Read Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. Online
Authors: Christiane F,Christina Cartwright
My mom, my aunt, and I, we all thought I'd landed in a corner of Germany that had been untouched by drugs—or at least by hard drugs. When the papers reported anything about heroin, it had happened in Berlin or Frankfurt. I looked at things the same way myself. I figured I had to be the only ex-junkie for miles around.
However, I grew to know better right after one of our first shopping expeditions. Early in 1978, we drove to Norderstedt —a kind of dormitory suburb of Hamburg, comprised of all-new high-rises—to go shopping. As I always did when we went on these road trips, I kept an eye on people who seemed like they were stoned. I'd been watching a couple of guys, and I was thinking to myself, Are they shooting up? Smoking pot? Or maybe
they're just students?
Before I got my answer, we went into a snack bar to get a hot dog. At one table, there were a few poor foreigners hanging around together. Two of them suddenly got up and moved to another table. I didn't know why, but I immediately had the feeling that heroin was involved. I made my aunt hurry up and leave without telling her about my suspicions.
Just a hundred yards further on, in front of a jeans shop, we walked right into the center of the Norderstedt heroin scene. There were junkies everywhere. Then I imagined that they were all looking at me. And that they had immediately recognized me as one of their own. I started freaking out. Heading for an all-out panic. I grabbed my aunt by the arm and told her that I had to leave immediately. She could kind of tell what was going on and said, “But why? You aren't involved with that sort of thing anymore.” I said, “Just drop it. I'm not ready for this yet.”
At that point, I already knew that I was done running. And when I knew that, I knew that I'd be able to stay away from heroin for the rest of my life if I wanted to. It shocked me that, despite my new resolve, they still had recognized me. So when I got home, I peeled off my clothes right away and scrubbed the makeup off my face. My high-heeled boots were fired—effective immediately. From that day, on I tried to look like the girls in my class.
But while at the club, I now hung out more frequently with the people who smoked pot and went tripping. Sometimes I smoked a pipe right along with them, and occasionally I “just said no.” I really liked these kids. Most of them were apprentices somewhere and came from the surrounding villages. They all had brains and were interested in using them—so they were nothing like the helplessly defeated students at the Hauptschule. They thought about things, about politics and issues. When I had
a conversation with any of them, I usually left excited, almost inspired. They were just good people. No one fought. The violence was elsewhere. This was a totally peaceful group.
One time—but only once—I asked some of them why we couldn't do what we were doing now without getting high. They blew me off. They said it was a stupid question. After all the shit that happens in the course of a day, how else were you supposed to relax?
They were all disappointed with their jobs. The one guy who wasn't was in a union and was working as an apprentices' ombudsman, he found meaning in his daily work. He looked after the interests of the other young people in that business, and that gave him satisfaction. He was also of the opinion that our society could be changed. He was on a pretty even keel. He didn't smoke at all, and when he drank it was usually just a glass of red wine.
The others didn't see any meaning in what they were doing. They were constantly talking about quitting. The only thing was, they didn't know what to do next. When they got off work, they were frustrated, bitter, and angry. When we got together, one of them always started talking about how he hated his boss or about how something had gone horribly wrong, until someone else would finally interrupt, “Enough about work!” Then a pipe would be passed around, and their postwork lives would begin.
I felt like in a way I was still better off than them. Sometimes I actually had some fun in school. On the other hand, I was just like them. There wasn't really any grand purpose behind all this studying and stress. By that time, it had become clear to me that I'd never be able to take my college exams or get into the Realschule. And I also knew that as a former addict, I wasn't eligible for a lot of the jobs I might be interested in later—no matter how well I did on my finals at the Hauptschule.
Still, when the time came, I did do well on my exams and got
really good grades before I left. It didn't earn me an apprenticeship, but I did get a temporary job (thanks to some law meant to keep unemployed young people off the streets). I haven't used heroin for almost a year. But I'm aware, of course, that it takes a couple of years before you're completely clean. And at the moment there are no big problems.
At night when we sit together, my friends and I, drinking wine and smoking, then all those small daily problems have a tendency to disappear. We talk about the books we're reading. We talk about the news and mysticism and whatever else comes up. We're all into Buddhism right now. We're looking for people who see the world in a different way than we do, so that we can learn from them. So far our own lives haven't proved to be quite what we'd hoped.
A girl in our clique is doing an apprenticeship as a nurse, and she brought some pills back one day. For a while, I was back on Valium. I won't touch acid, though, because I'm afraid to go on a horror trip. The others all seem to enjoy it.
There aren't any hard drugs in our small town. If anyone wants to get into that scene, they have to go to Hamburg. No one around has any H, so that makes it easy to avoid temptation. It's not like Berlin or Hamburg or even Norderstedt.
But if you're desperate to score, it's not really that hard. There are guys with connections. And sometimes a dealer passes through who has a real arsenal. If you ask somebody like that if he's got something to get high on, he'd most likely ask, What do you want? Valium, methadone, pot, acid, coke, or dope?
All the people that I hang out with these days believe they have the drug thing under control. There are definitely a few things that are different here than they were back at Gropiusstadt with all my old friends.
This new group is looking for something entirely different when they use drugs. It's not about getting away from ourselves now or numbing ourselves with pounding music and dancing. In
fact, for these guys, the atmosphere at The Sound would be like torture. It would be the opposite of a high. We all hate the city. We're into nature now. On weekends, we drive all over Schleswig-Holstein, and then we just park the car and start walking until we find a good spot. Often we end up on the moors, in places where nobody else would ever think to go.
