Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (13 page)

2.3 Perils of European melancholy

The 70s were an era of abandoned children, with no more support in institutions.
Christiane F. Wir sind Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
(this sentence has the same structure as the “Wir Sind Helden”,
we are the heroes
), the 1981 film, opens with a murky shot of Gropiusstadt, the most infamous block estate in Berlin, by then decaying from social and material neglect, plagued by crime and violence, which brought more and more arguments to a new class of politicians who deemed the ideas of modernism ‘bankrupted’. The infamous St Louis estate Pruitt-Igoe was taken down in the mid-70s. Groupuisstadt
is
scary, but wasn’t meant to be. Former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius designed it as a quite modest, low-density estate. Later, with migration from East Berlin rising, it was rebuilt several times to cram the new population in growingly lesser quality flats. Christiane hates Gropiusstadt, where she lives with her single, always-at-work mother, who is always absent, unless she is fucking her dodgy boyfriend. The only company and community she finds is in the night clubs and friends, who are all into drugs. She goes to the Sound, the famous disco club, labelled as “the most modern discotheque in Europe”. She starts lightly, takes speed and coke, but the whole thing is about “H”. H is her obsession, a gate to a different reality, where she can communicate with her idol, Bowie. Seeing her friends all drowning in H, she thinks this transgression is the only way to belong to their community.

Bowie, when a Thin White Duke, had cocaine as his toxin of choice, the typical drug of someone who insists they have the full “control” over their habit. The first half of the film is basically a Bowie fan story. Christiane has all his records (which she, when the first part ends, symbolically sells to get money for drugs). Bowie is the god for her post-political generation, who recreates politics as spectacle. In the film, he’s present everywhere, as music or endlessly repeated image: his music oozes out in clubs, at the Zoo station, where the young addicts gather at their alternative home; they hear him, when they forget themselves in the drug haze. He
looks at Christiane and others from posters, like Big Brother from the LP covers, in their dreams; his concert, central to the film, is the EVENT she waits for. It is her most intimate company, it accompanies the kids, when they prostitute themselves, and when they inject the drug and go on a trip, he
IS
that trip and that drug and that malaise.

In “Heroes”, Bowie makes a final declaration: there’s no more heroes, long live the heroes! Yet, his character, the new, bodiless, endlessly androgynous, sexless figure, has still some miasmas, he’s yearning: “I can remember standing by the wall/ and the guns shot above our heads/ and we kissed, as though nothing could fall/ and the shame, was on the other side.” is this purely the obligatory anti-communism? There’s more:
“Heroes”
and
Low
are psychogeo-graphical albums, where he takes us on various trips to places charged with history, various stops around Berlin, Neukölln, the Wall; then Warszawa, Japan, China, yearning for the East. And it is the easterners who shoot, who perpetrate the terror, it’s true: it was the choice of the DDR government to erect the Wall, as between the establishing of the republic in 1948 and 1961 their population was growingly defecting to the West. This was the ideological failure of the East, who had to lock their citizens to convince them they live in the best of the worlds. The children of Bahnhof Zoo don’t understand this
Drang nach Osten
, but why else do they’d stick to the DDR-owned and operated Zoo Station, the filthiest, most brutalized part of West Berlin? And next to it: the bling of the Ku’damm, along which they walk searching for drugs and soliciting for clients. Just like characters in Fassbinder’s
The Merchant of Four Seasons
, they look at the shop window displays as at the promise of a life they will never have.

Five hours away from that city was another one which was also levelled to the ground, but by Germans. ‘Warszawa’, Bowie’s most sinister and mysterious track, appears in the film in the grimmest moments, when they first take heroin. It was also full of young, emaciated people. Perhaps the boredom the Polish youth felt at the
time was the result of that isolation. Warsaw didn’t have the Wall, but the lives of its people gravitated no less around what happened with this piece of concrete. In 1981, the year
Christiane F
was screened, it was invaded by its own tanks. Bowie was a tourist, who left Warsaw a postcard, and then left. They couldn’t, continuing to be trapped with their lives. For young people of the declining late 70s, Bowie - an endlessly enigmatic hero for one day, less real than celluloid, replaced their politicians, parents, institutions, their god. But how to stake your whole life on something that does not exist?

The Drinker, the heroine of Ulrike Ottinger’s
Bildnis Nach Trinkerin
, shot at the same time in 1979, is played by the splendidly dressed Tabea Blumenschein, Ottinger’s lover and muse, as a beautiful mysterious millionaire, landing at Tegel airport, who chooses Berlin as the scene of her destruction, with alcohol as the drug. She’s always wearing splendid clothes, inspired by early Dior or Balenciaga, with the rule: dress well for your death. To make it funnier, Ottinger accompanies her with a choir of three women, dressed in identical uniforms: Social Question, Accurate Statistics and Common Sense, who comment and cheer her on. She drinks in the bars until she’s unconscious, meeting various weirdos, cross-dressers, punks and transes on her way. Her only friend is a homeless woman. She goes around degenerate Berlin, full of trash, which, together with homeless Lutze, they gather in a supermarket trolley (Ottinger was friends with Wolf Vostell, artist of destruction, who appears briefly in the film). She picks a random from the bar and takes him on a Berlin night
derive
without end. She does a lot of pointless things: one sees her balancing on a tightrope in a ridiculous ballerina dress, against the towers of Gropiusstadt, after she joins a circus troupe, a regular Ottingeresque bunch of weirdos, of society’s marginals, who take a dim view of her circus art. After several attempts, when she manages to degrade herself completely, she goes to the Zoo station, as if looking for a way out. Yet, she’s is overrun by the careful, punctual German middle classes, hurrying to work. The film’s alternative title is
Ticket With No Return.

