http://www.u2tour.de/travelguide/Berlin.html
fame is quite obvious in both title and characterization of modern Berlin's underworld of children pornography, youth prostitution, violence and rape. (In English, BOTH the documentary novel and film of same name are known by the title Christiane F., i.e. not WIR KINDER VON BAHNHOF ZOO or WE CHILDREN OF TRAIN STATION ZOO. Yes, this is the same Bahnhof Zoo written and sung about BY U-2.)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_Felscherinow
Set in the late 1970s, the quasi-non-fictional work WIR KINDER VON BAHNHOF ZOO had been published by STERN magazine journalists, by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck, on the lives of Berlin inner city drug addicts and prostitutes. The main protagonist had been 14-year-old Christiane F. (now known by her full and real name Vera Christiane Felscherinow). Christiane F., like Rashid A., is a drug addict involved in prostitution. Likewise, whereas Rashid A. was more interested in rap music, the docu-novel with Christiane F. focused on the music of David Bowie, who lived in and produced music Berlin at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_F.
As well, in contrast to the Christiane F. tale, Rashid A. (the Arabboy a la 2008) gets arrested, sent to prison several times and is finally expelled to Turkey (a country he has never lived in nor a country where his father and mother live) . Meanwhile, the actual Christine F., over the decades has fallen off the wagon several times, but the novel that brought her fame still influences the writing of many such social political novels in modern Germany.
The ARABBOY novel is still only found published in the German language, but I hope to see it in English print soon because it does a lot to show the marginalization and isolation of minority youth in Germany, a process that has led modern Germans to fear the Arab and Muslim population in their own country. Reading the ARABBOY, although partially fictional, is certainly a more realistic way to begin to disentangle the issue of integration, assimilation, and self-identity development in a modern Germany. By making that last statement I mean or believe it is much more realistic to see the problems of German minorities intimately by reading Balci's fiction than it is to simply condemn minorities and immigrants for having behaved (badly or) either isolationist or hostilely towards German cultural, social and educational values prior to arriving in Germany.
Finally, the theme of "Perpetrators and Victims" is common in the narration of Rashid A.'s life. In the 1990, the large immigration of East European refugees and settlers to Germany came along with the "re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur, GÃ ¼nter Grass's Im Krebsgang, JÃ ¶rg Friedrich's Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the "perpetrator collective' and its legacies."
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