Adventures in German TV: Kids on Drugs
I don’t remember when I first saw an advertisement for Amazon Prime’s Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo, but I remember thinking then and there that I was square in the bullseye of that target demographic, language barrier be damned. Vintage post-war Berlin and brooding youths behaving badly in a trailer full of rapid-fire cuts and bisexual lighting set to the new Isolation Berlin song… Honey, to that we say ja bitte.
Released in February, Amazon’s high-budget take on Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo is a reinterpretation of Christiane Felscherinow’s early autobiography, first published as a bestselling book of the same name by journalists Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck in 1978, then adapted for the screen in 1981. The book was intended as a warning to parents and a cautionary tale to West Germany’s disaffected youth, the latter of whom transformed Felscherinow into a cult figure and underground star.
Felscherinow’s tale of woe is shocking in large part because of her age. She is terrifyingly young for an addict and a prostitute, a factor the marketing consistently tapped into: Mit 12 Haschisch, mit 13 Heroin, mit 14 auf den Strich. (Hashish at 12, heroin at 13, on the streets at 14.) She’s now 58 and something of a recluse, living off monthly royalties. When she sits for the occasional interview she tells journalists she will die painfully and soon.
Amazon’s series picks and chooses pieces of her original story. Gone are Felscherinow’s younger siblings, though her abusive father stays. SOUND, the real low-ceilinged cellar disco that she and her friends frequented, is preserved in name alone, bearing minimal resemblance to the cavernous club on the show with its glowing bar and modern lighting installations. Her boyfriend Detlef is now named Benno. Perhaps sensing that viewers’ tolerance for watching prostituted minors is at an all-time low, producers age the clique slightly but not insignificantly. Babsi stays 14, but Christiane, played by 22-year-old Jana McKinnon, and the rest of her friends appear roughly 16 and older. It’s a selective retelling intended for heightened contemporary relevance, and you can tell because members of the cast are already in GQ talking about how relevant it is to today, even if they can’t articulate how very well.
In some ways, the timing of this reinterpretation feels off, or at least indifferent to the zeitgeist. For one thing, everyone’s interested in a very different class of drugs. Cannabis is thriving due to ongoing legalization efforts and the homebound conditions of pandemic life. Shroom- and ketamine-assisted therapy is gaining traction in the United Kingdom and Canada. (Taking ketamine without professional supervision is also positively mainstream.) Vice recently reported that Philip Morris is busy filing patents for e-cigarettes that specifically list multiple DMT compounds as “‘medicaments’ that could be used” in those devices. And it is both grotesque and completely normal given the circumstances that when people discuss “needles in arms” these days, they almost always mean Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson.
As such, drug stories in recent years have been bizarre and hallucinatory rather than traditionally gritty and fueled by the harder stuff. We’ve watched Florence Pugh wig out on trippy tea in the Swedish countryside in Midsommar and gorgeous dancers lose their minds after drinking surreptitiously LSD-spiked sangria in Climax. Maniac’s retrofuturist surrealism is set in motion by an experimental pharmaceutical trial. The Queen’s Gambit takes benzos for business and pleasure, all legal.
Heroin still has its pop moments. 2018 alone brought us Ben Is Back, Beautiful Boy, and 6 Balloons, none of which made a lasting impression on the public or at award shows. They don’t even come to mind when recalling what made 2018 a truly bonkers year in film: The Favourite, The House That Jack Built, Christian Bale as Dick Cheney and Chloë Sevigyny as Lizzie Borden, the Mamma Mia! sequel, mediocre remakes of Suspiria and A Star is Born, and full-frontal nudity from Chris Pine in Outlaw King. What a year!
I digress. However out of vogue heroin stories may be, troubled teenagers in compromising positions, sexual or otherwise, are all the rage. HBO’s Euphoria, which premiered in June 2019, has cornered the market of beautiful youths in skintight clothing suffering and swearing and snorting. It follows Rue, played by now-megastar Zendaya, through her miserable if varied drug addiction. She licks a gob of fentanyl off a tattooed dealer’s blade and scales the walls in a surreal K-hole party sequence. She’s admitted to rehab, which doesn’t exactly take. Writing for Vulture, Zachary Siegel deftly describes Rue’s addiction driven by a desire “not exactly [to] get high, but rather to unfeel.”
Euphoria is, to some degree, what Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo is trying to be. Edgy, raw, stylized, nihilistic, and disorienting, focused on a central figure (Rue/Christiane) but still an ensemble show. That ensemble is, by default, troubled, shrugging, and stylish. Christiane stomps around in a white and pink fur jacket. Stella dons a dark green trenchcoat and knee-high leather boots over fishnets. Benno wears button ups in statement patterns. There are a lot of medallions on the guys for some reason. Everyone goes to the disco night after night. School is an afterthought.
