Gespräche mit mir: eine Möglichkeit, seine Gefühle besser kennenzulernen (German Edition)

In other words, they prefer either to stay within the stores or be looted. The whole question revolves around how we practice a behavior that is consistent with a certain control. The interesting thing is that city inhabitants can also be seen as mannequins that shatter the windowpanes from the inside. It was meant as a very indirect call. Why are you walking around with radios? In a way, radio created another kind of direct communication.

Is that what you were thinking of before you organized the intervention, is that what you found interesting after all happened? The other aspect we had learned from radio ballet. Already during that action, the people who participated had been asked what they were doing there. So it was predictable that such discussions would also develop during the radio demonstration. Zeitlich haben wir das Ganze von der Chronologie her ein bisschen umgedreht; das Radioballett am Hamburger Hauptbahnhof war von all den Sachen, die wir vorgestellt hatten, das erste. Schon da war es so, dass die Leute, die daran teilgenommen hatten, angesprochen wurden, und gefragt wurden, was sie eigentlich da machen.

Dass sie den Hauptteil ausgemacht hatten, das hatte sich so entwickelt, aber war dann eine sehr positive Feststellung, die wir getroffen hatten, dass so was einfach funktioniert. Die Bahn hat darauf versucht, es zu verbieten. Stattdessen hat die Bahn versucht, es zu verbieten. Es gab ein Prozess. Die machen eine Zerstreuung, wo ist das Problem? In Leipzig war es umgekehrt. Es gab jetzt nicht eine Gerichtsentscheidung vorher da, die uns sagte: Sie wussten, sie hatten es verboten.

Zumal das Interessante war, dass auch viele Passanten mitgemacht haben. Das war im Rahmen der Hamburger Kunsthalle. Es hat insofern ein Unterschied gemacht, dass in Hamburg fast keine Rolle spielte, dass wir von der Kunsthalle eingeladen wurden; das hat keiner so richtig mitbekommen.

Ich kann mich an keine Diskussion hier mit anderen Linksradikalen erinnern, die gesagt haben: Gerade die Leute untereinander von BGR sagten: Da ist der Ansatz auch, dass Leute sich nicht versammeln sollen, sondern sich gerade auch zerstreuen sollen, beispielsweise mit Hilfe von Musik. Wenn der Bahnhof Leute zerstreut, sind sie nicht organisiert. Was die Leipziger auch vorgeworfen haben, war, dass eine konfrontative Strategie besser ist.

Dazu kann man sagen: Wir hatten [welche], die dabei standen und nicht wussten, ob sie anfangen, einzelne herauszugreifen, aber bevor sie die raushaben, ist das Ballett schon wieder um. Die Gefahr ist, dass sie dann einfach abwarten, bis es vorbei ist. Es muss schon eine bestimmte Verteilung in einem Raum geben.

Bei dieser Radiodemo ging es auch um das Hineintragen von Protest, sehr viel mehr um Inhalte, aber auch um die Praxis, also darum, sie mit in der Praxis zu verbinden, die dann die Aneignung des Raumes bedeutet. Ihr habt den Begriff der Selbstorganisation auch im Zusammenhang mit Radio benutzt. Wahrscheinlich ist zu lernen, dass es um die performative Umsetzung im Raum geht.

Es war euch ja wichtig, diesen Inhalt und die verbotenen Gesten in dem Raum zu transportieren, durch dieses Hinsetzten und dieses Handaufhalten, eigentlich im Einklang zu bringen an Dinge, die jetzt gar nicht mehr erlaubt sind. Zu dem Handaufhalten — in Hamburg wurde die Hand nicht lange gehalten. In Leipzig haben wir sogar 50 Cent auf diese Weise bekommen. Es sind ja nun viele Themen, die am Bahnhof kumulieren, die nicht thematisiert sind: Die Idee war zu erproben, ob es funktioniert, wenn man eine Situation vor Ort schildert, z.

Nur genau so lange wie diese Aktion lief, das ist klar, nach dem Radioballett war alles wie zuvor. Um etwas richtig zu stellen: I have two questions. We tried to lobby a lot of people, because the situation with radio was that the possession of a transmitter was a non-bailable offence, which would put you up for five years in prison, and that was the law. So we tried to create a situation where we could say that — because we had a Supreme Court judgement that said that the airwaves are public property.

We tried to lobby a lot of the Left in India, saying: I was wondering if at the beginnings of free radio movement, was there any discussion of this kind over here? What do you have? The other question was, taking the sender-receiver model, turning it around — which I found very interesting — supposing instead of radios in the station, people carried microphones and recording equipment and were trying to send back transmissions on to the radio station: Do you think that would create a real problem?

Because then it would be like you are interrogating something that exists, and then going back to the source. What is this for? Are you a terrorist? What we do is record sounds at night. The idea is that there can be only one kind of person who makes this documentation of everyday life. Only the police should be listening. Auf das zweite bezogen, sind die Regelungen hier nicht so streng. Es ist auch hier eine sehr ungewohnte Praktik, es ist selten, dass Leute mit Mikrophonen rumrennen.

Offenbar funktioniert Klang ganz anders als Fotografie. Eine Bildaufnahme hat immer eine Berechtigung, aber eine Klangaufnahme, das scheint etwas Unheimliches zu sein. The facts and then the theory and then the legal demand. Es ist sehr schwierig. Freies Radio ist nicht so eine Sache, die einem geschenkt wird, es war hier ein sehr langer Kampf. Was wir gerade versucht haben darzustellen ist, dass es nicht reicht, sondern dass es anderer Praktiken bedarf, um dann erst Freies Radio zu machen.

Das Spannende ist, das Handy zu verwenden, um Sound aufzunehmen, direkt zu senden. Das hat der Vorteil, dass es nicht erst aufzeichnet, sondern direkt auf dem Sender gehen kann und direkt auch wieder ausgestrahlt wird. Das ist ganz nett, besonders wenn man Leute trifft, die eben aus dem Bahnhof ausgeschlossen wurden — wie es auch in Leipzig der Fall war — und direkt gleich sagen, was sie ankotzt.

Nach dem Ballett in Leipzig gab es eine Situation, da sollte jemand verhaftet werden, weil er ein Dachschutz T-Shirt anhatte, und er hat das T-Shirt dann ausgezogen zu dem Zeitpunkt, als unsere Reporterin dahinkam. Have you ever thought about changing the medium?

Are you theory or radio fetishists? Ich glaube, dass eine bestimmte Auseinandersetzung auch eines bestimmten Kontextes bedarf. Da gehe ich mit Medienwechsel vorsichtig um. Wir haben neulich eine Arbeit gemacht, die in die Musikrichtung ging, und es war sehr anstrengend festzustellen, wie es funktioniert. Because I think that all of us have grown up with the kind of politics of demonstrations where you are all together in a mass. In , when India exploded once again its nuclear weapons, there was the beginning of a completely undirected anti-nuclear movement for the first time in Delhi.

This was very confusing to people, because although there were many people standing together, no one was giving a speech, no one was addressing the crowd, no one was giving slogans together. So when the police would come, we could say: Can you stop me from standing with a piece of paper? So we would say: Of course people there might have known each other, but there was something about it that was a bit sad. As far as I saw it, it was an extension of that discourse in the gestures, and that becomes an exercise in powerlessness.

I have a question for you. What do you mean by powerlessness in the radio ballet? You said it was an experiment, a form of research, and when I say powerlessness I mean it in the sense that we have to move from a stage where we are reflecting on a normative space and maybe begin to try to inhabit them. With your thing about the city centre at night, which is a very good point: How can that place be inhabited differently at night, and how can it be inhabited by a tribe of silent people, who go in to do contemplative, meditative practices?

Those are potential, interesting areas of discussion. Going back to the radio ballet, I think the powerlessness was that the gestures took on a character that was divorced from their normal use — to be actually begging, to lay actually drunk on the floor in the station. The important idea about it is the experience in the space — an experience one cannot have, usually, without being thrown out. We wanted to enable people to have the experience of making things there in this dispersion, but at the same time in a collective form.

We certainly hope that this does enable them to do something; at least that this reminds them that something outside of the customary is possible within that space. We hope that being in that space as collective changes the space for a certain moment. Certainly other practices can do different things, but a demonstration would never be able to generate anything there, as it is quite easy to throw out a non-dispersed demonstration group. Das ist die Situation von Massenmedien, dass die Leute dadurch voneinander getrennt werden. An dem Abend gibt er aus, das Wahlfieber auszumessen und stellt fest, es ist keiner auf der Strasse und die Wahlergebnisse werden nirgendwo angezeigt.

Diese Form von Austausch, das kann das Medium Radio nicht gut. Das kann man versuchen, aber es gibt immer eine bestimmte Begrenzung. Da ist sicher noch eine Menge denkbar, aber gerade [bei ]mehr als Leute, da ist es wichtiger, die Zerstreuung genau zu machen. Es hat wenig utopische oder richtig befreiende Momente, eher Gesten, dass man versucht, wieder an das zu kommen, was verboten ist. Aber was ist verboten? Es ist ja nicht utopisch, zu sagen, das Betteln oder die Geste des Bettelns muss wieder erlaubt werden. Eine Euphorie hat sich bei mir auch nicht breit gemacht, sondern zwischendurch so ein Kick.

Somebody asked if you were media fetishists. In that sense, the notion of spectacle is very useful. What does it mean to stop something that is going on? Ich verstehe das ja gar nicht so rein utopisch, was ihr da macht. Seht ihr das auch so? Oder seid ihr da ganz ungebrochen? Mit solcher Arbeit versuchen wir nicht eine bestimmte Form von Organisierung, wie sie seit den Zehner Jahren in der Linken bis 89 vorherrschte, fortzusetzen, sondern andere Formen von Organisierung zu denken.

