The Age of Christiane F.
Part I: "Though nothing will keep us together"
[So a few months ago, the amazing Sarah Marshall asked me to walk her through the story of Christiane F. for her podcast You’re Wrong About. I ended up with about 90 pages of notes and so much more to say than what could reasonably fit into a podcast episode. So I thought I’d start a small series of entries on this strange book and stranger media phenomenon. This will be part 1 of 3.]
Part I: “Though nothing will keep us together”
I came to Christiane F late. I imagine that German readers of this newsletter who are 10-15 years older than me were made to go see the movie when it first came out in 1981, and many who are only 5-10 years older probably read the book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo in school. I imagine many of them owned the soundtrack album with new tracks from David Bowie. I don’t recall anything like that. By the time it came to warning my peers and me away from drugs, Christiane Felscherinow’s fate was … I was going to say historic. But perhaps more accurately, it probably was felt to be historic, with its David Bowie concerts and punk jargon and the divided Berlin. But in a way, her world was still very much ours — maybe more so than adults were willing to fully own up to.
The reason I won’t say the book was historic is also the reason I have become so fascinated with this book. Because heroin — and the broader historic moment whose fears it epitomized — feels like it lasted a long time in Germany. You saw graffiti and Mohawks and studded leather jackets in Germany for far longer than even in parts of the US that transitioned from punk fairly directly into riotgrrrl into grunge. And you saw junkies, heard about people being junkies, had friends who became junkies. Germany was largely spared the crack epidemic, and pretty much until ecstasy really hit the market in the early 1990s the drug our parents were scared of was heroin. The Age of Christiane F. lasted for a long time in Germany.
I recently recorded an episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About about this book (we’re planning a separate one on the movie down the line). The host, the wonderful Sarah Marshall, asked me whether I thought that that wave of cultural fixation on heroin was a moral panic, whether, in other words, Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was a moral panic book. My answer was: yes and no. Heroin use spiked very suddenly in Germany and heroin abuse remained a pretty tenacious social problem. Of course, a lot of the warnings about it could also be hyperbolic; of course there was all kinds of other baggage that was tied up with the statistics and the individual fates of junkies. But then I think about my parents’ friends whose kids got into “H” at the time, kids who must now be in their 50s and 60s. I think about the endless needles we’d find in the playground across from the house I grew up in. And I think of a gentleman named Gert W.
Herr W. was renting a small room in our house when my family moved in. My parents decided to keep him there, kept the rent low, and paid him for odd jobs around the house. W., us kids were told, had been a heroin user, but was getting off it now, helped by a local methadone clinic. I remember, as a kid just entering school, finding his pallid complexion kind of spooky, and I remember a kind of affectlessness that freaked me out. But he was a nice-enough neighbor, and for my sister and I he was just part of our world.
Heroin was, I now realize in hindsight, just part of our world: on our way to the tram, on our way to the park, it was why we didn’t use the public restrooms at the train station. There’s an interview with Kai Hermann, one of the two journalist who compiled Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo from taped interviews, where he explains that part of what made him want to interview Christiane Felscherinow was that he’d suddenly noticed “these kids” at the Zoo Station and at other places in Berlin. He was interested in why they were there. We were of the generation for whom there was no more suddenness. This was just what some adults did, exactly as mysterious and as obvious as everything else they did. I don’t exactly know how old Gert W. was, but I don’t think he was in his 20s anymore. To me he registered as an adult.
One night in 1988, my parents got a call from W.’s mother – her son had missed a meeting with her, would my parents mind checking on him. My dad went over (W.’s rooms had a separate entrance), and immediately clocked the smell. Herr W. was dead, had been for a few days, in fact. I’m telling you this because it gets at the weird aspect of the story of this drug in Germany: in moral panics we’re always told this thing we’re panicking about is everywhere, even though it isn’t where we are right now. It’s coming, just you wait, it’s coming! But here was a drug that killed someone right next door to me, and still in hindsight society’s way of metabolizing deaths like his doesn’t exactly strike me as … normal.
