The story of a girl’s descent into drug addiction and prostitution in 1970s West Berlin, which became a bestselling book and cult film across Europe, is returning to screens in a modern remake.
Christiane Felscherinow’s lengthy taped interviews with two journalists formed the backbone of the book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, which was published in 1978 and made into a film directed by Uli Edel in 1981. An eight-part series with the same title launches in German on Amazon Prime on Friday evening.
Edel’s original grim and gritty low-budget film, which used mostly first-time actors and had a soundtrack by David Bowie, shocked critics and audiences with its decrepit depictions of a lost generation of Berlin youth who turned to heroin.
In one scene, the 14-year-old protagonist Christiane and her fellow addicts inject themselves in toilet cubicles, surrounded by their own and others’ urine, blood and vomit, before falling unconscious.
Some observers later accused the film of glamourising 1970’s West Berlin as a mecca of sex, drugs and experimental music. But for those who knew the city at the time it accurately portrayed the sense a lonely cold war island, surrounded by the Berlin Wall and cut off both from eastern and western Europe – a draw to drop outs, rejects, military deserters and artists.
Critics have inevitably asked what is to be gained by giving the story a new filmic treatment.
The leftwing newspaper Die Tageszeitung insisted it was impossible for the remake to have such a cultural, social and political impact as its forerunner. “This new series will never be able to leave its mark like the 1981 film did”. “Is it really necessary to give a new language to 40-year-old iconic material which influenced a whole generation and to place it in the here and now?”
The makers of the new series, which was filmed in Prague and Berlin, insist they are not so interested in recapturing the mood of the original as they are in embracing the essence of a universal story about young people finding their place in the world. “This is our interpretation of what Christiane and her friends experienced at this time,” director Philipp Kadelbach said in an interview.
Although the story continues to be set in West Berlin of the late 70s and early 80s, the connection has been deliberately blurred with a soundtrack that replaces Bowie with dancehall, punk and hip-hop from the last twenty years. The slang terms used by the actors mixes phrases from the present day and the early eighties. Critics have warmly praised the performances of its young actors.
Jana McKinnon, the 22-year-old Austrian-Australian actress who plays the lead role, said that she had not met Christiane Felscherinow, who still lives in Berlin, but had read her book and consulted the two journalists from Stern magazine who had interviewed her in preparation for the role, as well as consulting experts’ advice on drug taking.
“At the time the journalists struggled to find a publisher for the book because no one thought the story was relevant,” McKinnon said in an interview.
Felscherinow shot to fame when her story first became known.
In 2013 she published a sequel, Christiane F. My Second Life, which detailed her subsequent troubles, including losing custody of her son and how she joined a methadone programme to try to kick her habit. Over the years she has remained reluctant to talk about whether she is still a heroin user.
Her story has inspired guided tours of the Berlin locations where it took place, including Jebenstrasse at the Zoologischer Garten railway station, where the so-called “Babystrich” gathered, the strip in the Schöneberg district where Felscherinow worked as a prostitute to fund her drug habit, as well as the nearby Sound, the nightclub in West Berlin in the 1970s where she first discovered heroin.