2.4 Meeting with the idol

Christiane F.
is a weird kind of a zombie movie, where the action takes place only at night. When we first see Christiane going to a night club, it resembles hell. Gradually, all characters, as the habit develops, start to look more and more like ghosts, or rather zombies. Director Uli Edel is too literal when he throws Christiane into a nightclub projection of
The Night of the Living Dead
, we can soon see that from their disintegrating faces, changing expression only upon the sight or possibility of getting the drug. Everything becomes clear during the ravishing sequence of the Bowie concert. If they’re zombies, Bowie is their zombie-king. As Christiane looks her all-prepared, artificial idol in the face, then at his absolute artistic heyday, we start to believe he’s not only the sun they need to exist; tragically, in a horrific vision he, or rather his persona, becomes identical with the drug, the reason for their degeneration. What follows is the naked horror of addiction: physical and mental degradation and prostitution of these 14-year old kids, while their bodies waste away. Larry Clark’s 1994
Kids
is a version of this, post-AIDS.

Berlin is there a hard-edged, harsh city with no mercy, ruthless, easily claiming lives, once ascending city of modernity, where their dreams have died. We are in the realm of “joy division”: their passionless sex, their un-joy, resignation, their absolute nihilism. Punk was dead. West Berlin was full of pale, lifeless, sleepwalking young people (Hitler called Germany a “nation of sleepwalkers”). The real Christiane F (Felscherinow) was offered a career as “tell us our story”. She recorded hours of material that then became the famous book, and then the film. When her story broke, it caused a wave of outrage and self-accusations over the ‘health of the nation’ on the part of a nation still living in the shadow of its Nazi guilt. It seemed like the post-war optimism was finally over and the children of the hippie generation had been submerged by the
nihilist punk wave. Christiane wasn’t abused, didn’t lack education, didn’t grow up in poverty or worse yet – she wasn’t an
East German
- but she was alienated and she was from a broken home. She was raised in the personal freedoms promised by liberalism, that in the process became meaningless.

I read the book at 13, a greasy copy that we were passing between us girls in the state school I attended in a working class tower block estate in Warsaw. We were so bored and craved boys and experience, that despite the grimness, the filth and horror of the addiction, for weeks me and a friend lived only on dreams of putting ourselves into the frame of the story. I was looking at the attractive, too-soon mature face of Christiane and I envied her so much that I’d gladly sleep on the floor of the Zoo station, just to be there, see the Ku’damm, see David Bowie. On my first trip there, in 2000, when I was 17, the Warsaw-Berlin Express landed me at the Zoo, but nothing of the legend was left anymore. The story leaves us with the track of corpses under the wall, with the sinister towers looming everywhere.

‘A film about a woman who fucks an octopus’ – that was the way Andrzej Żuławski pitched his 1980 film
Possession
to the producer, fresh after the success of his French film
L’important c’est d’aimer
, about a fallen actress, played by a sad-eyed Romy Schneider, who is made to act in pornographic movies, surrounded by other failed artists, including an unusually melancholic, tender performance from Klaus Kinski. He was also right after the fiasco of his three hour long monumental metaphysical SF
On a Silver Globe
(1978), an adaptation of a fin de siecle futurological novel by his great uncle, Jerzy Żuławski, pulled before completion by the hostile communist authorities and shelved until 1987, when Żuławski was given the chance to “finish” the film. Around that time, he was abandoned by his wife Małgorzata Braunek, actress in his
Third part of the night
and
The Devil
, due to his famously domineering and possessive
personality as a partner and a director. Left in shock and depression, he started plotting a misogynist fairy tale about a monster….

The sleep of reason produces demons, and one of them materialized, when Anna, living in West Berlin with her nice functionary husband and child in a neat, 3 storey block estate, realized she despised her husband. She confesses that to him. The rest is what happens after that confession.

Possession
was made in the golden era of exploitation cinema, and it must be due to the communal genius that things conceived as forgettable schlock to this day shine with a magnificent mixture of the visceral and the metaphysical, with cinematography, colors, costumes and set design taken from a masterpiece. Argento and the lesser
gialli
creators, Jean Rollin with his erotic horror, the expansion of an intellectual SF, inspiring Tarkovsky, all paved the way for
Possession
, a still unrivalled study of a marital break-up, thrown in the middle of political turmoil in divided Cold War Berlin. Still,
Possession
had a special “career” in the UK, if by career we understand horrible reception, extremely negative reviews and eventually putting it on the ‘video nasties’ list of banned films. It was deemed ‘too arty for the flea pits and too trashy for the art house’.

Today few people can imagine what it was like to live in a city surrounded by barbed wire and under the constant look of armed guards. When we first see Anna, played by a disturbingly pale, un-Holy Mary-like Isabelle Adjani and Mark (Sam Neill), we instantly see something is terribly wrong: their windows are under constant scrutiny, and surrounded by wire – the symbol of political oppression just as of the marital prison, of conventional life. Mark’s job is not what it seems – he has completed a secret government mission, which he wants nothing to do with anymore. Meeting with mysterious grey-suited men, it’s clear he’s involved in high
rank espionage. Anna can’t explain what is driving her towards the mysterious lover. She wears her deep blue, up-to-neck gown of a nineteenth century governess, which walks her through all kinds of atrocities as if untouched, as if it’s a secret armor.