The big “comp title”, as a literary agent would call it, to Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is something like Go Ask Alice, which likewise concerned a precocious young schoolgirl drawn into a subculture of drugs and depravity. But which, in most relevant respects, was completely fictional. Wir Kinder is pretty clearly real. Unlike Go Ask Alice, it is low on melodrama, its story is in parts predictable, in parts deeply offbeat. In some way that made Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo a more potent historical agent: Germans lived with Christiane F., with the real Christiane Felscherinow, with the real milieu she inhabited for decades. She was braided into our everyday lives the way junk was.
There’s a book by Robert P. Stephens called Germans on Drugs – it’s an in-depth study of the drug scene in Hamburg. He points out that problematizing addiction and abuse are always also discourses about how to be an appropriate, measured, “good” consumer. The junkie is the secret sharer of the consumer. In the 1960s, Germany was becoming a country increasingly characterized by consumerism – a consumerism that was (a) much further suffused in society and (b) much more explicitly remarked on.
Stephens points out that prior to 1964, illegal drug use was not a youth phenomenon, and it was largely abused by people with access to it. He also seems to think that it objectively wasn’t much of a problem. I should admit that I don’t find his evidence on this score entirely persuasive. His evidence is mostly police records, media reports and drug busts. I don’t think that means he’s wrong, but it would certainly admit of an alternative explanation: drug busts indeed rose explosively in the 1960s. But this might just mean people largely abused this stuff in private.
At the same time, it doesn’t detract from Stephens’ broader point: drugs became visible as a social problem as they were publicly consumed, and consumed by the sort of people who had to consume drugs in public. If you were getting loaded on uppers or downers duly prescribed by a doctor in the privacy of your own home, the chances for an encounter with the criminal justice system were comparatively scant. Public consumption of drugs became visible as public consumption of drugs by young people.
In 1970, Der Spiegel ran a long title story about heroin. In a side article, we meet three junkies as they prepare to shoot up. The main story works overtime to position drug addiction as (a) new and (b) foreign. Scratch below the surface of early texts about drug abuse in Germany and you hit an anxiety about immigration:
“Only a decade ago, the terms drugs and addiction had triggered uniformly dark but clearly defined ideas in the bourgeois consciousness of the West. The evocative word drugs brought with it the exotic image of the emaciated Oriental, absorbed in smoking an opium pipe, withdrawn from the world and dreamy.”
Big “yikes” on the racism here. Tales of drug addictions became ways of thinking about globalization, about global transfers of goods, wealth and people. You get some of that in Christiane F. which is also a story about the relationship between Germany and the anglosphere. Christiane’s junkie argot is shot through with anglicisms. From context clues you can gather that she would have pronounced “H” “aitch”; when she’s going through withdrawal, she calls it “turkey”; it’s about US influences, rock music (Bowie!), AlcAnon and later on Scientology! The book – which is based on the tapes, but was ultimately put together by two middle-aged German journalists – seems to sense in drug culture a first shockwave of an unwelcome de-provincialization, globalization.
It’s very noticeable, for instance, that in a lot of media stories of drug users from the 70s, the rhetorical framing suggests successive “waves” of foreign substances were pouring to Germany – first marijuana, then heroin and cocaine. But when they interview actual junkies, it turns out the real gateway drug, at least in the 60s, wasn’t weed, which was still very much a drug of existentialists hanging out in jazz clubs. It was Fenethyline, which was invented in Germany in the early 60s, and which is basically an amphetamine – it was available freely under the brand name Captagon. Captagon was prescribed above all to children with what we would today call ADHD, and became a global German export – it was outlawed by the FDA in 1981 and put on an index by the WHO in 1986. It very quickly became an endemic abuse drug in the Middle East. So Der Spiegel seems invested in selling its readers on a tale of “oriental” invasion, when in fact it was Germany that was flooding large parts of the globe with immensely addictive substances that would present problems to the present day.
In general, when you look at what these people abuse alongside heroin, it almost all leads back to Germany: there’s Eukodal, first developed for Merck pharmaceuticals in Darmstadt, better known as oxycodone; Polamidon, developed for IG Farben in Frankfurt in the 1930s, better known as methadone; Pethidin, a.k.a. merepedine, also developed at IG Farben in the 1930s, the first synthetic opioid in the world; methylphenidate, developed in Basel (Switzerland) in the 1940s, better known as Ritalin; Palfium (dextromoramide) put out by a Belgian company in the 1950s; Preludin (Phenmetrazine) developed by Boehringer Ingelheim in the 1950s; AN1 (Amphetaminil), also created in Germany, in Berlin in fact, as a highly potent amphetamine mix. The one exception is the Pervitin, which was first synthesized in Japan in the 1890s, and which had become super popular among German troops during World War I. It is better known today as methamphetamine.