Just a short statement: What I really find interesting is how you give people control, becoming not only an audience, but also a programmer, taking the example of the music box. I find it quite interesting how you give that freedom to the audience, to become the producer as well. So seeing that kind of participation in traditional radio is really interesting to me. They had a sort of citizen council, like a board of directors run by citizens. Somehow persons with certain interests guiding that board of directors started changing the programs, so suddenly all the programming there was only music, all the political programs were shut down or they were switching the schedules of the show.

All the political programming started to disappear. People went on mass demonstrations, specially in San Francisco, and they took back the station, but the kind of control that the people had over the radio station was never the same. We did mention that it can be a political menace to people of the current right-wing senate in Hamburg, which has been in power for over a year and a half here, and suddenly there are always tactics to get rid of such a station. On the other hand, there are fights within the left.

As I said before, many fantasies of the left wing are projected on to radio and then everybody wants to have radio his or her way, so there are fights among the groups within the radio. That is a situation that endangers it, perhaps even more than enemies from the outside, because I think that we are licensed for a year now, and it is quite difficult to take away the license that is already authorized, as is our case.

Christoph, some final words? No final words, thanks everybody, thanks Ligna. Thanks to the translators. The next program points are short guided tours of the exhibition starting in 5 minutes with Margit. I advise you strongly to take the guided tour, because then we will walk to the park, and on that way there will be an intervention by the Schwabinggrad Ballet.

After that, there will be some time to get a bite and at eleven p. Stephan Dillemuth, Video mit Fleischeinlage. We see this congress develops the first ventures. I thought we might use this situation in order to collect a few questions that came up yesterday. We could take them up today and keep them in mind. That might be connected to nationality, but I think that it also has to do with different approaches. The questioning of what is local and what is global — it was all in there, in all the presentations, but in completely different forms. I think it was interesting that the four presentations had a strong notion of fluidity in common, or the term that you brought up: If we connect that to the term of constituent practices, this constituting moment is not as much in a given structure as in a mindset.

Our general impression of what happened yesterday has a lot to do with our work. Both presentations Ligna and Sarai were much involved with communication between communities and projects that catalyze communication within communities. To me, the most interesting point was seeing how different forms were practices: These other forms of constituent practices make me rethink several issues related to my work. I suppose some are to Park Fiction, others are for other people here.

There are now lots of housing cooperatives in that area. Where I live the park was brought about by people with a connection to gardening, rather than arts. So all of the work has been done by the people who live there, and that has been quite heavy duty at times. It is like an investment in an emotional sense. The other question is how do Park Fiction describe their relationship to arts.

I ask that because in the U. Our group is a bit like Park Fiction, but they tend to sever that connection to art, so they very much go off in a sort of community direction. Would it have been possible without art? The way that you described certain potential in London comes from a concrete gardening background. Some things are like that in here, too, but the gardening aspect was very beat.

There was only a very small slope of land, and a precondition for the park was the construction of a sports hall. There were all the institutions in the community — the community centre, the St. Pauli church, the school, which actually started this with all the people living in the area. With art, I think it also opened a field. In a very classical sense, art is the field where the bourgeois society affords to have all the liberties promised in the French Revolution and betrayed in the time afterwards. We were shown this critical and precise watching of what is going on, and how the world is built up.

I like the fact that we started with Sarai and its very precise, local view. As they said, you can see the whole world in your own street. We should really watch what we see, how it is represented and which spaces are constructed precisely through representation. We should watch ourselves: We should continue with this awareness. Another thing that crossed my mind yesterday when you look at art that comes out of social processes is the importance of developing categories to look at processes.

If you write about things, you realize you lack the tools — the necessary vocabulary or categories — to describe processes. I would be very interested in looking at that perspective a lot more when examining the work done by collectives in art or other processes. That could refer to the question of where art is located, where the art system is, all the usual questions posed to a project like Park Fiction.

I think it was who Shuddha or Katrin who started thinking about the presentation of Andreas Blechschmidt the day before, on the walk through the Flora. Another point about Ligna was the strong negativity and self-criticism emphasized in their own presentation. We talked about the fact that it is necessary, on the one hand, and how it could stop things — I thought it was a German thing, but Shuddha said it happens in India, too: The desire is to be completely omnipotent, and as this is bound to fail, you feel very powerless and the trick to get out is irony or strong self-criticism.

It was so important for me to work with Shveta and Joy for a couple of days, this deep concentration and seriousness. We had a talk with five people sitting on a bench facing the door of the Butt Club, and we started decoding that door via descriptions with Joy and Shveta, who were in Europe for the first time for four days.

It was as if they were going to find a northwest passage of utopia in that door. It was a fantastic moment and I heard the best description of that space with a sentence Joy said. How this seriousness in looking at things concentrated can be a way out of this big idea of: The world is nothing until revolution happens.

There is no white in the black. What I really saw was that it was not a temporary confusion as one of the participants here stated yesterday. I understood a lot of Sarai said as getting rid of all the dichotomies in order to find new fields, such as experiences of the city beyond being Muslim or Hindi. This would be a necessary discussion in left-wing discussions in Germany. We have to look very closely at what is happening and be very self-critical. Christiane suggested thinking about categories, which is a very interesting point, but you still have to look carefully at each situation, because they are all different; they create their own context in a very different way and people are in different positions.

Asking for categories was more in terms of trying to establish a looking at processes, rather than looking at results. Maybe a very small, ordinary point. It has to do something with what you said. In , the art system was completely through with projects that were categorized as participatory and interventionist; it was done with.

It was actually a time where it was possible to take a closer look at the differences. What happened then over here? There was a very strong self-organized scene in the German language area and it reached a peak in Then it entered the art discourse; there were art magazines writing about it, the market was down and it came up again, and suddenly there was a complete silence. But when you get on with strategies, you take the formal things and when you go into the art context what is really discussed?

Is it the content thing or is it the formal aspect? I would love to see the content in the formal and the formal in the content. We work on this in here, right now, and we make it public, and I thank Park Fiction for taking a big step in this discussion. We have to be careful with projects like Park Fiction. Once they are created, where do they go? How are they used? Who uses them and for what purpose?

You could discuss it from the perspective of Hamburg. In fact, artists can only do experimental things with galleries in the U. Their response is to go back into conservative notions of modernist projects, and do the political-social work in the arts, in the gallery. Slightly change in tact: Really quite extraordinary, I can give you some material about them. I would like to take a chance to make a brake. Beata is our sound engineer. Please play the jingle, and play it loud. Good morning, welcome to the second day of Unlikely Encounters.

Please proceed to your seats. Heute wird die Strukturierung von unserem Spezialgast gemacht, Eva Sturm. I was absolutely stunned by the precision of their talk and work, which is interventionist in the most radical sense, and taking place very far from what has been conceived as the art field, and I felt very much ashamed as to how unprecise artists are in Germany, on a general level, in a much laid back and controllable situation. They impressed me a great deal. I believe their work is connected to Park Fiction ,too.

Hello, good morning to all of you. We thank you all for coming here this morning. We wish to thank also the organization team, Christoph and Margit. We thank as well Park Fiction and all of St. We perceive these transformations as being active in the field of aesthetics, transformations subverting a liberal aesthetic, the manic creation of objects for consumerism, the notion of creating objects only to be exhibited in galleries and museums, and the creation of objects with a happy end.

As you know, our country and the region specified on the map have been the centre of many public activities that have happened over the last two years. The communities have really taken charge of certain aspects of the country, through public assemblies, processes involving collective decision making, and I think we have been working already for twelve years to make something like this happen as well. Here you see another satellite image of the area in which we work. This area of the city of Buenos Aires and its surroundings concentrates about half of the population of a country almost four times the size of Germany.

In , we decided as a team to center our actions on recuperating public space. We started to look for public spaces that had been in cultural decay for many years. At that point we initiated what we call our connective practice, immersing ourselves in society so as to catalyze a process of transformation. As I mentioned, the library is within the zoo, which is a very old one.

It preserves the Victorian notion of confinement and isolation of the animals. In this case, we tried to use photography to create an awareness of the situation. The medium of photography enabled us to link our own vision to other, more scientific visions of the situation. This is the project in which we started to play with metaphors: What do we do now? We spoke to our friends, other fellow artists, scientists, naturalists and researchers, and together we pondered the best way to represent this situation in order to put an end to it.

Were we to create a new object that would carry on with the aesthetics of capitalism? Sculptures or a sculpture park? What could we do to change this situation? After working on deconstructing our own ideas, we realized the most suitable thing to do was to deconstruct the space itself. The project continues up to the present day, and we have managed to demolish 22 cages.

This project is exemplary. Sculptors participated in this action, and the interesting thing is that they used the same ability involved in the creation of an object roughing out stone or wood to actually deconstruct a setting like that. Something very profound took place within ourselves when we deconstructed that space. Working in that project had almost a magic influence on us. We wanted to change our perception of zoos, because we now know that confining living creatures is barbaric. So why do we continue to accept this? We think that the act of questioning these structures is already a big step.

With this project in public space and the state of our own captivity in our cities, we realized the necessity of acting within a larger area. We started to work with bioregional models, but concentrating on very specific cases. It would be very lengthy to enumerate all of our actions throughout those years, but we can show you some places in which theory and practice met successfully.

The urban expansion there was causing an immense pressure on the coastal ecosystems. Our work there derived from the properties of certain emerging plants. We invited them to collaborate on a long-term project, with the support of the British Council. We started to focus on sustaining the natural ecosystems that were shrinking back. Basing ourselves on this model of rhizomatic expansion, we were able to trigger processes of environmental recovery.

