of ordeal, her mother sought out help everywhere from the youth welfare office to a Catholic charity known as Caritas.  All the facilities came up empty handed.  The welfare office coldly told Christiane’s mother to put her in a home with other kids with the same problems.  She was wise enough not to leave her daughter in the hands of a “home,” yet she found herself completely helpless as to find a solution to Christiane’s addiction.

At present, I have only read half of Zoo Station.  I have been planning for some time to post this blog, and I think I should do so with alacrity because I believe some time will go by before I complete it.  My own addiction to social media impedes my ability to read a book cover to cover the way I used to… only five years ago.

So how to complete my impressions of Christian’s harrowing journey through the labyrinth of West Berlin and Zoo Station in particular?  I see a girl, no, an entire generation of youths who were not given the chance to enjoy childhood and grow up in a healthy environment.

As I pointed out, the increased constriction of places for Christiane and her peers to play as kids funneled them towards dives like Sound and into drug culture.  The negligible job prospects that didn’t appeal to boys like Detlef made them opt for the more dangerous world of prostitution where more money could be made with a few johns in a night than he would in a respectable field like pipe fitting.  It didn’t help that younger kids saw Christiane and her peers in a glamorous light.  Was it because they didn’t have to live a drab nine to five life in a cubicle or a factory?    There were and are a thousand stressors that impel a young man or woman to live the life of an addict and a prostitute.  They came from shitty estate houses where the lobbies were literally caked in shit.  They needed something, anything, to stimulate or dull their senses.

All I can say is, sometimes it takes something as simple as a playground to set a child on the right path in life.

- JJB