My second life
You could buy your drinks on credit and everything and everyone was easygoing. There was a cassette player to play all our tapes with. People would pitch their tents on the beach and didn’t need anything. When I went there for the first time on holiday in 1987, there was just a small tavern run by a Greek communist that looked like Karl Marx.
My second life full#
Now there’s a landscape full of discotheques with loud music blaring and flowing alcohol. Friends of mine were recently there and they saw a beach full of tourists. Doesn’t explain the relationship with my family and the social situation very well. Those who don’t know how horrible it was to grow up there in the 1960s and 1970s – children with no room to play, everyone was poor and trashy – will never understand where I’m really coming from. We actually should have shown more of the old Gropiusstadt in Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. Today it’s green, with playgrounds and a shopping centre. I was actually just there for a photo shoot. Those two are actually the only close friends from my past who haven’t gotten in touch since Mein zweites Leben came out. It was fun but never serious.Īlexander Hacke was my boyfriend when he was 15. We started bands like Final Church and Sentimentale Jugend and made punk and experimental music. So I moved to Hamburg, where I met a few musicians at the Markthalle. I felt less welcome there than I did back home. After my mother took me to my grand- mother’s in Kaltenkirchen to get away from the Berlin scene, I had to leave there as soon as I was 18. Teenagers today make Youtube videos we made music. Listeners could ask questions, one asked what kind of music I’m into, so I put on the tape. Once I even went with Nina Hagen, who I met while in LA. One of the interviews I did was with famed radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer. It must have been 1981 or 1982 or something like that. I brought a tape of hers with me during a promo tour for the film in the US. I had nothing to do with the song “99 Luftballons”. We chose some people, places and things from her past and present and asked her to free-associate… The result, Christiane F.: Mein zweites Leben, was released last October to become an immediate bestseller in Germany, with translation into 12 languages already planned.Įxberliner managed to talk to the famously reclusive Berlin icon. Thirty-five years later, thanks to one Berlin publisher’s powers of persuasion, the 51-year-old Christiane was back at it with co-author Sonja Vukovic. You’ll find me around Hermannplatz because my methadone doctor is there.