Each point of the rhizome can be connected to any other one within it. But it is said that within the rhizome there are no points or positions, but only lines. This characteristic is doubtful, because at the intersection of each line there lies a possibility of individualizing a point. So a rhizome can be cut and reconnected at each point. If the rhizome had an outside space, it could produce another rhizome. You may take a rhizome apart, or reverse it, being succeptible to alterations. This rhizomatic capacity leads us to reconsider what we see in this slide: The reed permit the creation of other worlds.

So what is the point to those creations? The model we adopted has to do with identifying critical issues; the social, economic and environmental issues that bring about a new social and natural territory. This is how the metaphor is embedded in reality. This is the La Sarita settlement, in which the community occupied the grounds of a former petro-chemical company.

From then on, we were able to act inventively in order to bring about an economic, political, social and communicative improvement. The first issue was how to insert the local production in local culture. In times of neoliberalism, only products imported from Taiwan mattered — or German cars, or Coke — but local production had no relevance.

Along with other artists, we started to encourage traditional crafts, as well as to generate critical ways of evaluating neoliberal models for development. This slide shows an old train station. Our railway system was created by the British during the 19th century. In this case, we were working with the community of Punta Lara.

We had to face many difficulties. One of them was the construction of a 42 Km long bridge across the La Plata river, which would perpetuate the old export model of natural resources, not by railway anymore, but with new bridges and roads to transport these products from Argentina to Brazil, and from there to the rest of the world.

The community opposed this model. When we started to discuss the construction of the bridge, which was to be financed by the Inter-American Development Bank, we as a community refused to accept such a development model. We wanted to invest those 2, million Dollars — if they existed at all — in other things.

We wanted to know where that money went and who would profit from that. We wanted to be active participants in the development of our region. This is but a small example: Close to La Plata is the La Plata port. We started getting in touch with friends there. We are not artists that come from the outside and insert themselves in a community to work there, we are part of the community. We started discussions and tried to find solutions. We installed 32 solar energy panels, trying to transform the area into a tourist attraction this is still in process.

Another interesting issue was creating an awareness of work and local production in the children. We think an awareness of their own localities and traditions has a positive impression on the minds of children. It also helps children discover and develop their own abilities. It was indeed a very complex situation to work with. The ruling system had tried to eradicate any capacity of autonomous decision making, as well as the capacity to value the local.

The power over them has dwindled. Here you see youth of the Briso community. Currently, we have a very interesting project going on there, which looks at ways in which the community can participate actively in the recovery of this public space. Remember the old cages we showed you earlier? Here the children are taking an active part in reappropriating public space.

This project proposes a new concept of public works. Instead of comissioning a contractor, we tried to articulate the abilities available in the communities, so that they create and redesign their own public space. Based on the experience undergone in the zoo, that is transforming a space of imprisonment into a space of public action, many new ideas emerged: Ideas that extended the activities within the zoo and changed its former character of captivity to external activities that could have a benefitial effect on local natural environments.

The following example is completely the opposite. This was a good chance to test out our work, focusing on catalization of communication in communities. It also gave us the chance to combine the local and the global. As most of us know, the people of Northern Ireland have to deal with significant religious and political problems. These conflicts have both an economic and a social impact on the society there.

We stayed for 40 days in the Ards peninsula, establishing contact with the local fishing communities. The slide you see shows the port of Portavogie. We noticed the proximity of this largely protestant village to the border of Ireland. Our work during those three weeks consisted in bringing together the neigbouring communities that were considering other alternatives to fishing, such as aquaculture. While the community of Portavogie was losing its fishing tradition, it was unaware of the research on aquaculture going on about 10 km away, in the Republic of Ireland.

The reason for this unawareness on the part of Portavogie was precisely the lack of exchange between the two Irelands. So we succeeded in bringing these two communities together. We set off a process with two weeks of dialogue and discussions that led to agreements between both communities to exchange knowledge and information.

Where is the art in all this? At this point we want to stress the post-visual, dialogical aspect of the artistic work we are doing. Communication, connectivity and dialogical work are other ways of working. They have a double standard: I guess Shell workers in the port of Hamburg can afford to have a good car; there must be a strict monitoring of pollution levels and I suppose the corporation must have some benefitial effect on the local community.

Here you see an oil spill in , in the coastal area of Magdalena, Buenos Aires. Here we take up some aspects of the reed project. As you can see, the oil spill had a devastating impact on the reeds, but not on its metaphor. They all reacted immediately to this catastrophe. We started to use new ways of communicating through the press, radio, TV, analysis of satellite images, aerial survey and in situ evaluation, in order to gain a thorough insight of the situation. This project is still going on. The Shell oil spill had a great impact on the coastal communities, but it also enabled us to develop develop inventive models in collaboration with the affected communities.

It was also a way to empower those communities to trust their own visions, in order to find solutions and stop the advance of pollution. Many ideas emerged from the public works. The worst outcome of the spill was the contamination of brooks and wetlands, which was the space with the most biodiversity. These are creative strategies. Here you find another other kind of order. This is the port of Rotterdam. This is the port of Buenos Aires. I think we can go on to the discussion right away, but first of all, thank you very much. This was an overwhelming presentation. It might take some time for people here to articulate their questions to you.

I am really fascinated by how many levels you work in. I was just thinking of Gerald Raunig; he was here yesterday. He said that most of the time, one of the dangers that community projects run into is too much harmony versus too little conflict, too much help versus the creation of structures for the people. There is too much talk on identity, instead of focussing on difference.

I still have a question though, and it involves the idea of the aid-worker. When we talked this morning, I asked you about your notion of help. Could you elaborate on that again? Actually, what we were talking about today was healing and helping. Nevertheless, you made a very interesting and profound question.

How are you beginning to develop this? These cases are symbolic of the variety of means we can use to reach an end. Our hopes are built precisely on the things denied to us. We have to invest all of our strength and our hopes in those which must be refuted. We have to give strength to that which must be refuted. In December this year, we might be there discussing with them in order to unite both of our efforts. Our presentation in London was a result of such discussions with Friends of the Earth in England and the Netherlands, where Shell is based. Can you say something about your funding structures, subsistence if you like?

We produce our own funding. We have a very meagre source of income. We develop many projects along with other members of the community, and we produce many goods for bartering. Basically, we live of the pleasure of producing things. We participate in those creative activities such as basketry and harvesting. Connectivity allows us to subsist without money. Other economic relationships and forms of funding are created. On the other hand, it is important to emphasize that the continuity of our work does not depend on a lot of funding. You have indicated the point of greatest helplessness: You have touched on a very specific issue.

If you focus on the image of the prison here, the surrender to helplessness is greater and it is rare to find a proposal that finds an active way out of that helplessness. We had concentrated on the perception of zoos. I think any zoo throughout the world could have been deconstructed for that purpose. A useless vestige of the nineteenth century, zoos are symptomatic of our aberrated perception. We can fight for life and give our lives for that ideal, but we continue to take our kids for a walk in the zoo, holding a balloon. So one of the issues is focusing on our failed acts and problems.

As artists or cultural workers, we have the possibility or the obligation to think of alternatives to that which must be refuted. I reiterate that we must put our hopes in that which must be denied, and to apply creativity in order to find solutions to these problems by using a critical perspective. The slide showing children working with willow is connected to the one that Rafael elaborated on. We work on the transformation of that zoo in an interdisciplanary way with a very large group of people.

We live in a region that is very much threatened by urban expansion. One of the ways of deconstructing the Victorian notion of the zoo involves reconsidering it as a centre for the articulation of microenvironments, fostering the recreation of new living spaces and participation. I have a question and a comment, which has to do with the fact that in Argentina, for a variety of circumstances that have to do with social and economic processes, there is also a tremendous burst of creativity, which comes out of the necessities of subsistence and survival.

In a recent text that my colleagues and I wrote in the Raqs media collective, we were trying to think about realities that artists can learn from and we had five figures, like the marginalia you have in medieval manuscripts. Like earlier, people used to write books and the real stories would often be painted into the margins: We created these five figures.

One was the people who cross borders in boats and the other was a person who works in telecommunication centres, remote call centres. For us it was interesting that normally one thinks of a protest or a resistance movement in terms of ceasing to work, ceasing to produce. In a sense, the relations that we enter into because of necessity are never translated into relations that we enter into because of desire.

Yes, but the experience stays with us. I think we all learn from necessity. I say that when we had difficulties, we made so much more difficult work. Borges said something that is so true: Our vision is related to another aspect of our practice, which is more connected with transformation than with goals. We must be part of that transformation, adopting a perceptive approach.

For example the zoo project: I do think that your work is about dialogue, about deconstruction, but it might be about the helplessness of artists trying to change something in the world. That zoo still runs according to Victorian notions, but at the same time our project has set off other activities, other visions as exposed by Alejandro, for example the conservation of local microenvironments at the urban peripheries. What interests us is the transformation in itself and being part of that. But the zoo project was about our own captivity. Not all the three of us are artists.

Our trio has different backgrounds. For example in the case of the reed project, we cooperated with reed harvesters, scientists or people with local knowledge. We develop our work both with a bioregional vision and a bioregional practice, only then our vision can be an inclusive one. We see the artist as an integral part of the ecosystem. If you come from within the community your desire to achieve results is greater, because you are going to reep the rewards yourselves. Transforming your community is your drive. I also found your notion of production interesting: The important aspect is transformation.

Nature is not innocent, and as Donna Harroway says: I do think we are romantic to a certain extent, in that our demands are based on values, but also on necessities that are real. So our demands are at the same time a means of subsistence. In that sense I could compare myself to Novalis, if you like. When you talked about Shell, I was thinking about Spain in the spring of this year, when there was an ecological disaster.