It has become something of a fixation in German discourses about globalization: German media often frame global exchange at something that victimizes Germany, when in fact the Wirtschaftswunder, the post-war economic miracle, had everything to do with German exports. Many Germans regard imports with immense anxiety, while also regarding anything that harms their own industries’ exports as fundamentally illegitimate and unfair. Imagining yourself on the receiving end of global influences, while blithely ignoring what you’re unleashing on the world: this became, in the 1970s something of a German specialty. And when all else failed, one could wave away one’s own chemical exports, and instead obsess over cultural imports. Talk about drugs was always about global trade, but it was also about globalized citizens. A lot of the news coverage at the time was about the involvement of immigrants in bringing drugs into Germany. There was certainly broader global mobility in the 1970s, which allowed drugs to flow more freely: think of GIs coming back from Vietnam, counterculture hipsters on the Hippie Trail, think of the rise in air travel as a routine form of tourism,. Still, as is often the case in Germany, anxiety about this broader mobility became fixated on the one thing Germans reliably fixate on: their neighbor who happens to have a Turkish first name.
But there’s something else to notice in Der Spiegel’s framing. When we get away from the wave of “oriental drugs” crashing on German shores, to the (pretty admirable) portraits of actual heroin users, there’s something funny going on in terms of the timeline. Namely: the evidence Der Spiegel accumulates seems to contradict the experience of suddenness (even though the statistical uptick may of course have nevertheless been real). We meet “Barbara” – daughter of a US GI and a German mom – who goes, like Christiane, from abusing pills (no mention of weed) to taking heroin, prostituting herself, having a girlfriend, overdosing incarceration – all of it by 1968! “Bernd” started at 14, by way of LSD – as a high-school student with good grades … in 1965. So while the main article emphasizes just how sudden and quick heroin’s arrival in Germany has been, the individual stories in the article suggest it’s been around and for quite a while – though not in the same groups.
I think there’s a clue as to what’s really happening in the final “Fixer” (“junkie”) Der Spiegel profiles: 16 year-old “Rita”: “Rita, the only minor in the bunch,” the author declares, “is spoiled. Her father owns a wholesale business and Rita grew up in an elegant suburban villa.” When her parents realized she’s gotten into drugs (from “boredom”, she says) her mother “put her daughter in a mental hospital for two months. After that, she took her on a four-week skiing holiday, gave her a horse to ride and forbade her from associating with the drug addicts.”
In other words: “Rita” is of an entirely different social class. Being a GI’s child raised by a single mom (“Barbara” was most likely born in 1950) would have been legible for postwar Germans as a pretty difficult fate, and such a child would have been understood as an outsider with much going against her. “Rita”, by contrast, is described as a child of postwar affluence – horseback riding, skiing trips, psychotherapy, boredom. If “Barbara” is a reminder of postwar humiliations – disordered families, occupation by foreign armies, the sheer desperation of the immediate postwar years – “Rita” is a sum total of all that the Wirtschaftswunder had made possible for (some) German children. The marginal figure, not “really” German, an orphan, ward of the state, etc. And “Rita”: a child of the affluent German middle class.And here the two are shooting up together.
From Stephens book, I think, four important themes emerge: even if we assume that drug abuse in Germany did not just appear in 1964, but rather that a more socially acceptable form of drug consumption gave way to more heavily policed ones, four developments are pretty clear:
(1) After 1964, drugs became part a specific youth culture. One thing you barely ever see in German news reports after 1964 are old addicts. With that comes drug use in public — these kids simply on average had less of a private sphere to be drug addicted in. Meaning drug use became a public phenomenon.
(2) This youth culture was de-localized and increasingly internationalized – where there had been a dozen local argots and little criminal underworlds, there now were the Beatles singing about doing acid.
(3) This youth culture was expressed through consumer behavior, including – think of the mod/rocker panic in the UK – especially consumption whose selling point was your parents will fucking hate this.