But the best place of all—the place we all really love—is the limestone quarry. It's an enormous crater right smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. More than half-a-mile long, two hundred yards wide, a hundred yards deep. The walls of the quarry are almost entirely vertical. It's warm at the bottom. No wind. There are plants growing down there—plants like we've never seen anywhere else. Incredibly clear streamlets flow through this crazy valley. Waterfalls come right out of the walls. The water turns the walls a rusty red. Everywhere you look you can see these bizarrely shaped white rocks, some of which look like the bones of ancient animals—maybe even mammoths. The gigantic excavator and the conveyor belts—which made so much noise during the week—on weekends looked like they'd been hibernating underground for centuries. The limestone covered them all in a blanket of white.
When we go there, we're all alone. All alone in this crazy magical hole. The rest of the world is kept at bay by the steep, vertical limestone walls. There's no noise that can reach us from the outside. All we can hear is the water cascading down the quarry walls.
We always imagine that someday we'll buy this quarry, once the mining operation is closed down. We want to build our log cabins down here, put in a huge garden, tend to our pets, and make sure we'd have whatever we need to live on. Then we'd blow up the only path out of the quarry.
We wouldn't ever want to come up again anyway.
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2. Berlin-Kreuzberg was a neighborhood in West Berlin. Today it is an urban district within Berlin that was combined with Berlin-Friedrichshain to form Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.
3. Gropiusstadt is a subsection of Berlin devoted almost entirely to public housing. It was named after Walter Gropius, the architect who first envisioned the complex.
4. DDR stands for Deutsche Demokratische Republik—although most English speakers know this country more familiarly as East Germany. East Germany was dissolved and joined with West Germany in the German reunification on October 3, 1990—not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
5. One German pfennig was worth a little less than one US penny.
6. The Berlin Wall, which divided East Berlin from West Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
7. After sixth grade, students in Germany are divided into different schools, or tracks, depending on their performance up through sixth grade. The least difficult of these is known as Hauptschule; the intermediate track is called Realschule; and the most advanced college preparatory track is Gymnasium.
8. In the 1970s, the comprehensive school (called Gesamtschule in German) system was created as an alternative to the traditional three-way division of schools into Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. In this single system, students could study different subjects at different levels of difficulty.
9. College entrance exams (called Abitur in German) are taken at the end of twelfth grade and are required for attending university. Completing twelfth grade in Germany is roughly the academic equivalent of having completed approximately two years of college in the United States.
10. “Kessi” stems from the German word
kess
, which means someone who is brash and has a tendency to talk back.
11. A British glam rock band.
12. At the time, one German mark was equal to about $1.50–$2.00 US
13. The German student movement was a protest movement in the late 1960s in West Germany. German students had been largely conservative until the '60s, but protest movements across the world encouraged them to rise up against the perceived authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the German government, and the poor living conditions of students.
14. Hess is a state in Germany.
15. Wertheim and Karstadt were the names of two large department stores in Germany.
16. Tiergarten means “animal garden” or “Zoo” in German. It is a neighborhood in central Berlin.
17. Kurfürstenstrasse (Strasse means “street” in German) is not to be confused with Kurfürstendamm, which is a broad, long boulevard full of shops, houses, hotels, and restaurants. Kurfürstenstrasse is neither as famous nor as glamorous.
18. Stinger's German name was Bienenstich, which means “bee's sting.” Biene was slang for “girl.” He didn't care if he made a girl cry.
19. This is one of the most famous avenues in Berlin—a very broad, long boulevard full of shops, houses, hotels, and restaurants. Before the Wall was dismantled, especially, this avenue was comparable to the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
20. The Europacenter is an office and shopping center in West Berlin. It had an ice-skating rink until 1979.
21. Hermannplatz is a subway station in the Neukölln district of Berlin. It is one of the busiest stations in the Berlin subway system.
22. A cultural region, but also one of the states within Germany.
23. A mountainous, mostly forested region in southwest Germany, part of the German state of Baden-Württemberg.
24. Thrombosis is a coagulation (clumping or curdling) of the blood inside the vein or any other part of the circulatory system.
25. Methadone is used to prevent withdrawal symptoms in people addicted to opiate drugs who want to stop taking the drugs. It works as a substitute for drugs such as heroin by producing similar effects and preventing withdrawal symptoms in people who have stopped using these drugs.
26. The Kaufhaus des Westens, or Department Store of the West. At the time, it was the largest department store on the European continent.
27. Street heroin may be very “impure,” containing a variety of other chemicals like calcium oxide, ammonia, chloroform, etc., that may cause unexpected side effects.,
28. The Grunewald (German for “green forest”) is a quarter within the Berlin borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.
29. Caritas International is a confederation of 165 Catholic relief, development, and social service organizations operating in over 200 countries and territories worldwide.
30. Schwarzkopf was a well-known hair product store.
31. West Berlin, as an “island” within Communist East Germany, had a strong presence of American, French, and British troops (known as the Allied Forces), which regularly held military parades in order to maintain a high military profile.
32. The public bathrooms on Bülow Street were one of the many places in Berlin that Christiane F. made famous because of her life story.
33. Berlin's Winterfeldtplatz, named after the Prussian General Hans Karl von Winterfeldt, is a pleasant, leafy square in the borough of Schöneberg. The majority of the square was destroyed in the war, but it still possesses a curious architectural mix, from the '60s-style social housing that runs along one side to distinctive landmarks like the red-brick St. Matthias church, one of the few free-standing Catholic churches in Berlin, and the residential house (and associated buildings) constructed by renowned “green” architect
Hinrich Baller.
34.
Kojak
was an American television series starring Telly Savalas as a bald New York City Police Department detective named Lieutenant Theo Kojak. It aired from October 1973 to March 1978 on CBS and was a popular TV series in Germany.