Christiane F. - My second life

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christiane F. - My second life

description Autobiography
language German
publishing company Deutscher Levante Verlag (Germany)
Web link www.christiane-f.com

Christiane F. - My second life is the autobiography of Christiane Felscherinow , who became known as Christiane F. in the late 1970s . The book, published in 2013, is the continuation of the bestseller Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo , published in 1978 . My second life was written by the journalist Sonja Vukovic after interviews with Felscherinow.

Structure of the book

The book is in no chronological order. Instead, each chapter represents a chance Christiane had in her life to break out of the vicious circle between drugs, social neglect and prostitution. While some chapters show how many chances in their life the opiate addict seems to have simply missed, others raise the question to what extent society also plays a role in Christiane F.'s repeated identification with being a junkie, and whether or not she has ever had a real chance because of the stigma of being Germany's most famous junkie .

action

The first chapter, Islands of Hope , tells of how Christiane fled her past to Greece after the success of the book We Children from Zoo Station . There she falls in love with a man who walks in the footsteps of Odysseus across the Greek islands. His name is Panagiotis, and he is five years older than her. A beautiful Greek who, as a teenager, joined hippies passing by in order to escape the narrowness of his home village on the Albanian border. The couple love each other dearly, live wild and free in tree huts. They cook around campfires and sleep on beds made from insect repellent herbs like oregano and thyme under the stars and on the beach. But soon the past catches up with them. Because Panagiotis had also tried the drugs of the hippies - up to heroin .

"Damn" is the title of the second chapter. It reports cruelly and openly about the everyday hell of a long-term opiate addict. It breaks with the idyll of the first chapter and makes it clear that life in paradise cannot have had a happy ending. Christiane was plagued by severe cirrhosis of the liver , pain and loneliness. She has suicidal thoughts.

The third chapter is the first subject chapter of the book. These subject chapters differ in typography and paper color from the other chapters in the book. It was written by the journalist Sonja Vukovic. It provides background information that the reader may need in order to be able to fully understand the reality of life of the now 51-year-old Christiane F. The chapter entitled “Myth Christiane F.” explains what actually made the “Bahnhof Zoo” so successful and how the likeable anti-heroine cast a spell over millions of people. It also sheds light on how quickly Christiane Felscherinow earned the dubious fame of a celebrity junkie, achieved star cult and met stars such as David Bowie , Depeche Mode and Nena . After all, Christiane always falls back into her old life - also because the public only interested in whether she was still a junkie or not. But not what else she is but a junkie. It becomes clear that Christiane had to fight again and again against a part of herself that will sooner or later kill her, but at the same time nourishes her and brings her reputation.

“Zigzag” describes Christiane's time in which “We children from Bahnhof Zoo” was created and shortly afterwards. So those years from their 16 to 21 years of age. It becomes clear that - unlike the book and film "We children from Bahnhof Zoo" suggest in the end - she never became a refined member of the ideal world of her grandmother in Kaltenkirchen. Instead, she moved to a shared apartment in Hamburg's St. Pauli neighborhood with stars of punk music , tried her hand at being a singer and actress and switched to a new drug, cocaine .

The second chapter is called “Scene Professionals” . It sheds light on how Christiane F., the anti-heroine she was celebrated as, threw a light on a part of German society that until then had not been admitted to exist. It also explains how the drug scene has changed since 1978, which drugs are in circulation today and which drug policy is being pursued in Germany, Europe and within the framework of the UN. A big topic is the global fight against drugs, which according to recent studies has failed. Those affected now want more acceptance and help for self-help instead of repression and stigmatization, it is explained.