(4) Finally, this international youth culture was a “culture of refusal” – its affects were about refusing the very circuits of respectability and socialization that defined the grown-up world. The contradiction that you mostly refused to buy into the constant buying of stuff by … buying stuff, is almost too obvious to point out. But it would characterize a lot of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, where the kids feel superior to “the squares” just going to horrible office jobs to make money to stuff themselves in front of their TVs, only to … take on one of the most awful jobs imaginable just in order to be able to get their fix. Consider this passage early in Wir Kinder, where Christiane does acid for the first time:
“It was absolutely insane. I thought I was in this large tin can, with someone stirring the contents with an enormous spoon. The sheer noise of the U-Bahn in its tunnel was insane. I didn’t think I could stand it. The people in U-Bahn no longer had faces, they made these horrific grimaces instead. Which is to say, they kind of looked the same as always, the fucking squares. It was just that now you could see it even more clearly in their faces, the disgusting tedium of their lives. I imagined how these fat squares had come shuffling out some shitty corner bar, or from some shitty workplace. Later these pig faces would go to sleep and then back to work and then they watched some TV. I thought: You should be glad that you’re different. That you have your group. That you’re taking acid, that you’re seeing clearly what god-awful squares these people in the U-Bahn are. That’s pretty much what I thought.”
This is what is ultimately at stake in Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo: I’m not saying that this is what Christiane Felscherinow’s story means, or that this is what she told the two reporters who compiled the book from taped interviews with her. I’m saying that as the book took shape, this was the logic that clearly governed the material. Christiane starts the book thinking she is better than the “fucking squares”, and the end finds her face pressed desperately against the glass wanting a normalcy that her life can never again have. And that kind of storyline — independent of what happened, independent on what the two journalists intended — would have read in 1978 as a verdict of sorts. A verdict on “the student movement”, on “1968”, 'on “the 60s”.
In thinking about the phenomenon “Christiane F.” we’re really talking about three separate things. We are talking about a young woman, Christiane Felscherinow, born 1962 in northern Germany, who moved to Berlin in 1968. We are talking about a book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, written by Horst Rieck and Kai Hermann “based on a true story”. And we are talking about a media phenomenon — because unlike with many sensational drug stories in the US, not only did the “true story” turn out to pretty true. The press did a fairly thorough (though at times fairly exploitative) job interviewing the protagonists of the memoir after the fact. So we have Christiane’s boyfriend from the book sounding off about the book, we get follow-up with even the most minor protagonists years or even decades later. We get a film version on which Christiane Felscherinow served as an advisor, filmed on location with some of the same junkies in the background.
Here’s the thing though: in some way, because Wir Kinder hews pretty close to the facts, as best as I can tell, the shifts that do occur in each stage of the process can be harder to spot. Rieck met Christiane F. at court in 1976. She wasn’t there to talk about drugs at all, she was there as a child prostitute. A well-off West Berliner had been paying underage prostitutes with heroin for their services for years, and the police had finally tracked him down. Rieck asked to interview her, and Felscherinow said yes, explaining later that she thought it was basically cheaper therapy. Rieck, Hermann and Felscherinow met daily for months.
The book we got out of it is about 300 pages long, the audiobook is, I believe, 14 hours long. Meaning that there must be enormous quantities of tape on the cutting room floor. We also know that Rieck and Hermann (more on them soon) had real trouble placing the book. Eventually, the weekly newsmagazine Der Stern agreed to excerpt it in a series and then publish the book in its own imprint. The publishers clearly had some influence on what the final product looked like — Rieck and Hermann gave a few interviews where, in hindsight, they lamented that the magazine had made them dial down the theme of sexual violence, for instance. So we a particular version of this story that became the runaway success that it did.
For those readers unfamiliar with the book, it might be worth sketching out the stations of Christiane Felscherinow’s journey: she was born and grew up in a small town outside of Hamburg. In 1968, as the student movement in Berlin reached a fever pitch, the family relocated to the divided city. In her 2013 follow-up book Felscherinow says her parents likely did it for the subventions (the government subsidized various activities in Berlin, just to make sure the city didn’t lose all its population) — though the one she cites was a 70s creation. Still, her parents had a half-baked business idea (a dating portal of sorts) and some notion of the government helping them set it up. They moved to Paul Lincke Ufer in Kreuzberg, today tony as all hell, but back then an area dominated by Bohemians and immigrants. Christiane’s comments about immigrants throughout the book are pretty horrifying — her personal “rock bottom” doesn’t have to do with prostituting herself, it has to do with “going with” “Kanacken”, a word that was exactly as casually hateful then as it is today.
