FILM · 1981
Christiane F.: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
20 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
20 Interesting Facts About Christiane F.: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
Interesting Facts (16)
- #001
Many of the extras in the Sound club and train station scenes were real teenagers, drug addicts and prostitutes the production recruited for the crowd scenes.
- #002
Natja Brunckhorst recalled: "We shot a scene on Kurfürstenstraße. My character Christiane is standing alone, waiting for someone to pick her up. It was a long lens shot, so the camera crew was far away. A car pulled up and as I was about to get in, I saw some of the crew running towards me shouting: 'No! No! No!' And it came to me: this was a real man, not an actor, a man on the make. I was about to get into a car with someone who wanted to pick up a 13-year-old to sleep with her."
- #003
One of Christiane F.'s best friends in the film is Babsi. When Babsi died in 1977 at 14, the "Berliner Zeit" ran a front-page story calling her Berlin's youngest drug victim, and her death, along with the book "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo," helped raise awareness of drug use among young people.
- #004
The David Bowie concert scene was shot in October 1980 at the Hurray Club in New York, because Bowie was on Broadway several nights a week at the time and director Uli Edel had to film him there; the venue was dressed to look like a Berlin nightclub. For the big concert crowd shots, footage from an AC/DC concert in what was then West Germany was used.
- #005
The film features music by David Bowie, who even appears in the concert scenes, and his involvement boosted its profile and box office. Nearly every song on the soundtrack was written or co-written by Bowie, and according to the book behind the film, the real Christiane F. first tried heroin at a Bowie concert, which the film also works into the story.
- #006
Many German teenagers died of overdoses in the toilets of Berlin's Zoo Station.
- #007
Most of the actors were still in school and had never acted before; for most of them it remains their only film or TV credit, and they never worked in the industry again.
- #008
The real Christiane F. walked out of the premiere halfway through, ashamed to watch scenes from her old life on screen and wanting to dodge the press's questions.
- #009
While filming without a permit in a public toilet, Uli Edel stumbled on a large bag of heroin hidden there. He wanted to sell it to pay for more shooting days, and as he was trying to talk producer Bernd Eichinger into it, a dangerous-looking junkie who seemed about to go for Natja Brunckhorst walked in. Edel quickly threw the bag at him, and the junkie turned and ran, never to be seen again.
- #010
The film's original posters were still up in Berlin well into the 2010s, and nobody had any plans to take them down.
- #011
The producers invited Christiane Felscherinow to see the film before release, and David Bowie took her to the premiere in a limousine. Christiane F. later admitted she took cocaine to calm her nerves, only to be let down by how small Bowie looked in the back seat.
- #012
Roland Klick was originally set to direct, but after a long prep period he was fired just two weeks before shooting over a dispute with producer Bernd Eichinger, and Uli Edel took over.
- #013
In 2016, the German magazine SZ brought together Natja Brunckhorst and Thomas Haustein, who hadn't seen each other since the last day of shooting 36 years earlier; the two revisited the film's locations and posed for a photo shoot.
- #014
Thomas Haustein, who played Detlef, said the film affected him so deeply on the subject of drugs that after school he trained as a social worker. After working at other centers, in 2002 he joined the very center where the real Christiane F. would get help for her addiction (the Caritas Integrated Addiction Counseling Service in Lichterfelde, Berlin's first counseling center for drug addicts).
- #015
Christiane Lechle, who plays Christiane's mother, was dubbed by Renate Küster.
- #016
The big apartment in the book was at Joachim-Gottschalk-Weg 10, supposedly on the 11th floor. The main address the book gives for Christiane, Solmanweg no. 2, is wrong, used to avoid giving the real one (it's even in a different district): the apartment was really at Kommandantenstrasse 32, on the first or second floor (not the ground floor). The film's apartment is a set, but a good reconstruction of the real one.
Behind the Scenes (1)
- #017
Uli Edel wasn't allowed to film at West Berlin's Kurfürstendamm station, which was patrolled by East German railway police because of the crossings between east and west. So the cinematographer sat in a wheelchair with the camera hidden in a box on his lap and an extended viewfinder poking out, and Edel pushed him around the station after Natja. They could only do it once, and some of the footage is still out of focus.
Characters & Cast (2)
- #018
Thomas Haustein was a bit nervous about the sex scenes: "I wasn't part of the gay world and of course I was nervous about acting out something like that in front of the camera. It was the same with my first sex scene with Natja. I hadn't had any sexual experience yet! So before the scene with my male client, Uli left me alone without the crew, just me and him, and stood behind me to show me how it should look," he says, laughing.
- #019
Natja Brunckhorst was discovered at 13 in the schoolyard of the Kopernikus Comprehensive School in Steglitz, and soon her face was on every poster for the film. For a while she dressed like a boy, but the fuss was too much; she left school and went to London and later Paris. She has mixed feelings about her early fame and says such a huge success at such a young age went to her head a little.
Easter Eggs & References (1)
- #020
Natja Brunckhorst revealed that for the scene where Christiane throws up, a makeup artist taped a thin tube along her hand against her body, with someone on the other end pumping the fake vomit onto the wall, and she had to hold some of the liquid in her mouth for it to work. The first time, they made the mistake of using wine, which shot straight up her nose when it was pumped; after that she didn't want to do the scene and had to be talked into trying again, this time with grape juice.
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Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- IMDb
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