Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (45 page)

But before long I could see that the kids out here weren't all that different from the young people in Berlin. There was a lot of dissatisfaction and anger out here, too. At the same time, things were more concealed in the country. The kids weren't as rowdy in school, and there were nowhere nearly as many pranks. Most of the teachers could still assert themselves. And most of the teens still dressed pretty conventionally.

I wanted to do well in school, even though I'd already missed so much. I really wanted to graduate at least. For the first time since elementary school, I was doing homework. After three weeks, I'd adjusted myself pretty well and had settled into class. I got the feeling that I could really do this.

We had just started in cooking class when I was called to the principal's office. When I got there, the principal was fiddling around with some document behind his desk. He looked nervous. It didn't take me more than a second to realize what was going
on: He'd just received my file from Berlin. It explained everything about me. The youth welfare office had at some point sent a complete report to my school in Berlin, and after that they had sent it here.

The principal spent some time clearing his throat before he said that, much to his regret, he couldn't allow me to continue at this school. I was, apparently, unable to cope with the demands of the program here.

My file must have made me seem so hardened and intimidating that he couldn't even come get me himself. He had to send someone else. And it was so urgent that he couldn't even wait until the end of the school day to kick me out.

I didn't say anything. I was speechless. The principal wanted me to leave right that instant. During the next break between classes, I was supposed to check in with the principal of the lower-track secondary school, the Hauptschule. I was devastated. I went over to the other school in a complete daze. And once I was sitting in the office of my new principal, I just broke down and cried. He said that things really weren't as bad as I made them out to be. I should just take a seat, get to work, and set my sights on graduating with good grades.

When I got outside, I took another good look at my situation. I didn't feel sorry for myself at all. I told myself, It goes without saying that now you're paying the price for all your old mistakes. All at once, I understood that all those dreams of a brand-new life without dope were a total pile of crap. When other people looked at me now, they didn't see my “new self”—they just saw me. What's worse, they saw me through the lenses of my past actions and judged me by my past. Everybody did that: my mom, my aunt, and of course the principal, too.

It was obvious that I couldn't change into a new person from one day to the next. My body and my mind kept handing me new bills. My liver reminded me constantly of what I'd done in the
past. And it wasn't like I was perfectly well adjusted to life at my aunt's house either. The smallest thing would make me go totally crazy. There were constant fights. I couldn't bear the least bit of noise or stress around me. And when I was really depressed, I couldn't help remembering how effective drugs could be at banishing those kinds of feelings.

After I got kicked out of the Realschule, I lost all my confidence in myself. I became really apathetic again. I couldn't defend myself against the expulsion, even though after only three weeks, there was no way this principal could have any informed opinion about whether or not I could actually make it in his school. I had no plans for the future. I could've gone back to a comprehensive school. There was one that I could get to by bus. In the comprehensive school, I'd have a chance to prove that I had brains. But I was way too afraid that I might fail there, too.

It took a while for me to fully grasp what it meant to be downgraded to the Hauptschule program. We had two rec centers in our area, kind of like youth clubs. One was the hangout for students from the Gymnasium and the Realschule, and the other one was the place where the Hauptschule students, along with some of the trade school kids, hung out. When I first arrived, I spent my time at the former. But once I was booted out of the Realschule, I got the feeling that the teens there were shunning me and shooting me disapproving looks. That's when I switched to the other club.

That was a brand-new experience for me. This sort of segregation didn't exist in Berlin—not in school, and not on the streets. The distinction was evident even when we gathered in the common ground outside. Right across the yard, they'd painted a white line. On one side were the students from the Realschule, and on the other side were the students from the Hauptschule. You weren't allowed to cross the white line.

So now I could only talk to my former classmates from across this stupid line. I thought this was such bullshit. We had been separated into two groups: Young people in the Realschule still had a chance to achieve some success in life, while the young people in the Hauptschule were already being thought of as a lost cause.

And so this was the new society in which I was supposed to adapt. Adapt was my grandma's favorite word. But at the same time, she told me that I shouldn't associate with kids from the Hauptschule when we weren't in class. Instead, she told me to try and make friends with the kids in the other programs. So I told her, “Why can't you just get used to the idea that your granddaughter is a student in the Hauptschule. That's where they stuck me, and that's where I'll have to adapt. So deal with it.” That, of course, provoked a huge fight.

At first, I wanted to just zone out at school. But then I realized that my new head teacher was actually okay. He was an older guy. Really old-fashioned. Really conservative, to put it bluntly. Sometimes I got the impression that he thought the Nazis might have had some good ideas. But he was able to maintain his authority without having to yell at us. He was the only teacher for whom everyone stood, on their own, when he came into the classroom. He was always calm, and he paid attention to each individual, giving us the time we all deserved. Even me.

Some of the younger teachers were, I'm sure, hugely idealistic. But for the most part, that didn't get them very far: They couldn't handle the job. They were just about as clueless as their own students. They didn't know where to turn. Sometimes they just let it all go, and when the chaos was complete, they'd start screaming at us, totally unhinged. But the biggest problem was that none of these idealists had any good answers to the problems and questions that actually preoccupied us. They always came out with their “ifs” and “buts” because they were
so unsure of everything. Their lack of self-confidence made them easily intimidated.