There was this peace movement that brought many different people together. Again I must stress that which unites the political struggles of groups like the unemployed and us, who have our own approach in dealing with reality: The general movement is political, but it is not institutionalized.

Yes, we work with other communities. The communities embody emerging processes. In fact, institutionalized political structures have caused the downfall of many encouraging movements that were emerging. Unfortunately we have to end this first session, thank you very much to everybody. Thanks for coming on this lovely day into this oasis of theory, practice and reflection.

Their name might sound a bit misleading, and there have been grudges held against galleries within our circle. I think I wrote to all the invited groups that Hamburg is a very musical city, and a lot of artists produce close to the musical subculture. Thank you very much to all the people involved in organizing this really good congress.

I hope we can contribute to the discussion as well. Da sind wir seit zwei Jahren. Wir haben auch unser eigenes Museum in Altona, an dem Ort wo bis vor zwei Jahren auch unser Ausstellungsraum war. Dort haben wir dann eine ganze Reihe von Ausstellungen gemacht. Ich deute das jetzt nur kurz an. Hier eine andere Sache: Hier sehr analytische Karten; das ganze dreht sich darum, die Stadt hinsichtlich ihrer Wahrnehmung der Dunkelheit und Helligkeit zu beschreiben.

Ich gehe darauf jetzt nicht weiter ein. Also haben wir ihn als erstes eingeladen, mit der vagen Umschreibung unseres Arbeitsvorhabens und der Beschreibung des Bootes und er hat dann eine biologische Forschungsstation, bzw. Sie liegt jetzt hier in der Innenstadt, und ich werde ganz kurz versuchen, um es bildhaft zu machen, diese Arbeit, die ein Haus ist, das als Arbeitsort funktioniert aber gleichzeitig ein Kunstwerk war, zu beschreiben. Wir haben den Vorplatz gesehen; hier ist ein kurzer Blick hinein.

Es ist so, dass die Ausbildung dieses Raumes bereits zu einer Zusammenarbeit wurde. Es ist vielleicht eine Mischung davon, wie es im Hier im Raum ist z. Wir haben auch Barbara Engelschall dazugeholt, eine Biologin aus Hamburg, die ganz intensiv an der Vermittlung naturkundlichem Wissen arbeitet. Dann der Erdboden hier z. Christoph hat das vorhin schon eingeleitet. Hier sieht man eine Karte. Die Elbe sehen wir links, es ist ein Fluss, der da unten ist und den Hafen durchzieht.

Liegeplatz gewesen, der in einem ausgeweiteten Gebiet liegt. Das finde ich vollkommen richtig. Viele Resultate haben wir dann in einem Schrank auf dem Schiff gezeigt, so dass man sie auch jederzeit auch angucken konnte. Das war das erste Dia Karussell, jetzt kommt das zweite. Organisatorisch war es Neuland. Aber es ist gelungen, es in diesem Vierteljahr entwickeln zu lassen. Hier ein Bild, der zu meinen Lieblingsbildern wurde in der Zeit: Die Dias halten diese Entfernung in der Projektion nicht ganz aus. Das zeige ich jetzt hier auch, weil es ein ganz komisches Moment war in dieser ganzen Geschichte: Hier sieht man ihn beim Markieren eines Insekts.

Das Markieren dient dazu, z. Hier ein weiterer Ausschnitt dessen, was passierte. Es wurde eine Lesung verbunden mit etwas Essen und Grillen. Vielleicht jetzt hier ein paar Dias eingestreut, die gar nicht viel zeigen. Ein Teil von ihnen trifft etwas, was gewesen ist, ein Teil von ihnen trifft etwas, worum es einem ging, aber es ist auch eine Art von Mythos, den man damit erzeugt, und dessen muss man sich immer bewusst sein, gerade bei Projekten, wo es darum geht, mit anderen Leuten zusammen zu arbeiten.

Vielleicht noch eine kurze Anmerkung zum kaputt machen. Es gab einmal eine Auffassung des sogenannten landschaftlichen Stils, hergeleitet noch vom englischen Landschaftsgarten. Dagegen standen Auffassungen von dem Oberbaudirektor Schumacher, ein hier sehr einflussreicher Architekt, die sich nachher durchgesetzt wurden, das Ganze architektonisch aufzufassen, d.

Hier sieht man eine hervorragende Architekturzeichnung in ihrer Klarheit, worum es geht, das auch die Naturelemente rein architektonisch aufgefasst sind. Das ganze Ufer ist auch architektonisch aufgefasst. Nun, so sieht es auch noch heute aus. Das Ganze war damals sehr fortschrittlich. Das andere entsprach einer alten Zeit voller Mief. Das ist aber ein Idealbild, was zugrunde liegt.

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Dieses Idealbild ist aber eins, was uns allen zugrunde liegt. Rechts sieht man auch einen Weidenzaun, sehr bewuchert; das Ganze ist ein kleiner Landschaftsgarten. Wo wollen wir hingehen und wie empfinden wir uns in Verbindung mit der umliegenden Architektur? Jetzt gebe ich an Sonja und Ricke weiter. Ich werde schon was dazu sagen, weil die beiden sind ja meine Studentinnen. Shveta, what do you think? First I thougt that the documentation of the project was terribly interesting, that we have something to learn from that. Maybe because my understanding would be slightly limited, but one of the things that the manner in which we do work is trying to understand what the perception is.

Perhaps that would be the most important distinction that I would make in terms of what the training is. So the comment is about the different cultural contexts of these projects and that this one has to deal with Western art history. I was also a bit shocked at some point. To be more precise, there was this picture of a child who had to learn something about colour, and you commented something like: I find this hierarchical; I think it might have been more interesting to look at the way the child made the picture.

Vielleicht kann ich doch was dazu sagen, weil ich finde, wir sollten es nicht zu sehr zu einer Konfrontation ausweiten, was jetzt an diesen Konzepten der beiden schwierig und vielleicht gut war. Insgesamt war dort vieles, was einfach auch schwierig war, an unseren eigenen Konzepten und Konzepten von diversen Leuten, die dort stattfanden. Es war wirklich ein Arbeitfeld, an dem wir dort gemeinsam gearbeitet haben, z.

Das war unglaublich lebendig. Diese Problematiken, die angesprochen wurden, kann ich zum Teil teilen, verstehe aber nicht ganz, warum eine ganz kategorische Differenz gemacht wird zu dem, was wir heute morgen gesehen haben, und was am ehesten von Till Krause noch eben problematisiert worden ist. Ich finde, sehr viele der Projekte kreisen um dieses Frage. Das ist ja bei Park Fiction auch eine Frage, wie kriegt man Leute dazu, dass sie einsteigen, dass sie sich verlinken, dass sie sich einschreiben. Was wird da genau beschrieben? Yes, I have to. I found it was a onesided view, and not a situation of exchange.

There are forms of knowledge that are gone and of course, I have no problem with that. I liked the Alster barge project so much because it allowed for so many points of view without judging any of them. That might be a nice thing to do, but sometimes it gets dangerous, because of old pedagogical ways of thinking that are very patronizing. I was shocked myself about so many people being shocked. I think one of the problems is framing. I really loved the details of how one thing followed the other and how the communication went. I think though that it is still a bit of a taboo to work with kids and art, quite a tricky field.

For example, we had a guided tour done by the kids, so they presented themselves, rather than being presented by someone else. Just to try and diffuse the strong dialectics here. Erstens setzen wir dieses Projekt nicht im Kunstkontext an, sondern es ist ganz klar ein Projekt, das im Kunstunterricht entstanden ist, und das macht schon ein Riesenunterschied aus, glaube ich.

Und dann glaube ich, dass der Unterschied von dem Projekt zu euren Projekt oder zu dem Projekt heute morgen, den ich leider nicht gesehen habe der ist, dass wir den ganzen Verlauf der Dinge gezeigt haben, und zwar mit den ganzen Problemen, die es gab. Die Tatsache, dass er zu so einer Form gekommen ist, war eine riesige Leistung.

Das Problem ist, dass man beide Sachen gesehen hat und dass es nicht als Prozess erkenntlich geworden ist. Ich habe auch keine klare Antwort drauf, aber z. Ich finde es schwierig zu sagen, bei diesen Projekten ging es darum, Leute zu etwas zu kriegen. Das ist ein fundamentaler Unterschied. I just want to shift the discussion a little bit, because I take it from the point where Christoph left it, but my problem with the discussion is that we assume already that there exist wishes.

I think that is a great assumption on our part. Are we being pedagogic? We were often full of anxiety about pedagogic impulses, but in retrospect, I think that there is a point where you set examples of attending to detail, and that is what I find very fascinating in the project that we saw. So the putting down or the recording or the inscription of a lot of observations may lead to a point where then we can say: Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism.

Oxford University Press, , By meeting places of young heroin users and the numerous squatted houses had thus become visible signifiers of a city in crisis that was also a city of crises, a socio-geographic space in which various forms of youth deviance were produced, became visible and had to be dealt with.

Scholars have shown that in contrast to the underground of the s, in which the consumption of illicit drugs mainly cannabis, LSD, and mescaline and the wish for social change went hand in hand,33 by the early s the underground had split up into a political, a soft drug, and a hard drug scene. Despite the general separation of political and heroin scene at the end of the s, the different scenes were linked on several levels: Rock and Psychedelics in the s Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , What users had earlier felt as an unconscious suspicion or intuition - that was just a lie - became, when high or tripping, a verity.

In Zurich activists understood themselves as a youth movement, demands for more funding for youth culture had been the starting point of militant clashes between youth activists and the police. Activists' demands for an autonomous youth centre mirrored the perception of a political struggle in terms of that of a whole generation.

But squatting and heroin consumption were also perceived as youth phenomena despite a relatively broad age spectrum in both cases. Youth was and is , in other words, a social and discursive construction, based less on biological age than on individual behaviour and its evaluation by those considered adults.

