Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (2 page)

It was all incredibly exciting. My mom had been packing suitcases and boxes for days. We were going to start a new life together.

I had just turned six, and I was going to start attending school right after we finished with the move. While my mom was packing and getting more and more anxious, I hung out almost every day on the Völkl farm. I waited for the cows to be herded into the barn for milking. I fed the pigs and the chickens, and ran around and played crazy games in the hayloft with the other kids. I was able to carry the farm's kittens around with me. It was a wonderful summer, the first one that I remember consciously enjoying.

I knew that we were going to leave soon and move to a large faraway city named Berlin. My mom flew ahead because she wanted to set up the apartment first. My little sister and my dad and I followed a couple of weeks later. It was the first time that my sister and I had ever flown anywhere. Everything was unbelievably exciting.

My parents had told us wonderful things about the huge apartment with the six big rooms that we'd soon be living in. My parents were going to make a lot of money in Berlin. My mom said that we would each have our own big room. They were going to buy really nice furniture. She would describe what our rooms would look like in vivid detail. I know, because as a kid I never stopped fantasizing about that room. In my imagination, it became more and more beautiful with every passing day.

I'll never forget what the apartment looked like when we actually arrived. I felt this deep-seated fear when I was in it. It was so big and empty that I was afraid I would get lost. If you spoke loudly enough, there was a spooky echo, too.

Only three rooms had any furniture in them. In the kids' room there were two beds and an old kitchen cabinet for our toys; in the second room was my parents' bed; and in the biggest room we only had an old couch and a couple of chairs. That's how we lived in Berlin-Kreuzberg,
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on the north bank of the Spree River.

After a few days, I finally took a chance and rode my bike down the street all by myself because I saw a few of the older kids playing outside. In the town where I grew up, the big kids always looked out for the little kids, and played with them. But right away the kids out front said, “What's she want here?” and took away my bike. When I got it back it had a flat tire and a bent rim.

My dad spanked me because the bike was broken. From then on, I only rode my bike around our six rooms.

Three of the rooms were actually supposed to function as an office because my parents wanted to run a dating service out of the apartment. But the desks and armchairs that my parents talked about never arrived. The kitchen cabinet stayed in the bedroom that I shared with my sister.

One day a moving truck arrived, and the couch, beds, and kitchen cabinet were all transported to one of the tall apartment buildings in Gropiusstadt.
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So now, instead of living in the big place in Berlin-Kreuzberg, we were confined to two and a half small rooms in an eleventh-floor apartment. The big, expensive furniture that my mom always talked about would've never fit into the room now meant for us kids.

Gropiusstadt: the projects. Home to 45,000 people, but mainly just a forest of high-rises, with some patches of green and shopping centers in between. From far away, it looked new and well taken care of. But when you got up close, you realized that the whole place reeked of piss and shit—because of all the dogs and kids that lived there. The stairwells smelled the worst.

My parents hated the trashy kids who treated the staircases like their own personal bathrooms, but most of the time it wasn't their fault. I figured that out the first time I played outside and needed to pee. By the time the elevator arrived and I'd made it up to the eleventh floor, I'd already wet myself. My dad gave me a spanking. After the same thing happened a few more times, and after a few more spankings, I learned to just find a place where nobody could see me. And since people in high-rises could see almost everywhere, the safest place to pee out of sight was in a staircase.

On the streets of Gropiusstadt, I was known as the stupid country kid. I didn't have the same toys as everyone else—I didn't even have a water gun. I wore different clothes. I talked differently.

And I wasn't used to the games they played (but I also didn't like them). In the town where I grew up, we would ride our bikes into the woods, to a bridge over a little stream. When we got there, we'd build dams and forts—sometimes together and sometimes apart, but always side by side. And when we destroyed everything afterward, it was only after everyone had agreed to it, and we'd have fun tearing it all down. We didn't have a leader. Anyone could make suggestions for what kind of game we should play. Then we'd all argue back and forth until someone's suggestion won out. It wasn't even unusual for the older kids to let the younger ones have their way once in a while. We'd created a real democracy amongst us kids.

In our section of the Gropiusstadt projects, there was one boy who was definitely in charge. He was the strongest and he also had the best water gun. We liked to play this game where we would pretend to be a gang of robbers, and he would always be the leader (of course). The most important rule for all of the other robbers was that they had to do whatever he said.