Our head teacher, however, didn't sugarcoat anything; he didn't want to give us any false expectations about what it meant to be a student in the Hauptschule. He told us that it was going to be incredibly difficult for us at each and every turn. But with some hard work and discipline, we could even do better in some areas than students in the Gymnasium. For example, in spelling and grammar. These days, no one taking the university entrance exams could spell, write grammatically, or punctuate properly. As a result, we stood a better chance if we wrote our job applications in completely perfect German.

He tried to teach us how to handle people who spoke down to us. And he knew some great sayings and quotes, which he never hesitated to use if a situation called for it. Mostly they were snippets of wisdom from the not-too-distant past. He let us laugh at them if we wanted and most students did, but I also found that there was always a kernel of truth in them. I disagreed with him a lot, but what I liked about him was that he still seemed to know the difference between north and south. In other words, he knew where he was going and what he was about.

Most of my classmates didn't like him as much as I did. They probably thought he was too tough, and his sermonizing got on their nerves. But most of them didn't care about school anyway. A few of them saw to it that they'd get a good report card and a diploma, hoping that maybe they could manage to snatch up an apprenticeship somewhere. Those types would do all their homework like good boys and girls, following the instructions to the letter. But reading a book or taking an interest in something that wasn't assigned as homework—that never would've occurred to them.

When our head teacher or one of the younger teachers tried to get a discussion going, then they all just sat and stared, looking
stupid. Their plans for their future were just like mine—basically nonexistent. What sorts of plans can a student in a Hauptschule have, anyway? If he were lucky, he'd get a spot as some kind of an apprentice. He couldn't just choose an apprenticeship according to what he thought would be fun or interesting, but he'd have to go with whatever was offered.

Many didn't care anyway what they'd do after school. Maybe an apprenticeship or working as an unskilled laborer or collecting unemployment. The prevailing opinion was that nobody died of hunger in Germany. As a graduate from a Hauptschule, you didn't have much of a chance of doing something cool, so why bother wasting your energy? Why try hard? With some guys, you could already tell that they had criminal tendencies, and a few were already alcoholics. The girls didn't think too much about anything anyway. They'd preset their minds that some guy would take care of them someday, and until then they could work as a salesperson in a store or take a factory job in an assembly line or just hang around at their parents' house.

Not everyone was like that but that was definitely the general mood at school. Totally bleak, with no illusions and certainly no goals or ideals. When I thought about things that way, it hurt. I had imagined my life very differently.

I'd often tried to figure out why the young people here were so miserable. They couldn't find any joy in anything. A moped at sixteen, a car at eighteen—that was somehow expected and taken for granted. And when that didn't happen, then it was a letdown, and you were considered inferior. In all my fantasies about my future, it always went without saying that when I set out on my own, I'd have an apartment to sleep in and a car to drive. To break your back working for an apartment or a new sofa like my mom did, that wasn't part of my plan. Those were the old-fashioned ideals of our parents: to live in order to just accumulate some stuff. For me, and I believe for many others also, those few
material things were considered the minimum requirements for life. But then something else had to follow—that elusive thing that makes life meaningful. And that was nowhere in sight. But a few of us, at least, were still searching for it. I know I was.

WHEN WE WERE TALKING
about German history and the Nazis in school, I had very conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it turned my stomach when I thought about the horrendous, gruesome brutality that these human beings were capable of. On the other hand, I liked it that the possibility existed for people to believe in something. I said as much in class, “In some ways I think I would've liked to have been a teenager during the time of the Nazis. At least the young people back then had some ideals and could believe in something.” I wasn't really serious about that. But there was some truth in it.

Even out here in the country, the teens were into all kinds of crazy shit because they wanted a little more out of life than their parents could give them back at home. Hooliganism had even found a place in our small village. The youth were into giving punches instead of taking them. Two years prior, in Berlin, there were a couple of kids who were really into the punk movement. It always gave me the chills when I realized that some people, who were otherwise okay people, would think that being a punk was cool. When it comes down to it, it's really just sheer brutality—at least what I've seen of it. The music reflects that: just a driving, brutal rhythm without any imagination.

I knew a punk in our area pretty well. You could actually talk to him as long as he didn't stick a safety pin through his cheek or start pulling his brass knuckles out of his pocket. Later, he got beat up in our local pub. His attackers broke two chairs over his
head and then rammed a broken bottle into his stomach. He just barely pulled through in the hospital.

Violence always really upset me—especially when it happened in the course of a relationship. Everybody talks about women's liberation now. But it seems to me that, without a doubt, boys have never treated girls as brutally as they do now. That's where all the guys' frustration comes out. They want to have power and success, and when they feel disappointment, they wind up taking it out on women and mistreating women.

I developed a real revulsion toward most of the guys at the local clubs. Maybe it was because I looked a little different from the other girls, but for whatever reason I was a constant target for these guys. I heard a lot of whistles and come-ons, and I heard the word
bitch
a lot—and honestly, it bothered me even more now than it did when the customers driving by on the Kurfürstenstrasse would make a gesture toward me. When a customer in Berlin waves you to his car, then at least he's smiling. But the guys here—who all thought they were God's gift to women—didn't think they needed to make the slightest effort. I think that most johns were friendlier and more affectionate than these assholes out here. These guys wanted to fuck you without knowing the first thing about you, without showing the least bit of kindness or affection, and, of course, without having the decency to pay for the privilege either.