The category of youth conceals differentiating factors like class, gender, educational background etc. Youth appear thus as a risk both for themselves and for society and in need of strict guidance on their way to adulthood. In West Germany in these included the age of majority, i. After the reform of the criminal law in , the age of 35 For the heroin scene see p. Sage, , 10, In other words, it was not enough to refrain from certain actions until one reached a specified age—not having sexual relationships until the age of 16, for instance—what also mattered were the ways in which one acted once this age had been reached—what kind of relationships one had and with whom.

The discourse on youth delinquency and youth deviance thus became one of the sites where society's basic norms and moral values were renegotiated and codified but also where fears about its future could be articulated and possibly mitigated. Besides youth being the result of adult attributions and object of governmental policies, it was also a means of self-identification.

Further weight to contemporary conceptions of heroin and squatting as youth phenomena was added by a cult of youthfulness that was prevalent in both scenes: But youth was not the only link between squatters and heroin consumers. Both groups were, second, driven by a fundamental discomfort with hegemonic urban regimes. The modern city was perceived as a symbol of an encompassing regime of normative values, discipline and control, in which spaces for deviating youth were non-existent.

As contemporary urban theorists put it: To many youth the city appeared thus as the manifestation of an encompassing normalizing regime. These sentiments were expressed primarily through metaphors of social and architectural coldness. Likewise, life in both scenes was, third, centred around the search for extraordinary corporeal and emotional experiences in order to oppose the perceived monotony of modern city life.

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These teenage kicks could be found in individual drug consumption as well as in collective militant actions. Dissens und kultureller Eigensinn Opladen: On the emergence of the coldness metaphor see Lindner, Jugendprotest, The search for warmth and the search for adventure were thus two sides of the same coin. This may sound paradoxical in the case of addicts whose life was almost completely determined by the need to procure money for the next dose of heroin. Both scenes were also connected through an ideal of masculinity that was based on toughness, aggressiveness, and the willingness to undertake personal risks.

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In the case of heroin consumers this could mean to possibility for identification with the peer group. They are always on the move and must be alert, flexible, and resourceful. This is most obvious in the idea of squatted houses as free spaces, but the creation of public scenes of heroin users also included a spatial component, as did trips to popular meeting places of the international drug underground, like West Berlin, Amsterdam, India, or Afghanistan. Nach Tonbandprotokollen aufgeschrieben von Kai Hermann u. Horst Rieck, 1st ed.

On militancy as a means of identification, though without a perspective on gender, see Schwarzmeier, Die Autonomen, 26ff. Some squatters were acquainted or even friends with individual heroin users and some were consuming heroin themselves, although further research will be necessary to understand the individual perception of such behaviour.

Whether being a heroin-consuming squatter meant that one was seeing oneself as belonging to either, both, or none of the two scenes, would have to be clarified in each case individually. For although the political and drug underground can be and usually are described as distinctive scenes, for individuals it was not necessarily a contradiction to be part of both scenes or to switch between the two. Comparing heroin and squatters' scene in the early s reveals that the separation of the two was only one possible result of discursive and spatial practices during the early s.

Heroin consuming youth had participated in the struggle for the Leiche'. Aus dem Tagebuch der Fixerin Heidi S. Freitag, for an account of a heroin addict from Berlin about his unsuccessful attempt of withdrawal in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. Still, in these instances heroin users were squatters and they were constituting one of several sub-groups of the heterogeneous squatters' scene.

In contrast to all previous studies I will therefore treat heroin and squatters' scenes as strongly interrelated and sometimes intersecting phenomena. The separation of drug and political youth scene and its relation to changing governmental technologies can thereby also be described as a process that was not completed by the early s but lasted well into the s. This approach promises new insights into the governance of youth and into the different ways non-conforming youth reacted to these governmental technologies.

The crisis of Fordism and the emergence of societies of control By addressing a profound crisis of society, urban space and youth in the late s and early s this study is engaged in two larger current debates in historiography and social sciences. So far I have described scenes of young squatters and heroin users as aspects of or symbols for a more encompassing crisis in the s and early s, namely that of the city 24 and of a social order that was experienced as cold and constricting. The experience of crisis touched upon many facets of this order—from the organization of industrial production to the rise of consumerism, a social policy grounded in the welfare state and urban restructuring processes according to modernist principles.

Throughout this study I will use the term of a Fordist regime to capture all these different aspects. Fordism in this sense denotes therefore a historical epoch that lasted from the end of the Second World War until the mids. A History of the World, New York: Vintage Books, , Soon, rationalization and standardization appeared as desirable guiding principles for society in general.

Assisted by experts, it was the role of the state to plan and control the transformation of society. Residential, commercial and industrial areas were to be clearly separated. From the city itself to the design of a kitchen, virtually all aspects of life were being rationalized. But in the early s this hegemonic model came under scrutiny. These aspects will be discussed in more detail in section 3. Universe Books, ; the German translation was published the following year.

In view of the exploding costs of social security systems economists like Milton Friedman started to demand their liquidation. To the mentors of the neoliberal project the Fordist state appeared as the contrary of economic freedom, initiative and individual responsibility. Sind wir noch regierbar? Herder, ; Wilhelm Hennis, ed. Studien zu ihrer Problematisierung, 2 volumes Stuttgart: Wirtschaftspolitik, Expertise und Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik bis Berlin: University of Chicago Press, As standardization of urban space and society went hand in hand, with their demand for a non-standardized urban environment squatters also demanded space in a double sense for individualistic life concepts that did not fit into the Fordist model.

During the s and s, the new project of neoliberalism, with its preference of the market over the state and an emphasis on individuality and diverse life-concepts, would eventually become hegemonic. Dietz, , Campus, , 15ff. Although continuities did exist—from drug legislation to the student protests of —the break becomes more tangible when we understand Fordism also as a set of normalizing and disciplinary technologies.

Although standardization has been described as a main aspect of the Fordist regime, the term does not fully catch the role of normalization in regard to youth and to urban space that was at stake. As the emergence of heroin and squatters' scenes as spaces for non-conforming, individualistic, deviant, rebellious youth is at the centre of this study, the crisis of Fordism also needs to be described in terms of a crisis of a disciplinary and normalizing regime.

Individual bodies and spaces were constituting each other and formed the base of an ideal social order. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation; they carve out individual segments and establish operational links; they mark places and indicate values; they guarantee the 29 The disciplines76 created a mass of individual bodies, bodies that had to be subjected to constant coercion in order to improve them, make them more efficient, to adjust them to hegemonic norms.

Disciplinary techniques were complementing the punishment as a way to ensure this subjection. Both techniques, disciplines and punishment, were thus complementary means to ensure the same goal: Although in his later works Foucault emphasized the growing importance of security over discipline,78 this does not mean that disciplinary technologies, institutions and spaces had been replaced.

They are mixed spaces: An Introduction New York: Blackwell, , In the industrialized countries discipline comes into crisis. Suhrkamp, , f. Suhrkamp, , Edition AV, , ff. Geschichte, Bestandsaufnahme, Entwicklungstendenzen Weinheim: Beltz, 31 organization of urban space and the emergence of new sites of youth deviance indeed seem to indicate a profound crisis of disciplinary society and the spaces it produced. And by adopting the lifestyle and values that were predominant in these scenes youth also turned their backs to the factory as a space and an institution that produced disciplined, Fordist subjects.

Yet the emergence of new spaces of youth deviance also created new technologies to govern deviant behaviour. Understanding deviance as a matter of public urban space allowed for the policing of large groups of youth rather than or in addition to disciplining them individually. One of the questions that will guide the analysis of discourses about and practices at these new spaces of deviance is therefore: And if that was the case: What kind of spaces did non-conforming youth and the technologies to control these youth produce?

The focus on urban space as a site of crisis, protest, and governance in the s and ; with a regional focus on Westphalia: See also Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule. Mareike Teigeler, Unbehagen als Widerstand. Transcript, , footnote Barbara Budrich, , The end of the planning euphoria in regard to urban space and social order becomes apparent in the wide-spread uneasiness with urban redevelopment and the initial success of the squatters' movement. But the emergence of this urban space as a site and means to govern youth deviance—and to thereby manage some of the effects of the crisis of Fordism—also points towards another shift, that from disciplinary to control societies.

Youth created spaces in order to evade the normalizing regime that was structuring society and that became manifest in urban space. These spaces were in turn used as an object of new technologies of control that supplemented earlier strategies to discipline non-conforming youth. Conceiving space as an object of historiography For a long time, historians have privileged time over space. While in time there was change, space was conceived as an empty and unchanging container, an empty space that was populated, perceived and used by people. This notion of space has come under scrutiny in the past two decades and scholars have highlighted the dynamic aspects of space.

Especially the work of Henri Lefebvre has informed what might be termed a post-structuralist current in the history of spaces. University of California Press, , Bodies are not distributed in space but actively create and shape spaces. In the context of this study this means that youth did not simply meet at already existing spaces but created spaces by meeting at certain geographical places and that the character of these new spaces was determined by their concrete practices and that of the police.

These newly created spaces did in turn structure the social practices of the subjects. Space thus appears as a process rather than as a static order. Space is also, second, the product of discursive representations. A neighbourhood or any other spatial ensemble is therefore not just perceived in a certain way, but it is discursively brought into existence in the first place: In the context of spaces of youth deviance the creation of such spaces always went together with the creation of spaces of normalcy.

And just as the spaces of normalcy and deviance could not exist without each other, the drawing of borders between the two always created the transgression of this border: This idea of a limited number of clearly distinguishable spaces that were totally different from their surroundings can be found on the side of police, politicians, and press—to whom these spaces appeared as those of a lawless, chaotic, deviant and threatening Other— but also on the side of youth for whom these spaces were liberated islands that stood in stark contrast to the constricting social order around them.

