I ended up with about 90 pages of notes and so much more to say than what could reasonably fit into a podcast episode. This will be part 1 of 3. Dreams in the Which House is a reader-supported publication.
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I came to Christiane F late. I imagine that German readers of this newsletter who are years older than me were made to go see the movie when it first came out in , and many who are only years older probably read the book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo in school.
I imagine many of them owned the soundtrack album with new tracks from David Bowie. But perhaps more accurately, it probably was felt to be historic, with its David Bowie concerts and punk jargon and the divided Berlin.
But in a way, her world was still very much ours — maybe more so than adults were willing to fully own up to. Because heroin — and the broader historic moment whose fears it epitomized — feels like it lasted a long time in Germany. You saw graffiti and Mohawks and studded leather jackets in Germany for far longer than even in parts of the US that transitioned from punk fairly directly into riotgrrrl into grunge.
And you saw junkies, heard about people being junkies, had friends who became junkies. Germany was largely spared the crack epidemic, and pretty much until ecstasy really hit the market in the early s the drug our parents were scared of was heroin. The Age of Christiane F. The host, the wonderful Sarah Marshall, asked me whether I thought that that wave of cultural fixation on heroin was a moral panic, whether, in other words, Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was a moral panic book.