But it didn't matter what kind of game we were playing—we were always competing with each other. The goal was to always try to annoy somebody else. So we'd do things like try and steal or break someone else's toys. The name of the game was superiority: beating people up to show you were bigger and stronger than they were, and finding other little advantages that made you look better than everybody else. It was a dog-eat-dog world.

If you were the weakest, you'd obviously get the most abuse. My little sister wasn't very strong, and she always looked scared, so people picked on her, but I couldn't really help.

Then I started school. I'd been looking forward to it. My parents had told me to behave and to always do what the teachers said, but I thought that was a given. In the town where I came from, the kids respected the adults as a matter of course. And that's probably one of the reasons I was looking forward to school, because I thought that it would keep all of the other kids in line.

But school was totally different than I expected. After just a few days, the kids would get up during class and run around playing tag. Our teacher was completely helpless. She kept yelling, “Sit down!” but then the kids would laugh at her, and everything would get even more chaotic.

I'VE ALWAYS LOVED ANIMALS
, ever since I was really little. Everyone in my family was crazy about animals. It made me proud. I didn't know any other family that loved animals like we did. I felt sorry for the kids whose parents didn't like animals and who weren't allowed to keep pets.

It didn't take long for our already cramped living space to be transformed into a small zoo. I had four mice, two cats, two bunnies, one parakeet, and Ajax, our brown Great Dane, whom we'd brought with us when we moved to Berlin. Ajax always slept next to my bed. At night, I'd let one arm dangle out of my bed so that my hand was on his fur while I fell asleep.

I found other kids who also had dogs, and I got along with them pretty well. It turned out that in Rudow—which was a neighborhood just outside of Gropiusstadt—there were still pockets of nature left. So that's where we headed with our dogs. We played on the old, earth-covered hills of the garbage dump, and our dogs were always a part of whatever it was we were
doing. Our favorite game to play was a version of hide-and-seek that included our dogs. One of us would hide, and somebody else would hold onto that person's dog. Then the animal had to track down and find that person. My Ajax had the best nose of all.

Sometimes I would bring my other pets into the sandbox or even into school with me. My teacher used them as show-and-tell opportunities in biology class. Some teachers even allowed me to bring Ajax into the classroom. He never disrupted anything. Until the bell rang, he'd lie peacefully next to my chair or under my desk.

I would've been really happy there with all my animals if things hadn't gotten progressively worse at home. While my mom was out at work my dad just sat at home, doing nothing. The dating service didn't pan out, of course, so now he was waiting for a different job. He wanted something that he'd enjoy, but he just sat on the worn-out couch and waited for something to fall into his lap. Meanwhile, his rage-filled outbursts happened more and more often.

My mom always helped me with my homework when she got home from work. At one point, I was having a hard time telling the difference between the letters H and K. So one night, my mom was explaining the difference to me (with the patience of a saint), but I wasn't really paying attention, since I could see how worked up my dad was getting. I could always tell when it was going to happen: He got the hand broom out of the kitchen and started beating me with it. During a break in the thrashing, I was supposed to explain the difference between H and K to him. At that point, I was obviously incapable of understanding or explaining anything to anyone, so my rear end received another dose of the same, and then I was sent to bed.

That was his idea of helping me with my homework. He wanted me to be a good student and work toward a better future. After all, his grandfather had made a lot of money: He owned a printing company, a newspaper in East Germany, and some other businesses as well.
After the war, everything that was privately owned in the DDR
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was expropriated by the state. So now my dad totally freaked out whenever he thought that I wasn't getting something in school because I was supposed to continue the financial success of his family instead of succumbing to the apathy generated by the socialist policies in East Germany.

There were evenings that I can still remember down to the last detail. Like one time when I was supposed to draw houses in my math notebook. They were supposed to be six squares wide and four squares high. I had already finished one house and knew exactly how to do it, when my dad suddenly sat down next to me. He asked me how the next house should be drawn—where the squares should go. Frozen with fear, I didn't count anymore but started to guess. Every time I pointed to a wrong square, he slapped me across the face. When I couldn't give any more answers because I was crying so hard, he stood up and went over to the rubber plant. I knew what that meant. He pulled out the bamboo stick that was acting as a support for the plant, and then he beat me on the rear with that bamboo stick until my skin was so raw it was peeling off all by itself.

By the time I sat down at the dinner table every night, I was already afraid. When I dropped a crumb on the tablecloth, I got slapped. When I spilled something, I got a spanking. I could hardly bear to touch my glass of milk anymore. I was so nervous that I caused some small disaster at almost every meal.