Icon: enlarge
Actress McKinnon (center)
:
Capricious unbreakability
Photo: Josef Fischnaller / Amazon Studios / Soap Images / Constantin Television
The junkie is actually a character who has fallen out of time.
The Taliban are financed by selling opium, and heroin is still being confiscated in Germany, so someone has to take it.
But it has disappeared from public perception and pop culture.
Our accelerated times tend to call for stimulants, cocaine and amphetamines.
Psychedelic drugs to think “outside of the box”, as they say in Silicon Valley.
Smoking weed to get down.
But heroin?
The zeitgeist is intoxicated elsewhere.
If you have an injection, then a vaccine.
Being fit and healthy beats being broken.
It is all the more astonishing that Amazon Prime Video, one of the global players in the world of series, is now reliving one of the biggest junkie sagas in pop history, "We children from Bahnhof Zoo".
And even more amazing: It turned out pretty well.
In 1978 the book appeared for which the then 16-year-old Christiane F. told two journalists about her life.
How she started smoking weed at the age of 12, took heroin at 13, hit the streets at 14.
She talked about addiction, emotional brutality, junkie friendships, sex and violence.
Strange hybrid creature
It was one of the greatest non-fiction successes of the post-war period,
stayed on the SPIEGEL bestseller list for a fabulous year and a half and was filmed in 1981 with the assistance of David Bowie.
Everyone who grew up in the eighties can remember it.
Of the horror of this story, of its peculiar attraction.
The producers Oliver Berben and Sophie von Uslar and the author Annette Hess (»Weissensee«) now had access to the entire recordings of the interviews from which the book was created - and they have created a large and peculiar hybrid.
Of course there is still the West Berlin darkness of the original.
But with all the artistry that the series narrative form offers, some of the local color has been rubbed off and the material turned into a universal story about youth, addiction, friendship and emotional indifference.
The story of Christiane and her friends is worked out with startling accuracy.
How familiar drama, boredom and thirst for adventure drive this girl and her friends onto the streets.
It's also great how the junkie intimacy is portrayed, this peculiar mixture of distrust and closeness, these relationships in which you get incredibly close, are at the same time best friend and worst enemy, ally in drug procurement, opponent in hoarding the material.
What's first sex compared to the intensity of shooting each other?
Capricious indestructibility
Jana McKinnon plays Christiane with capricious indestructibility, and Lea Drinda as her friend Babsi is reminiscent of Jean Seberg.
It's all located in a fantasy Berlin, where the graffiti on the walls announce bands that didn't even exist in the seventies, today's techno is played in the club sound and the dark wall units in the free apartments still tell of the gloom of the post-war era .
The leather jackets are undoubtedly from the seventies.
Two things, however, don't really fit.
First, the actors just look too good.
The junkie, as invented by the original book and the movie at the time, was an emaciated figure, someone who didn't participate.
A refuser who no longer believes that the world can be changed in a way that would be worth the effort to stop wrecking yourself.
And secondly, closely related to this: You are too old.
The shocking thing about "We children from Bahnhof Zoo" was that Christiane and her friends were actually children.
The baby stroke was called that for a reason.
However, the creators of the series have given up.
Jana McKinnon, who plays Christiane, is a good five years older than her role model.
Hopelessness
The beauty and age of the protagonists naturally help to follow the characters to the end.
Through all the shallows, all the free cars that Christiane and her friends get in, into all the greasy toilets where they shoot themselves and sink over the toilet bowl.
But a little too much of the dirt that shaped the original has been lost - but without the drawing of the characters having suffered as a result.
"We children from Bahnhof Zoo" played in West Berlin, this disused half-town in the shadow of the Wall.
It was a book (and later a movie) that was about hopelessness and claustrophobia.
About wanting to flee and not being able to.
The series "We children from Bahnhof Zoo" tells a story that could play anywhere and anytime.
From young people who want a different life.
About the high flight followed by the deep fall.
About the logic of drug addiction, the happiness and misery of the junkie.
From February 19th on Amazon Prime
Icon: The mirror
