Christiane F – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (4 Stars)

This film is based on the autobiography of Christiane Felscherinow about her experiences as a 14-year-old heroin addict. The film is interesting to me, because it takes place in 1976 to 1977 at a place that I visited several times a week. The events related in the film were happening all around me, but I was blind to them.

Bahnhof Zoo was the main train station in West Berlin until the reunification in 1990. After that it gradually lost importance, because it was too far from the new centre of Berlin. Trains were diverted to other stations which had previously been in East Berlin, especially the Friedrichstrasse Station. Since the completion of the new Berlin Central Station in 2006, Bahnhof Zoo is barely used. There have been repeated calls for it to be torn down, but due to its cultural importance it will probably remain standing.

When I arrived in West Berlin in September 1976, the first I saw of Berlin was Bahnhof Zoo. It was also my first experience with German police. I had the address of someone I would be staying with until I found a room. It was about 6 am. I saw two policemen walking in the station, so I asked them where the street was. I realise in retrospect that it was a stupid question, because West Berlin was a city with 3.5 million inhabitants and so many streets that it's impossible to know them all. The reaction of the policemen was a mixture of arrogance and rudeness. They looked at me, then they looked at each other, then they walked away without replying. Since that day I've disliked the German police.

After that I sat outside the station at a café and drank a Fanta. I can't see the café in the film, but I remember roughly where it was. Were Christiane F and her friends running around while I was naively sipping my overpriced drink in a new city? I don't know. What I do know is that I caught the U-Bahn (underground train) to Bahnhof Zoo every day, and from there I walked to the university where I was studying.

Christiane is 13 when the film starts. Like any young teenage girl, she wants to be an adult. She puts on make up and goes to Berlin's biggest discotheque, Sound. The security is lax. They ask her if she's 16. She answers Yes, and they let her in. (16 is the minimum age for visiting nightclubs in Germany, but anyone under 18 has to leave at 10 pm).

Do you think she looks like she's 16? Hardly. She was played by the 13-year-old actress Natja Brunckhorst in her first film. Watching the film today, I have to say that she was perfect for the role. Katja Bienert also auditioned for the role, and she was favoured because three years earlier she'd appeared in the unofficial adaptation of the biography, "Die Schulmädchen vom Treffpunkt Zoo" (engl. "The schoolgirls who meet at the Zoo train station"). Eventually she was turned down because she looked too old. I'm a big fan of Katja Bienert, but I agree with the decision. The new film wasn't the right type of role for her. In the film Christiane starts out as a pretty 13-year-old, but she ends up as an ugly 14-year-old. Katja Bienert could never look that ugly.

Heroin destroys. There are other illicit drugs, some more dangerous than others, but heroin is the drug that has the biggest and most drastic effect on its addicts. When I lived in Birmingham I knew a drug dealer called Alexis Thomas, the son of a friend of mine. He introduced my wife to crack and heroin. She said that she "just wanted to try it", but she was soon hooked. This is what destroyed my marriage. She repeatedly said that she wanted to give up drugs, but she couldn't. I can't blame her for that. If I'd been taking heroin I wouldn't have been able to stop either. With heroin it's important that you don't start.

I remember meeting Alexis' girlfriend, Maisie. She told me, "Everyone says that heroin's bad, but it's wonderful and totally harmless". I asked her how long she'd been using heroin. "One week", she replied. I wonder what she would say to me today, if she's still alive.

Christiane made her first contact with drugs in Sound. First marijuana, then LSD, then heroin. It wasn't a slow decline, it was a rapid crash. She and her boyfriend Detlev injected themselves together, sharing their needles. Their friends began to die around them, but that didn't stop them. Not permanently, anyway. In early 1977 Christiane and Detlev went cold turkey with the help of her mother. They became clean again. Then they met their friends at Bahnhof Zoo, and they told themselves that they could still use heroin occasionally, as long as they remained in control. One injection was all that it took to renew their addiction.

"Dedicated to Andreas W, Axel W and Babette D, and to everyone else who wasn't lucky enough to survive".

David Bowie assisted in the making of the film. He appears in a concert where he's looking down at Christiane from the stage, but it's more than that. He was personally interested in the film, because he'd lived in Berlin from 1976 to 1978. At this time he too had been struggling to overcome his drug addiction, so he remained closely involved on the film set giving advice to the cast and crew.

A slight fault in the film is that David Bowie's music is overused. I have no problem with his songs being used as background music for the film, but it seems artificial that every time Christiane walks into Sound a David Bowie song is being played.

Maybe this film deserves a five star rating. Probably it does. It's an intense film from beginning to end. However, I have to give it a lower rating for personal reasons. I find drug use abhorrent. The use of drugs in the film is explicit. It needs to be explicit to tell a message, but it makes the scenes too unpleasant for me to enjoy. As good as the film is, I can't watch it very often. Today is the first time I've watched it since 2006, and I don't think I'll watch it again for years. It churns my stomach.