In any case, the large Altbau (19th century construction) apartment in Kreuzberg becomes unaffordable once the business plan comes to naught. So the young family (mom, dad, Christiane and a younger sister) move to the Gropiusstadt, a massive public housing development at the southern end of Neuköllin. Most of the high-rises were completed in the early 1960s, but Christiane describes the neighborhood as basically unfinished, poorly designed and absolutely hostile to children.
In this modernist hellscape, Christiane grows up with a father who beats her and a mother who seems, by her own acknowledgment, far too slow to stand up for her children. You can’t say that the DV-angle is underplayed in Wir Kinder, exactly, but it doesn’t seem to have played much of a role in the book’s reception. The fact that this is a story about a young woman, and about women in general, in postwar Germany, seems not to have occurred to the almost exclusively male journalists that helped write, promote and reflect on this book. Only once the movie comes out do some (again, almost all male) critics point out that clearly part of the fascination of the book was quasi-pornographic, an investment in seeing a young girl descend into prostitution and forcible sex. There’s some indication that the men who made the book happen were aware of this danger and tried to blunt it somewhat. But in the end this also distorts what is ultimately a story about patriarchal continuities even after the sexual revolution, into an implicit indictment of the sexual revolution.
Whatever the case: in the Gropiusstadt, Christiane falls in with some cool kids at a church-run community center, where she starts taking pills, smoking weed and taking some LSD. Her mother finally moves out and finds a new partner. Her sister decides to follow her father to his new home. Before long she finds her way to the SOUND, a club in Schöneberg. There she slowly loses touch with her own “clique” and falls in with a new crowd: young junkies who prostitute themselves for money and smack on nearby Kurfürstenstraße and — roll credits — Bahnhof Zoo. Before long, she has moved in with her new boyfriend Detlef, who turns tricks for both of them, and a few other heroin using friends. But as their addiction worsens, Christiane begins prostituting herself, and a long cycle of attempted therapies, failed tough love strategems, and endless relapses begins. At the end of the book she’s living with her aunts and grandma in a rural town near Hamburg, having — very 1978, that — substituted the thrills of nature for the gleaming lights and thumping beats of the Big City.
So Wir Kinder is a story about drugs, but it is emphatically a city about a broader societal shift. It connected with a public highly sensitized to the drug problem — and primed to read the drug problem as an import, as young and largely coterminous with public drug use. I went through the covers of Der Spiegel for the 1970s+, and it’s really a pretty remarkable drumbeat of cover stories:
Stephens thinks that the German fixation on the drug problem had to do with the unintended consequence of the modernization of the 1960s. But I think we can also think of it as the beginning of an honest-to-god backlash. Tes, it’s a hangover of the long 1960s, it was obsessively analyzed by German society as that: the boomerang effects of too much liberation. But in being analyzed this way, it also became a harbinger of the more austerity minded Kohl-era (1982-1998). The “tough love” approach you were supposed to show to your H-addicted offspring soon become the principle through which you were supposed to see all aspects of the social safety net. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo arrived at something of a fulcrum point in this trajectory: it arrived at a moment when pretty much anything was read as a verdict on “60s culture”, and when a conservative backlash was ready to position itself as a cure for those excesses.
There’s also this kind of left-wing self-interrogation: it may have carried some of the seeds of backlash politics in it, but Wir Kinder is not self-consciously a backlash text, far from it. The book does get around to the idea that tougher, more engaged parenting is the likely cure to the problem it describes (we’ll get to that); it has an implicit critique of the student movement and big government social programs. It has a critique of hedonism. But that critique seems to mostly come from the left. Der Stern was, back then, a pretty left-wing magazine, the first edition of the book appeared with a brief introduction by psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter, the writers let Christiane rhapsodize for several pages (!) about her newfound love for the work of Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.