Cornell University Press, ; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory [ Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.

In our society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place 'elsewhere' than at home.

Looking at heroin and squatters' scenes as heterotopic spaces at society's margins promises therefore new insights into the fundamental order of this society's centre. Rather, I will use it as a concept to describe contemporary assumptions about these spaces. Heterotopia thereby becomes a way to denote a specific mode of thinking space. These sites were imagined as totally different, but it is the task of critical historiographical analysis to deconstruct the notion of dichotomous and utterly different spaces itself. Used in such a way, the concept of heterotopia, despite its inconsistencies, can become a powerful tool to understand contemporary attributions to and functions of spaces of squatters and heroin users in the s.

Michel Foucault's ideas on heterotopia, http: Polity Press, , See also Soja, Thirdspace, They offer no resolution or consolation, but disrupt and test our customary notions of ourselves. These different spaces, which contest forms of anticipatory utopianism, hold no promise or space of liberation. With different degrees of relational intensity, heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination. Thesis outline In the first chapter I will use the case of young heroin users to illustrate the process of spatialization of youth deviance.

In a first step I will show why and how heroin use became a symbol for the profound crisis of the Fordist regime in the s. As such, it was translated into a problem of order in public urban space, in an attempt to render heroin use and social crises less threatening. The practice of heroin users to meet at public places and to thereby constitute visible heroin scenes and its interpretation as spatial symptoms of a crisis paved the way to govern heroin in and through urban space.

Two complementary developments will elucidate these processes: This symbolic containment was complemented by practices of policing of open heroin scenes in urban space. The second chapter deals with squatted houses as spaces of non-conforming youth. In contrast to the first chapter now the perspective of youth themselves comes into focus. After a short history of the Berlin squatters' scene and the related press discourse, squatting as an emotional and social practice will come under scrutiny. This idea of free spaces was also experienced as a possibility to create whole liberated territories on a district level.

Spaces of politically active youth and of heroin users were not necessarily located at different geographical sites. As the example of the autonomous youth centre AJZ in Zurich in chapter three shows, the use of the same space by different groups of youth who It was the attempt to react to governmental policies to spatialize drug use and to disperse drug users from public urban spaces by providing a safe haven for young heroin users.

Informational campaigns to keep the misery of these drug users visible show the potential but also the difficulty to react to new forms of governance and control without accepting urban space as the only field to deal with problems of marginalised youth. In those instances where activists fully adopted a spatial logic, their radical opposition missed its mark and their spaces turned into sites of stagnation rather than liberation. This is shown in chapter four for the West German squatters' scene and its treatment of conflicts about drug use and gender roles. In contrast to Zurich, heroin users were constructed as alien and a danger to the squatters' scene and consequentially excluded.

Similar notions can be witnessed in regard to gender: Further self-segregation into women's spaces or the exclusion of individuals from squatters' spaces were the only possible choices for activists that had fully adopted a spatialized understanding of the social. Governing through spaces of heroin consumption Conflicts were necessary in particular, conflicts over urban space [ While the surface was remodelled to suit the needs of motorized traffic, people could travel from dormitory towns at the fringes of the city to its consumerist centre by using the subway.

The modernity of this concept was even underlined rather than contradicted by the absence of sunlight and the illumination of the vast concrete tunnels with artificial lights. Barely bothered by the occasional two-men patrol or police raid, before the eyes of partly shocked, partly fascinated passers-by, they are strapping their wrists with colourful Foucault, The History of Sexuality, At the same time the left-wing Konkret had published a series in three parts on heroin use.

Yet the symbols of the counter-cultural underground in which drug use had been understood as a mind-expanding and rebellious experience had undergone a significant change: Media and general public witnessed the shooting-up of heroin with an unsettling mixture of fascination and fear, lust and angst. The report by Der Spiegel exemplifies many of the facets that would dominate the drug discourse of the s and s, which will be discussed throughout the following chapter.

Heroin use was, first, discussed as a problem of public urban spaces. Two worlds, that of orderly citizens and that of drug users, were colliding in the same place. Drug users did not use public places to stroll from shop to shop but rather, to sojourn there. Telephone boxes were used to prepare and inject freshly acquired heroin in relative peace. The topic of heroin use urgently needed to be addressed partly because it created conflicts about the proper use of public urban spaces. These conflicts were fuelled by the conspicuous character of the heroin scene. The heroin users' greatest affront was not that they were breaking the law, but that they were doing it in public, in view of passers-by and even the police.

The visibility was further enhanced by the negative effects of diluted heroin on drug users' bodies. Even if no criminal acts could be witnessed, visible milieus of delinquency continued to exist and could not be avoided by orderly citizens. One of the main focal points of contemporary drug discourses was therefore the visible presence of heroin users in public urban spaces—and not the criminal act of consuming illegalized substances itself.

The visibility of the heroin problem was, third, significantly enhanced through media reports such as the one cited above. Heroin use has always been a phenomenon that concerned only a very small minority of the overall populace. It could be encountered in public spaces, especially in the bigger cities, yet most people knew heroin use and heroin users solely through the media. Heroin might have been understood as a phenomenon of the margins or periphery of society. In public urban space and through the news coverage, though, it was extending into society's very core and became a topic that concerned everyone.

Starting from these deliberations, this chapter will examine the creation of visible heroin scenes both discursively and spatially. Discursively, heroin was conceived as a problem of youth delinquency and linked to other forms of social, economic, and cultural crises. These crises were translated into a terminology of space: The focus on the visible symptoms of heroin use, that is, on groups of heroin users in public space instead of individual consumers, also allowed for new ways to govern problems of transgressive youth.

The example of the Berlin train station Bahnhof Zoo will show how the 42 media turned one of many meeting points of the local heroin scene into a symbolic site of heroin consumption and indeed of many other forms of threatening social developments. On a symbolic level, certain forms of behaviour and groups of people could thus be socially excluded and spatially contained.

The discourse on heroin use by adolescents became one of the sites at which society could reassure itself of its fundamental norms and values. And by conceiving the Bahnhof Zoo as a counter-site to the rest of the city, it was seemingly possible to prevent youth from pervasive danger by keeping them from this singular space, that is by exerting strict spatial control. These assumptions in turn informed governmental strategies to combat juvenile drug use.

While funding for therapeutic programs remained scarce after the economic crisis of , the policing of open heroin scenes intensified in the early s, which in turn fostered perceptions of heroin use as a spatial problem. This repressive strategy, implemented most strictly in the city of Zurich, could not prevent youth from taking illegalized drugs, nor could it dissolve local heroin scenes. Instead, the young heroin users were forced to constantly change their meeting places and to move through the city; as a consequence their situation worsened significantly.

This chapter shows how it was nevertheless possible to present policing the heroin scene as a replacement for the care for and disciplining of individual drug users and how drug consuming teenagers—and the encompassing social crisis they signified—could seemingly be brought under control, once again, through the control of urban space. Yet this was not just of concern for the parents of these children, as youth—and children in particular—also represented the future of society in general.

These anxieties were fuelled by the experience of a severe crisis that affected the economy as much as matters of culture, migration as much as sexual norms, and the nation-state as much as the city. I will show how heroin consumption, understood as a youth phenomenon, came to signify these crises; and in particular, how the social crisis of the s was translated into a crisis of youth. I will further argue that this interpretation was supported by a second translation, that of social phenomena—changing consumption patterns, youth delinquency—into questions of space.

Their innocence was as much endangered by the spread of heroin as the innocence of children. In turn, it was not so much social conditions or individual behaviour that needed to be addressed in order to govern the problem of juvenile heroin consumption and to mitigate the effects of the crisis. Rather, it was necessary to control the spreading of heroin which usually was synonymous with controlling the movement of heroin users in the city. The phenomenon of heroin use was turned into a matter of control over public urban space.

Heroin use as a youth phenomenon Adult anxiety has consistently been expressed in terms of youthful vulnerability, nuisance and misbehaviour and has focused on the simply undesirable, worrying and disobedient as well as criminality. Der Spiegel summarized the knowledge of experts and politicians Ibid. At the same time, drug use was perceived to be spreading from urban centres to the countryside and from upper to lower classes.

Probably the best example was the idea that cannabis was a gateway-drug, the consumption of which would lead young people to other, harder drugs like heroin. By subsuming all illegalized substances under the term drugs, contemporaries missed the development of two different, and distinct, drug scenes. While the use of cannabis and LSD had been popular amongst upper class pupils and university students and was already on the decline, heroin consumption became more and more popular, though primarily among working-class adolescents who had not been part of the hippie underground of the late s.

Later studies showed that minors were disproportionately charged with offences against narcotics laws, largely because of illegal consumption, while the actual number of teenage and adolescent drug consumers was significantly lower than statistics based on police controls suggested. Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, , Of the drug users at Zurich's Platzspitz park in , the average user had started using heroin at the age of nineteen, although some claimed to have started when they were only twelve years old. Zurich, , The younger people started with heroin, though, the longer and more intensely they would continue to do so, an effect that has been observed in the case of nicotine consumption as well.

The study showed that the number of heroin addicts was much higher than had been assumed previously. Instead of an estimated 3, addicts in West Berlin, the study concluded that about 6, people were addicted to heroin and other opiates. Extrapolating from these figures, estimates for West Germany spoke of approximately , heroin addicts—three times as much as the official 45, Although the majority of heroin users and addicts were young adults, there were some twelve to fourteen year-old drug addicts.

