"Me, Christiane F., 13, drug addict, prostitute": the book becomes a series
The series “We, the children of the zoo station” tells the story of Christiane Felscherinow who inspired the book “Me, Christiane F., 13 years old, drug addict, prostitute”.
© 2020 Constantin Television GmbH
Text by: Pascal Thibaut Follow
4 min
“Me, Christiane F., 13, drug addict, prostitute”: the documentary book published in 1978 remains the most widely read in post-war Germany.
Its film adaptation three years later has been seen by millions of people.
This tragic true story has grown into an eight-episode "We the Kids at the Zoo Station" series, launching this Friday on Amazon Prime in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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From our correspondent in Berlin
,
With this shocking book, it is a hidden side of well-polished West Germany that is presented in its most gruesome details.
Of course, the drug and its damage were known.
But in this station of the zoo -Bahnhof Zoo- in Berlin, passers-by in a hurry did not necessarily know that barely puberty young girls but also boys prostituted themselves for a few dozen Deutsche Marks to buy various drugs including heroin whether they injected themselves in the arms or elsewhere in the putrid toilets of this unwelcoming building.
Christiane Felscherinow, 58 years old today, grew up in an outlying city of West Berlin in a family with problems.
With her friends, also marked by family violence, alcohol and other things, she finds in clubbing and drugs an escape from an unpromising future.
She is the only one to have survived but has fallen back into drugs on several occasions.
The book
Moi, Christiane F., 13 years old, drug addict, prostitute was
released in 1978. 95 weeks remained at the top of the bestsellers.
It has since sold nine million copies and has been translated into around 20 languages.
It has been a must read for many students.
In 1981, a young director brought the story of Christiane F. to the screen.
Five million people will see the film.
The series, forty years after the film
The series lasts more than seven hours.
It bears the name of the book in German namely
We, the children of the zoo station
.
And the will of the screenwriters - who are inspired by true history but are only inspired by it - is to paint a portrait of the other young people around Christiane F. and to accompany them over several years.
It is therefore the portrait of a group or even a generation.
Moreover, the time marks fade in the film with music from the time, starting with David Bowie who then lived in West Berlin, but also more contemporary sounds.
The same goes for the clothes or expressions of actresses and actors.
The idea is therefore to show that these stories are not the expression of an outdated era but still topical in a Berlin where drugs are still very widespread.
A series that should be successful
One could fear the commercial exploitation of a myth of the last decades, even if the story is tragically real.
But the series by not focusing only on Christiane F. but by portraying the other protagonists gains in depth.
Young actresses and actors are remarkable for their acting. And if they are not or little known, which allows their characters to remain in the foreground, we will no doubt find them in the future.
The images and the settings are remarkable like the use of surreal scenes where the 1981 film took on the features of a documentary.
It is not yet known if and when the series will be released in markets other than the Germanic countries.
But the notoriety of Christiane F. as the quality of the series suggest that such releases are to be expected.
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