A couple of things about our stenographers: they’re both longtime Berlin journalists who bring considerable baggage to the drug question. Rieck had been a critic of hard left groups, and had in fact made headlines when the members of a West Berlin Far Left group (the “hashish rebels”, later Tupamaru Berlin) beat him up for coverage critical of them. Kai Hermann meanwhile got canned by Die Zeit for writing critically about the assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke, ended up writing for konkret, the magazine that was once edited by Ulrike Meinhoff. I don’t want to overanalyze this, but the two writers are clearly trying to understand the drug problem in light of the social upheaval of the 1960s. For Rieck, just biographically, it seems the drug culture was about the excesses of the 1960s, of student protestors, etc. For Hermann, the drugs were part of this hedonistic turn in left wing movements that had watered down their emancipatory potential. This is the overall framing of the book: Richter, Fromm, Rieck, Hermann: they all position the young junkies as a wrong turn in subversive, left-wing politics. And they see it as their role to get them back on track.
You can sense that some of this is projected onto the story Christiane is telling them: there are counselors and social workers at the youth hangout in Gropiusstadt who turn a blind eye to the kids smoking dope, or even smoking dope themselves. And in the occasional chapters where Christiane’s mom explains her side of the story (in a voice that is stultifying and rote in all the ways her daughters is not), she keeps castiagtions for her own “permissive” parenting. But it’s very important that her parents are not presented as stereotypical 1968ers. They are children of privilege, but not of the intelligentsia – more like a lower provincial industrial gentry. Christiane’s father is completely status obsessed, driving “the only Porsche in Gropiusstadt, certainly the only Porsche driven by an unemployed guy.” The family, we learn, lost all of its wealth during the expropriations in what was then East Germany, and they’ve been desperate to get back the sort of status and class trappings they feel they are entitled to.
And look at the way the book ends, with Christiane discovering that it was the big moloch Berlin all along and finding peace and contentment in Mother Nature:
“In our group everyone thinks they have their drug thing under control. And, honestly, a lot is different from three, four years ago in Gropiusstadt. It’s a different kind of freedom that we’re getting from drugs here. We don’t need the SOUND to get completed anaesthetized while the music is thumping. For my friends in the group, the idea of trying to find freedom under the advertising and the neon lights of the Kurfürstendamm seems absurd. We hate the city. We’re on an absolute nature kick.
The coolest part of that is our lime pit. It’s basically just a hole in the landscape, about a kilometer in length, 200 meters across and maybe 100 meters deep. The walls are basically cliffs. It’s oddly warm down there. No wind. Down there, we find plants that we haven’t seen elsewhere. Super clear little streams run through this valley, there are small waterfalls coming out of the walls. The water colors the white walls rust red. There are these massive boulders everywhere, which looks like the bones of prehistoric animals – and for all I know maybe there are mammoth bones down there. The giant excavator and the conveyor belts make an insane racket during the day, but on the weekends they look like they’ve been derelict for centuries. The limestone has made them fully white.
We are completely on our own in this incredible valley. Separated from the rest of the world by these sheer white cliffs. No noise comes in from the outside, in fact the only noise comes from the little waterfalls.
We like to imagine we’ll buy the lime pit when they’re done mining it. We’ll build little cabins at the bottom, plant a massive garden and keep animals. We’d have everything you need to live. As for the only path down the valley floor, we think we might just blow it up. We wouldn’t want to go back up again anyway.”
I joked above that it’s a “very 1978” sort of denoument. Christiane discovers simplicity, nature, community. That may strike us today as pretty trad-wifey, but that’s not what this is, I think. It is positioned as a kind of leftist, environmentalist solution to a deeply sick society.
The book was a huge success, but it was an odd one. It was part of a society starting to feel bad about itself in really interesting ways. Idk how much you know about postwar German history, but the overriding vibe of the first three decades of the new Federal German Republic was the “economic miracle” – and pretty much since then there’s been this nostalgia for a simpler time, Rhenish capitalism, suburban sprawl, full employment, etc. But there was this undertow of malaise even in the midst of all this wealth and global success – two authors, Frank Witzel and Philipp Felsch have called it FRG Noir. And the late 70s was pretty much the turning point where the stuff that the FRG had sort of latently felt bad about came out into the open. I’ll get into that in Part II of the essay.