If you’re around my age, you’ll recognize a lot of what’s going on. Bahnhof Zoo is a teen drama dressed up as an adult show, familiar to those of us raised on the heyday of racy teen dramas that loved drugs and sex and tragedy and finding more dangerous things to do than homework — Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, The Vampire Diaries, Skins, hell, even Teen Wolf. Bahnhof Zoo scratches a particular nostalgic itch for those of us who once wanted our shows full of scandalous and melodramatic storylines in highly aestheticized settings set to of-the-moment indie rock. This also means it’s not quite the serious adult show about a barely teenaged drug addict and prostitute in grimy working class West Berlin that its title and source material implies.
Instead it’s closer in tone and structure to those pulpy teen dramas, replete with choreographed moments of high drama and big emotions. Halfway through the series, Benno and Christiane share their first kiss during a police raid at SOUND, a convergence of mutual attraction and the urgent need to furtively transfer the heroin Benno is holding in his mouth to Christiane before he is searched. As the exchange takes place, the camera snaps to the painfully closeted Michi (played by standout Bruno Alexander with the steely desperation of a trapped animal gnawing off its own leg), who loves Benno, looking furious and shocked, and then to Axel, who loves Christiane, himself helpless and defeated. A little manufactured, sure, but it gets the job done.
Let’s discuss the music for a moment. The show’s deliberately vague styling and fixation on being relevant manifests musically, thanks to a soundtrack full of 2010s teen drama indie rock that feels several years late. Case in point: “You’ve Got the Love” by Florence + the Machine soundtracks the final scene of Gossip Girl, whereas her “Dog Days Are Over” concludes Bahnhof Zoo. Jungle’s “Busy Earnin” plays while the squad scrambles through the bowels of a concert venue where David Bowie is performing. What does ’70s Bowie have in common with contemporary neo-soul group Jungle? No one knows. Every song not by Bowie feels salvaged from the ruins of Tumblr: “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala, Cigarettes After Sex’s “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby,” and “Silk” by Wolf Alice. In context, it’s a cliché. It feeds the anchorless-ness of the show, which doesn’t always have the desired effect of being relevant to both the worlds of its characters and its audience. Gen X-ers taking drugs to Lonerism is a hard sell, even here.
It’s difficult to use a popular song to not-overwrought effect, especially if it’s these phoned-in staples of 2010s TV. Needle drops of popular songs from any era work best when they’re used to uncanny or uncomfortably revealing effect — “Walking on Sunshine” in American Psycho, duh — or when the mood of the song and the scene it accompanies match so stylistically and lyrically precisely that it’s irresistible. Take Mad Men’s use of “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones as Don Draper steps into the Midtown sunlight wearing Ray Bans and the world’s crispest white shirt. Dee-licious.
Bahnhof Zoo’s musical ineptitude is unfortunate because it’s a show that desperately needs music to work. Instead it uses moody synths and Bloc Party to fill aimless visual stretches and signal obvious emotion. On Christiane’s first night at SOUND, the throbbing bass gives way to a soulful version of “Everybody’s Free.” After a verse or two, she and all her friends take flight, levitating between the disco ball and the outstretched arms of the dancers below. To which I sincerely thought, oh please, not the liberating power of dance again.
n.b. because this is Medium and I do what I want: Why they didn’t kill two birds with one stone and set the club scene to the smash club mix of “Everybody’s Free,” I don’t know. Also if this song-scene combo gives you déjà vu, it’s because this isn’t the first time “Everybody’s Free” has played while protagonists with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes make poor choices.
Then there’s all the David Bowie. Felscherinow loved Bowie as a kid and first tried heroin at his 1976 concert at Deutschlandhalle, an event indispensable to her biography. For her first real hit on the show, Christiane and the clique sneak into Deutschlandhalle, where they run maniacally and gleefully from a pair of cops because every junkie story needs a Trainspotting reference. (Choose life, et al.) To escape she dips into — wouldn’t you know it?! — David Bowie’s empty dressing room, where she is injected with heroin by a masked and black-clad figure who emerges from the walls. (This actually happens.) If it’s a grim reaper metaphor, it’s not a very good one. Elsewhere in the venue, Christiane’s friend Michi encounters Bowie himself at the urinals. In both cases, the situation is patently ridiculous, but it’s admittedly intriguing to watch. Even the lookalike Bowie is decent, although he’s a bit on the heavier side since the only way to achieve Bowie’s late ’70s physique is to actually subsist on cocaine, chili peppers, and milk.
Things fall apart, as they tend to in addiction narratives. The attempted detoxes look dreadful. The parents are either useless or absent when they’re not just straight-up dead like Babsi’s are, although her ghost dad shows up periodically to debate Bowie songs and the finer points of her death wish. Benno sells a piece of his father’s Nazi memorabilia for drug money, and later lands in prison for theft. The girls are in and out of an apartment owned by Günther, a middle-aged pet shop owner happy to trade drugs for sex on the wrong side of the age of consent. By the final episode he’s on trial for some combination of child pornography, solicitation of minors, etc. Stella’s character arc stretches from overworked daughter of an alcoholic mother to rape victim to gaunt prostitute to madame, consulting with and divvying up cash among her stable of underage girls. She starts to cut a profit, rents her own apartment, and shoos her younger sister away from the stretch of sidewalk where she pimps her girls. It plays like the world’s bleakest #girlboss glow-up.