Hardly any chapter shows Christiane's inner conflict and ambivalence as clearly as the chapter "Anna" . The distinguished Swiss publisher's wife Anna Keel , whose husband Daniel Keel was once a co-founder of the world-famous Diogenes Verlag, wants to get to know the girl from the book “We Children from Bahnhof Zoo” because it was the only book that her two sons had ever read. The two women get on so well that Christiane visits Anna Keel, who is more than twenty years her senior, in Zurich - and stays. Christiane commutes between Zurich and Berlin for four years, dining at the Keels' house with Patricia Highsmith , Patrick Süskind , Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Loriot, among others . She deals with art and goes to the opera - but at some point she will also be drawn to the Platzspitz , the largest open drug scene in Europe at the time. In the park between Sihl and Limmat, not far from Zurich main station, up to 3,000 junkies from all over the world meet every day. The chapter ends with Christiane being tried for having been caught with heroin several times. After all, she has to go to jail and, more than twenty years after these stories, remembers that she never thanked the Keels. Anna and Daniel Keel are now dead.

The following information chapter "Eerie Bazaar" explains exactly what the international shadowy world looked like into which Christiane immersed herself on Zurich's Platzspitz.

Christiane unexpectedly portrays the prison sentence in "Plötzensee" as a kind of cure. She writes that she felt freer in prison than she ever was in freedom. But that does not reduce the violence that she experienced there. With the help of the struggle for survival in the penal system, the chapter clearly shows how intelligent Christiane is and describes an unexpected love.

What has already been suspected up to this point is sadly confirmed in the ninth chapter: In truth, Christiane Felscherinow and Sonja Vukovic break with the title of the book, Christiane F.'s “Second Life” is tragically only a continuation of the first. But despite all excesses, she copes with one thing very well: to be an honest and loving mother. At the age of 34, after abortions and miscarriages, Christiane becomes a mother. That turns her world upside down, finally gives her meaning and stability and the boy is developing splendidly. So there is, after all, the other, better life - namely that of your son. "It was the only thing I ever succeeded in," says Christiane F. about her son. The boy is the greatest love and the only real chance Christiane has ever had.

But Christiane F. cannot seize this opportunity either. In 2008 she loses custody of her then 12-year-old son. But this time it is not drug addiction that tears her out of her luck, because she has been in a substitution program for years and is only receiving a small dose of methadone . As she has just steered her life in order and seems to be happy, the stigma becomes her undoing: Christiane F. wanted to flee from the dubious fame as “Germany's most famous junkie”, emigrate, be far away from the “Christiane” F. thing ". She asked her son where he would like to live, and because he wanted the same weather and a similar culture and language as in Germany, Christiane decided on Amsterdam. She prepares everything meticulously, undertakes a first trip to Amsterdam without the boy in order to clarify on the spot what she has to do in order to emigrate there. There, among other things, she is given the tip to properly de-register her boy from school in Germany. When she does that, the management sounds the alarm at the youth welfare office, which then takes the boy away from her. But Christiane takes him back, kidnaps him from the youth welfare office and escapes to Holland with the help of a dubious friend. When, after six weeks, she has no more cash and neither renting an apartment nor registering at a school are successful, she surrenders and wants to put her boy back into the care of the youth welfare office.

But when the family helper hears that she is sitting on the train back to Berlin, the office wants to make sure that she doesn't change her mind and uses police violence to get the child off the train in Wuppertal. A world collapses for Christiane. “I didn't even want to live anymore,” she writes. At that moment it does not occur to her that she can get her son back. Desperate, she relapses again, the media besieged her apartment in Brandenburg for days and Christiane's mother terminates contact with her daughter via a newspaper interview.

The chapter "My shadows" tells that Christiane F. feels persecuted by the press and other people.

Another chapter follows: "We old people from Bahnhof Zoo" deals with the fact that heroin addicts no longer necessarily have to die early due to prevention and substitution, but also live to be 60 years and older. But in Germany there are only a few care offers for these people, which society has to take care of according to the Social Security Code when they get old and in need of care. In addition, the approval of methadone, Subutex and, above all, pharmaceutical heroin as a substitute for severely dependent people has met with criticism in most countries. The technical chapter explains what these substances are and whether they actually help out of the heroin addiction.

"My second life" ends with the "Toxitus" . Christiane managed to complete a substitution program again and regain custody of her son. She wants to experience how the 17-year-old is doing his Abitur. But she is now also fighting a serious illness: She knows that her liver will soon fail and that one day it will be completely poisoned - a consequence of hepatitis C, which she contracted from an infected needle many years ago.

literature

Web links