Yet these clearly atypical representatives of the heroin scene were presented as stereotypical, as symptomatic of a wider trend in drug consumption and, not the least, for a whole society for which its base and future were about to be poisoned. This reliance on stereotypical images was, and is, characteristic of mass media coverage of juvenile delinquency, including drug use. Deissler voraus, mit neuen Erscheinungsformen: On the discursive connection of drug use and teenage sexuality see section 2. One of the unuttered bases for the moral panic about teenage drug use was the disturbing fact that children turned into youth and finally into adults precisely by taking drugs, whether it was the largely accepted alcohol or illegalized heroin.

If anything, stories of drug addicts becoming ever younger might therefore indicate an earlier end of childhood in general, at least as perceived by adults. In a way, the individual crisis of adolescence was a means of understanding and coping with an impersonal and much larger societal crisis.

One that even adults couldn't control. In the United States, a report on an eight year-old heroin addict even won the Pulitzer prize in , but later turned out to be a hoax. Based on this risk-rationality it is possible to identify potential subjects of intervention and to determine objects and limits of 'legitimate' actions. The consumption of illegalized drugs could thus be understood as a failed attempt to master the transition from child to adult. The more intensive someone's drug consumption, the more likely he or she was to have sexual experiences as well, starting from an earlier age, with more frequent changes of sexual partners, and with a wider range of sexual practices employed.

Experts viewed this confluence in light of the social conditions of youth: The use of heroin was thus understood not only in terms of youth but also of sex and gender. Young girls were believed to be the passive victims of seduction to both drugs and sexual intercourse, which in turn implied a greater need for control. This gendered difference was also based on different meanings in regard to the nation state: These general convictions about youth as crisis were complemented by a historically specific perception of youth in crisis during the s.

Following on the economic crisis of and the successive dismantling of the welfare state, the social conditions of youth and especially their prospects for upward mobility looked rather dim; from the mids, youth unemployment continued to be alarmingly high. The unemployment rate among heroin users was higher the longer and more severely heroin was used.

Unemployment was and is an effect rather than a cause for heroin consumption. Bezeichnenderweise fanden sich bei Demonstrationskrawallen, gewaltsamen Hausbesetzungen, Gefangenenbefreiungen und Terroristenaktionen Personen aus der Drogen-Szene oder mit Verbindungen zu ihr.

Hans-Wolfgang Sternsdorff and Paul Lersch. As scholars like Robert P. Stephens have shown, two positions 54 the liberalization and growing permissiveness that supposedly came with it was complemented by a critique of the Fordist welfare state and its supposed passivating effects on young people in particular: There is a lack of demand in regard to the shaping and mastering of one's life: Individual and familial provisions [Daseinsvorsorge] are being handed over to collective governmental and social institutions welfare state.

Young people are learning passive experiences on multiple levels e. Drug use thus needed to be viewed as one possible effect of this deep social crisis. The crises that were touching the core of society were met with a crisis of its borders. Stephens, Germans on Drugs, Liberal and left-wing views on drug consumption will be explored in more detail in section 4. Junge Menschen lernen vielfach passives Erleben z. Immigration and drug import both demonstrated the fragility of national borders and of national identity based on ethnic purity in a globalized world. The topic of migration and convictions regarding drug use and sexually deviant behaviour of young girls were connected in the motif of white slavery.

Transcript, , West Berlin was seen as especially vulnerable in this regard. As West German authorities did not acknowledge the German Democratic Republic as a state, its borders were not being controlled by West German customs agents. These threatening interconnected developments could be attributed, at least in part, to specific urban spaces. Die Dirnen dankten den netten Umgang durch bereitwilligen Dienst beim Herointransport. Here, criminologists like Arthur Kreuzer suspected the merging of milieus of drugs, migration and prostitution, turning these districts into counter-sites to the bourgeois order of the city.

For the city did not just provide spaces for an already existing delinquency. In contrast to previous decades, urban space was now also seen as a potential cause for aberrant adolescent behaviour, including drug use. Kreuzer went on to relate these supposed effects of modernity to Fordist concepts of urban architecture: All this can foster the search for supposed ways out: The discourses on drug consumption, youth deviance, modernity, the nation, and the city were related through an all-encompassing experience of social transformation and crisis.

The debate on adolescent drug use allowed to understand these crises and to negotiate and reestablish fundamental social norms and values, for example in regard to gender roles and national identity. The city played a crucial part in this process: Yet even though some sites of youth delinquency could be identified—red-light districts, neighbourhoods with a high proportion of immigrants, but also sites of youth culture like nightclubs and bars—their boundaries were blurred and the exact effects of their architecture on youth behaviour remained uncertain.

On the contrary, heroin use was perceived as a wave that was threatening to flood and poison ever more strata and spaces that had hitherto remained seemingly untouched by the vices of modernity. While drug use had become most visible in urban public spaces, its perceived spreading from there outwards to rural and private spaces was even more disquieting.

Both countryside and the private were constructed as positive counter-sites to the vices of the city.

The discourse of heroin reaching these heterotopias of presumed innocence and order can thus be understood as another expression of insecurity in a time of social change. Media reports and experts added to a fetishization of heroin by focusing on the substance instead of behavioural patterns. Teenage drug consumption could thus be conceived as a problem of spaces rather than as a side-effect of successful modernization. It is impossible to make any verifiable statements about the distribution level of heroin in rural areas for the s and s.

There is evidence, however, that heroin had been available outside the urban centres right from the beginning. Heroin was first imported to West Germany by individual young members of the counter-cultural underground of the late s and early s. Stephens, Germans on Drugs, esp. There were several reasons for this: Additionally, the first loads of heroin reached West Germany in the form of unprocessed opium that had to be boiled up with acetic acid before it could be injected. This mixture, a dark-brown liquid, was called Berliner Tinke, Berlin tincture, and sold for as little as fifteen Deutschmarks in the early and mids.

In the early s police and press reported on this movement from the city towards the countryside and connected it to matters of age. As early as Der Spiegel summarized recent E. US army forces, JHF]. And it is increasingly youth and adolescents who become known to the police in the context of the opiate law. Yet again, this situation was perceived as a process: Und zunehmend sind es Jugendliche und Heranwachsende, die im Zusammenhang mit dem Opiumgesetz polizeibekannt werden. Two possible explanations can be given for this phenomenon that do not necessarily exclude each other.

The establishment of visible scenes of juvenile heroin consumers in small towns and even villages probably was a process that had been completed by the mids, despite individual heroin consumption that preceded this development. But the perceived movement from city to countryside was superimposed by the seeming movement of users through the city, once the strategy of policing visible heroin scenes had been implemented.

As with youth, the countryside had been envisioned as an endangered site. It was imagined as a heterotopia of purity and innocence, threatened by contamination from people and substances from the city. The rural environment was constructed as a pastoral idyll, as a heterotopic counter-site to the city that in turn became a symbol for the evils of modernity. The dichotomy between city and countryside was complemented on the micro-level by the one between public and private spaces.

Heroin, like other illegalized drugs, had been consumed and also traded in private apartments since the beginning of its availability. This was most notably the case for all those consumers who did not depend on the open heroin scene for their supply. For those who had established a stable business relationship with one or more drug dealers, there was no necessity to buy in public places.

In the per-capita consumption of alcohol had reached its highest level since the first statistics in Each German citizen consumed The emergence of visible drug scenes in rural areas could therefore also be interpreted as a shift from alcohol to other drugs, the biggest difference being the illegal character of the latter.

The actual sale took place elsewhere, including private apartments. Yet as with the countryside, the trade and use of heroin in private space was perceived as one of constant movement. Of the victims who had been found in West Germany that year, sixty percent were discovered in private homes. Seventeen percent were found dead on toilets and subway stations; the rest had died in hospitals, on the street or in hotels. This movement was invoked repeatedly in descriptions of the heroin scene.

Whenever the police came, the scene moved temporarily to side streets, only to come back later; whenever the policing of a certain scene intensified, people evaded the pressure by relocating to apartments only to gather again on the streets when the intensity of the raids allowed for it. The conceived movement of deviant behaviour into apartments can therefore also be understood as an expression of fear: BKA schon resignierend fest, setze dieser Taktik 'jedoch Grenzen'.

The same mechanism was at work when Der Spiegel described the attempts to dissolve the scene at Frankfurt's Kaisersack in The image of increasingly younger heroin addicts was so successful because it fit well into a perception of drugs invading spaces of order, purity and innocence—a perception that could not be troubled by developments that indicated the contrary.

As Walter Benjamin once said: Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

See also Vanessa R. By focusing on substances moving through spaces, conquering increasingly more room and bodies, possible social roots of juvenile drug consumption would largely disappear from view. The most obvious reason was the performance of criminal acts in public. Descriptions of teenagers who were dealing and consuming illegalized substances in front of the police served to point out the exceptional character of the acts; not only were these young people breaking the law—they were doing it in sight of the law!

Furthermore, such descriptions implicitly asked for the police to no longer stand and watch but to act and restore law and order. Yet there was more at stake than just crime prevention or persecution. Before the eyes of police and passers-by addicted pupils got the dope, dealers sold a few grams for a profit — money for their own demand. The problem with the supposed members of the drug scene was therefore not simply their individual delinquent behaviour but their belonging to a group that visibly defied hegemonic expectations regarding proper behaviour in public space.

Wilson and George L. The members of the heroin scene were also visible reminders of social crisis. They were viewed as drop-outs not so much because they had chosen to but because they had failed to live up to society's expectations. This becomes most obvious when one looks at the importance of the willingness or capacity for labour in the discourse on drug addicts.

From the early to mids especially, drug addicts' inability to work was posed as a significant problem. Kelling and James Q. Again, the crime of heroin users was not so much the act of selling, buying or using illegalized substances but their being addicts or, more exactly, their being perceived as addicts. The insecurity that the crisis and transformation of society caused so many people was reinforced by visible misery. It was a reminder of the possibility of one's own social fall—a possibility that had to be repressed in order to continue to lead a normal life. By sojourning at certain places their decaying bodies seemed to represent the decay of these sites as well.

