Christiane F.: Up Against the Wall

Christiane F. then takes viewers on a ride from the periphery of West Berlin to its center, following Christiane to Sound, the entry point for her descent into the underground world of drugs and sex work. This ride is figured through successive tracking shots recorded by cameras mounted on the side and front of a subway car moving along elevated tracks against the backdrop of the night city, recalling similar panoramic shots in Walter Ruttmann’s landmark film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), which begins with the arrival of a train in the metropolis. These shots suggest a form of virtual tourism, offering viewers proximity to the desolate thrills of the city in which Christiane is soon immersed.

Born in Hamburg in 1962, the real-life Felscherinow moved with her parents to West Berlin as a child. Growing up in the Gropiusstadt, she began smoking hash at the age of twelve, and by thirteen she was using heroin, supporting her addiction through sex work. In 1978, Felscherinow told her story to the journalists Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck, who published it first as a serialized feature in the magazine Stern and later in book form as Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Zoo Station, 1979). Framed as a memoir told in Felscherinow’s own words, with additional sections written by her mother and a youth pastor, Hermann and Rieck’s narrative became the top-selling nonfiction book in the history of West Germany. Estimates suggest that more than twenty million West Germans—nearly a third of the population—read Felscherinow’s story in either magazine or book form, and it was subsequently translated into numerous languages.

The book’s resonance derives from its authentic account of the increasingly dismal drug scene in West Berlin, which saw more overdoses than any other European city in the late 1970s. A by-product of youth unemployment and Cold War ennui, addiction also drove the child prostitution and petty crime that ran rampant on the so-called Babystrich around Zoo Station. Although Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was billed as a cautionary tale, its cult status was certainly fueled by both trauma voyeurism and, on the part of young readers, a fervent attraction to its antihero protagonist. The newspaper Die Zeit referred to the book as “the bible of the tennis-shoe generation”—a German term for Generation X—even comparing it to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classic novel of youth rebellion, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

For Bernd Eichinger, the young producer who acquired the rights to Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo and played a key role in its creative development as a feature film, the book’s sensational treatment of controversial social problems and its remarkable popularity made Felscherinow’s story ripe for adaptation. With Christiane F., which became the top-grossing film of 1981 in West Germany, Eichinger patented a strategy of producing adaptations of major best sellers that would make him the most successful German producer of the contemporary period, ushering in a shift away from the auteur-driven aesthetic experiments of the New German Cinema and toward commercially oriented genre films.

Eichinger initially hired the filmmaker Roland Klick to write and direct Christiane F. on the merits of Supermarket (1974), a crime thriller about young people on the streets of Hamburg. Shortly before shooting began, however, Eichinger decided that Klick’s vision for the film was incompatible with his own and parted ways with him, necessitating a new screenplay and a new director. Eichinger turned to two of his friends from the University of Television and Film Munich, the screenwriter Herman Weigel and the director Uli Edel, both of whom shared his passion for mainstream American film. Edel had discovered cinema during his teenage years at a strict Jesuit boarding school and, after graduating from film school in 1974, began working in television. Christiane F. was Edel’s first feature film for the cinema, and its success laid the groundwork for his subsequent career as one of Germany’s most assured film and television directors, known for his distinguished oeuvre of transnational and multilingual productions. As a frequent collaborator with Eichinger, Edel directed a series of successful screen adaptations, including Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).