Addiction narratives are, in a word, tricky. The contradictions are baked in. It’s impossible to perfectly describe the highs and lows of addiction to someone who has never experienced it, and those who have experienced it tend to be unreliable narrators, at least while actively engaged. We want these narratives to function as cautionary tales, and we often demand abject tragedy from them. Anything less will warrant accusations of glamorizing addiction. There is little in-between.
This is a false dichotomy. From no other narrative of vice do we demand such puritanical moralism and self-hatred. We love, for instance, stories about gangsters and white collar criminals that let us revel in their hedonistic excesses. It’s fun to watch! And it’s probably really fun to live! To be fair, there was some handwringing over whether or not The Wolf of Wall Street was critical enough in its depictions of the gazillionaire lifestyle, but the bottom line is those very depictions of Leonardo DiCaprio wearing Armani while face down in fake tits and Colombian cocaine made $392 million worldwide. And with two successful seasons down and another on the way, Succession proves there’s undeniable entertainment value in the flexing of indiscriminate greed and insatiable appetites.
In TV shows and movies like these, something always goes wrong. The mighty fall far and they fall hard, typically during the third act or season finales. This clears our consciences. By this logic, Henry Hill landing in witness protection with ketchup instead of marinara on his spaghetti absolves us of our genuine delight in watching him enjoy the fruits of criminal labor at the Copacabana. He is punished. We are forgiven.
This is nonsense. We need not be absolved of art, and art need not absolve us. Art does not implicate us in its politics or morals simply by presenting them to us. Nor by presenting something as fun or sexy does it automatically declare whatever it is morally right. If the group’s one last hit sequence looks like a dance-party-slash-semi-clothed-orgy worth attending, that’s because it absolutely was in that moment for the characters, and it’s not disingenuous or immoral to depict it as such.
What Bahnhof Zoo does well is reject this glamorize-moralize dichotomy. Everyone looks a little too put together to be a junkie, but not everyone makes it to the final episode. The sexy-grimy style of the show’s vaguely ’70s Berlin is interesting enough, and it doesn’t make the abuse and dysfunction of Christiane’s parents any easier to watch. Christiane’s jacket is perhaps a bit cleaner than it should be for someone nodding off on the floor of a public bathroom, but she’s still wearing it nodding off on the floor of a public bathroom. Looks aren’t everything.
More importantly, the show’s understanding of its teenage ensemble is surprisingly clear-eyed and empathetic. Christiane and her friends do drugs for the same reasons all young people do drugs. One, all their friends are doing it. Two, they’re bored. Three, they see the present as unremarkable at best and intolerable at worst, and if the future involves turning into their parents, then postponing it is imperative. The camaraderie and pleasure-danger heroin promises and initially provides assuages their fears of being alone and being a nobody, which is the same thing at that age. Shooting heroin is not simply a reaction to generation-wide disenfranchisement but the active expression of the newfound freedom teenage-hood has conferred upon them. It is a freedom so precarious they feel they must constantly perform it, not only through heroin but by banging out rhythms on the windows of a crowded U-bahn car and hot-wiring a carnival chair swing to ride through the cool night air.
Bahnhof Zoo doesn’t glamorize or romanticize, insofar as it is already glamorous and romantic to be young and wild and seemingly free, running around a big city with the boyfriend and friends you swear you’re going to know and love forever. Why pretend otherwise? When it’s time for things to get ugly, things on the show do indeed get ugly. That’s not moralizing. It’s what happens when you have a smack habit that you’re only able to fund through selling your body and stealing. Bahnhof Zoo isn’t shy about it characters’ abysmal situations, the predatory sex pests funding their habits for a price, or the shredding of already-strained familial ties in addiction’s name. Eventually they get clean or they don’t, and some of the ones that don’t, die. That’s a steadfast reality of heroin addiction on- and offscreen, and depicting it as such is realistic, not moralistic. And reality, however lavish or harsh, is no simple morality play.
Bahnhof Zoo gives Christiane a happy enough ending, one that makes a second season doubtful. But the show’s relative impact has been felt, however temporarily. For all the moaning about its lack of fidelity to its source material, the show catapulted the book to #5 on Amazon.de’s fiction bestseller list the week it premiered. In a benevolent PR move, Amazon donated €100,000 to Königberger 11, the Berlin addiction counseling center staffed by Thomas Haustein, the actor turned social worker who played Detlef (a.k.a. Benno) in the 1981 film. The show is no candidate for the upper echelons of pop culture’s addiction canon, but it’s pulpy and nervy and watchable enough.
Cue the Florence + the Machine hit from 2009. Sweep the camera over the dark blue cityscape. Roll credits.