Modernist architecture was discussed widely as a possible reason for drug consumption and drug users strengthened the perception of the city as a space of and in crisis. The presence of a visible drug scene thus seemed to prove the perceived social and urban crisis while at the same time contributing to and intensifying it.

Or, on a more abstract level, urban decay produced decaying bodies which in turn symbolized and accelerated this urban decay. For it was the heroin users' decaying bodies whose presence created a space of deviance and whose visibility was hard for many to bear. It was hard to tolerate, as sociologist Imke Schmincke has pointed out, because physical misery [Verelendung] touches one's own physical vulnerability while at the same time indicates a social condition that has not prevented this misery. Through the discomfort in sight of a misery that becomes corporeal a social discrepancy is articulated that manifests itself on the individual bodies.

Psychosozial-Verlag, , The more difficult it was to adhere to hegemonic norms and values—due to financial crises and growing rates of unemployment, for instance—the stronger the provocation. Most of these persons buy impulsively: They are strolling between stores and within the stores between the commodities on offer, aimless, without concrete intention of buying but attracted by atmospheres of intense experiences […]. Then, suddenly, they are getting excited, as this year-old woman describes, looking back at her Christmas shopping: They were such strong sensations.

In the shop the lights, the people; they were playing Christmas carols. I hyperventilated and my hands began to sweat and all of a sudden I was touching sweaters and everything I touched was waving at me A group of medicinal personnel working with drug addicts in Zurich described this mechanism as follows: It is a punch in the face of a society that is still defined by values like hard work [Leistung], profit, success, cleanliness, and control.

Urban sociologists interpret this development similar to the situations described in this paper: It is the fear to be confronted with the visible consequences of the problem of addiction; it is the fear of one's own possible blight and the impending social exclusion that is used to avenge such deviations from the norm.

A compulsive buyer does not experience himself as the centre of action: It is not him who desires the commodity—the commodity desires him, looks at him, calls after him, pursues him. An irresistible suction emanates from it that elevates its prospect to the rank of an exceptional encounter. In the words of a year-old man: As soon as you see it you stop and look at it for some minutes as if spell-bound, then suddenly it hits you like a stroke and you're getting goose bumps'. Most people knew drug addiction only through mass media products.

Die meisten dieser Personen kaufen impulsiv: Es waren so starke Sinnesempfindungen. Im Laden die Lichter, die Menschen; sie spielten Weihnachtsmusik. Nicht er begehrt die Ware - die Ware begehrt ihn, blickt ihn an, ruft ihm nach, verfolgt ihn. Here, drug addiction was securely contained within the frame of a newspaper or TV set , excluded by walls and doors , and controlled one could always put away the newspaper; there was no troubling smell or noise. One could gaze at addicts without fear of them looking back thus establishing a connection between 'ordinary' citizens and addicts , without fear of being touched.

Although it was a different world from that of most citizens, the public character of the heroin scenes' meeting places made such encounters likely. Heroin users occupied the same geographical place as 'ordinary' citizens but used it for very different ends. While the latter might use a train or subway station to get to work, heroin users would sojourn there to trade, consume, share information or simply socialize. In these instances it was impossible to ignore the misery of drug users. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, It denotes a citizen, i. But the term merges the political category of the citizen with the social class of the bourgeoisie.

Even if nothing happened, the simultaneous presence of normal and deviant bodies in the same space caused a fear that was experienced as almost corporeal. This corporeality was enhanced in cases when passers-by witnessed the actual process of shooting up, that is the penetration of a body's borders and its subsequent pollution. This sight could cause physical sickness and revulsion for the viewer. Conclusion From the late s, illegalized drugs had been a common aspect of West German youth culture.

By the early s, the use of cannabis by middle- and upper-class pupils was already on the decline, while a growing number of primarily working-class youth took to the newly available heroin. By the mids, this new hard-drug scene had separated itself from the soft-drug and political scenes and had established a network of meeting places in public urban spaces.

This visibility, together with rising numbers of drug-related deaths, sparked a debate on drug use, its causes and its consequences. Youth figured prominently in the discourse on drug use and drug addiction. More generally Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

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An Essay on Abjection New York: Columbia University Press, The concern about youth was also a concern about the nation's future; the crisis of youth had to be regulated in order to solve the crisis of nation and society. Gender stereotypes resulted in young girls being placed under intensified observation, with implicit calls for stricter guidance for their own good.

As potential mothers, their behaviour was strongly linked to the nation's future and as such needed special attention. The connection between the crisis of youth and the crisis of society that became visible in scenes of young heroin users, worked in both directions. Yet teenage drug consumption also helped to translate the all- consuming crisis of the s into a crisis of youth, thus providing a potential object for regulatory policies to manage this crisis.

The discourse on juvenile drug addiction was therefore also a site at which social norms and values could be renegotiated and reestablished, for instance in regard to national identity, sexuality, work ethics, and the proper behaviour of youth in the widest sense.

The conception of drug users becoming ever younger had no equivalent in reality. The focus on a seemingly homogeneous youth allowed observers to ignore social and economic factors in the growing consumption of heroin. This spatialization also implied a new way of dealing with youth deviance. Until the s, considerable effort had been made to discipline and re-integrate deviant individuals. The use of heroin needed to be contained on a symbolic level and the visible heroin scenes needed to disappear from public space.

These two solutions are the focus of the following sections. Its decline between c. The life-story of a young heroin addict turned the train and subway station Bahnhof Zoo, one of many meeting places of the heroin scene, into just such a symbolic space. This media discourse, I want to argue, conceived the Bahnhof Zoo as a heterotopia, or counter-site, that was entirely different from its surroundings and that was marked by the absence of hegemonic social norms or their complete reversal.

For adults, the existence of such a space made heroin use among teenagers less threatening, as they could now protect their children from drugs by keeping them from places like the Bahnhof Zoo.

Yet these new spaces of deviance were highly ambiguous. Although they were presented in the media as symbols for delinquency and decline, to many teenagers these spaces became an object of fascination rather than sites to be avoided. The reception of stories about the Bahnhof Zoo shows that the presumed absence of adult norms and values at these sites turned them into spaces that to many youth promised a freedom that they were not able to find anywhere else in society.

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Although the assessment of the Bahnhof Zoo by adults and youth differed, the underlying structure was the same; the idea that social conditions could be understood and solved through the management of space. This split also expressed itself spatially. Under pressure from the police, members of the Berlin drug scene quickly abandoned an established meeting point only to gather at a new one, often just some hundred meters away. According to Berlin drug therapists, the separation of soft and hard drug scene was thus completed by Whether this separation was always so absolute is doubtful.

At the local scene at Hasenheide park in Berlin-Kreuzberg, heroin users and hashish smokers apparently hung out together even in the mid- and late s. A mutual disdain for each other usually prevented such a mingling, though: Subway stations, public places and parks added up to a whole network of local heroin scenes. These meeting points were mostly used by people who wanted to buy drugs or to establish contacts with dealers, while the actual consumption, sometimes even the purchase, took place in private apartments or public toilets. Young heroin consumers—by an estimated 6,—could be encountered virtually everywhere in the city of West Berlin.

Paralleling the series in Stern was the story's publication as a book. Although written by two journalists, the story appeared in the form of a first-person account under the title Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, thereby evoking a high degree of authenticity. The book became a roaring success: Still in print, more than two million copies have sold of the German version alone. It covered Christiane F. Her path led first to the Sound, a major nightclub, where she was introduced to a clique of teenaged drug users, including her soon-to-be boyfriend Detlef.

It was in this nightclub that she took her first LSD trip; and after attending a concert by her idol David Bowie, she started snorting heroin. While Detlef and Christiane grew closer to each other, she learned that Detlef prostituted himself at the Bahnhof Zoo. Although appalled by this fact, soon after her first shot of heroin Christiane herself was forced to work as a prostitute in order to earn the necessary money for her addiction. In the 49th edition was published by Bertelsmann; 1,, copies have been sold since the first edition thirty years ago publisher's information.

Creation Books, , One year earlier, a sexploitation film based loosely on the story of Christiane F. She moved out of her mother's apartment to live with a friend of Detlef's, only to be forced to move in with one of his regular clients after losing this friend to a fatal overdose. While several of their friends shared the same fate, Christiane would finally be saved by being sent by her mother to her aunt and grandmother in a small village in rural Schleswig-Holstein.

Both the book and film were enormously successful because they took up contemporary assumptions about heroin use and turned them into a meaningful story that, aside from all the dreariness, provided a happy ending. The movie especially, with its inherent necessity to situate every scene in a spatial setting, focused on urban spaces, their meaning and their interconnectedness in telling this story. City space appeared to provide an explanation for teenage drug consumption and possible solutions to it. The story of Christiane F. To this end, the film explored some of the assumptions for deviant juvenile behaviour, including the decline of the nuclear family, modernist urban architecture, and youth culture.

Christiane was shown to grow up with her sister and single parent mother. Forced to earn a living, the mother was often absent and therefore not able to supervise her children, a fact that was exacerbated by her liberal educational methods. The invisible father thus symbolized a lack of authority that would otherwise have complemented the mother's understanding nature. See for instance Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 21ff.

By omitting the father's violent behaviour towards his wife and daughters which had figured prominently in the book the film constructed an ideal image of 'normal' family life and thus managed to present the decline of the nuclear family—and not its existence—as one of the main reasons for teenage drug use. Right at the beginning of the film we see several shots of the bleak high-rises of the Gropiusstadt settlement, accompanied by Christiane's voice-over: Everywhere just piss and shit.