A heartbreaking, raw true story about 13-year-old Christiane F. who lives with her mother and little sister in a small apartment in a multi-story concrete social-housing building in a dull neighborhood in West Berlin. She's sick and tired of living there and has a passion for singer David Bowie. She hears of Sound, a new disco in the city center, labelled as the most modern discotheque in Europe. Although she's not old enough to get in, she dresses up in high heels and makeup, and asks a schoolfriend, Kessi, who hangs out there regularly to take her. Kessi also provides her with pills. At the disco, she meets Detlef, who is a little older and is in a clique where everybody experiments with various drugs; one night while running through the Europa Center they vandalize a ticket booth. The next day, Christiane takes pills and LSD, and goes to a David Bowie concert where she meets Babsi, who shares her interests and later will become first and the youngest victim of heroin in Berlin, and tries heroin for the first time by snorting it. As Christiane falls in love with Detlef, she begins using heroin on a regular basis in order to be close to him, gradually becoming more and more dependent on the drug until she is a full-blown addict. After her 14th birthday, Christiane stops going home and spends more and more time at her cohorts' unkempt apartment; she is also drawn to the Bahnhof Zoo, a large railway and subway station notorious for the drug trafficking and prostitution that takes place in its underpasses and backalleys. After spending some time doing prostitution and being highly addicted to heroin she successfully break free from that life when Babsi dies at the age of 14 due to overdose she and goes to live with her grandma on the country side.

To show the reality of what kind of hell drug addicts live in. I have never read anything more raw than Christiane's story about life and survival of an addict.

How brutally honest and vivid the book is. I couldn't stop reading it when I first got it from a highschool friend. It is one of those books that you have to process in one day and never get back to it anymore.

Cry. I went through an emotional turmoil while I was reading about what those kids were ready for to get just one fix who could easily be fatal one. They lived on the edge constantly and I felt like I'm on the edge of breakdown together with them as I was reading about their lives.

Upset. It was a first of this kind I have read and I wasn't prepared for anything. I knew that drugs do harm people but I had no idea how awful this life is and what addicts are capable of. I was completely shaken by brutality of Christiane's story.

Drug memoirs have long been a reliable mix of cautionary content, salacious detail, and voyeuristic thrill, and this new translation of the long-out-of-print Christiane F., first published in 1978 and something of a cult classic, delivers on every front. According to her book, Felscherinow was born in Hamburg, but her family moved to West Berlin when she was a child. They settled in Gropiusstadt, a neighbourhood in Neukölln that consisted mainly of high-rise concrete apartment blocks where social problems were prevalent. Felscherinow's father frequently drank large volumes of alcohol and was abusive towards his two daughters while her mother was absorbed by an extra-marital relationship.
When she was 12 years old, she began smoking hashish with a group of friends who were slightly older at a local youth club. They gradually began using stronger drugs such as LSD and various forms of pills and she ended up trying heroin. By the time she was 14, she was heroin-dependent and a prostitute, mainly at West Berlin's then-largest train station Bahnhof Zoo. During this period, she became part of a group of teenage drug-users and sex workers of both sexes.

It will open your eyes to the world of addiction. Believe it or not, this book was part of my highschool literature because professors thought it would be helpful if we, the kids, read about addiction from the point of view of another teenager and that it will trigger some kind of warning when it comes about drug abuse. It helped in my case. However, I can't say it worked with every other friend of mine..

If you are easily to be offended or if you are not interested in this kind of book types, or life of an addicts in general.

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Created Oct 15, 2017 at 1:05pm • Submit your own review...