Tales from the Drugstore and the film school
MAR 27, 2026
In between I met Sonja: daughter of an Austrian celebrity. She made eyes at me and asked in the sweetest voice if I could drive her to Vienna sometime. Sure, right away!
Strangely enough, we didn’t check in at her parents’ place but at a hotel. The next morning she fiddled with the heel of her boot, pulled out the sole – packed solid with heroin. She had used me as an unwitting courier to smuggle her drugs to Vienna and sell them there.
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I confronted her: “If we’d been caught, I as a foreigner would have taken the fall – you as a celebrity’s daughter would have been fine!”
Reaction: zero. Instead she immediately shot up. I got in the car and sped straight back to Berlin.
At the Bavarian border: Stop, passport control, pull over. Hand over my passport, the border guards disappeared with it. Thirty minutes. One hour. I went into the little office: “Can I have my passport back?”
Three border guards standing there with arms crossed. One said: “Come on in and get it – but then you’ll get a smack in the mouth.”
Assholes. I went back out, waited for the next car full of freaks, asked for backup. The five of us marched in together. With four witnesses I got my passport back immediately. End of story.
I never had much to do with drugs – an occasional joint, that was it. As a teenager I tried LSD for a whole year. Our dealer in Heidelberg was a bargain: LSD trip for 2.22 DM, gram of shit for 3.33 DM. We placed group orders like from a mail-order catalog and picked the stuff up in person. Nobody wanted to make money off it.
Once Piper mailed the entire school-festival order (100 trips!) in a regular envelope. My mother shook it: “What’s rustling in there?”
Me: “Uh, a pearl necklace from my pen pal!” I showed her a similarly sized pearl necklace from my room. She was relieved.
At the school festival: Half the upperclassmen took a pill – nothing happened. After half an hour they took the second one. Big mistake! Shortly afterward the first one kicked in, then the second. By 10 p.m. the festival was over: All the pill fans either fled into the woods or wandered disoriented through the old town.
Thirty years later a friend in Mannheim told me about a publisher who threw a huge party in the Odenwald every year. Guess who it was: our old dealer Piper. Nice guy, fair prices, no hard drugs. Hard drugs were uncool with us anyway – anyone who tried them got kicked out of the clique. That’s why we didn’t have any junkies in town for years.
Back to school: Our “The Spider” turned out really well. We submitted it to the Film Evaluation Board in Wiesbaden – at our own expense. After that: radio silence.
A year later I called: “So, how was it?”
They were stunned: “Didn’t you get the notification? We sent it straight to the school!”
I confronted the school director Eichhoff. He handed me the letter grumpily: “Valuable.” The first such rating in the history of the school.
His explanation, without the slightest remorse: “If it gets out that films with a rating are being made here, suddenly twice as many filmmakers will apply. Then we’ll have 800 instead of 400 applicants per year – and I’m not up for that. End of discussion.”
Pride? Not a trace.
The only one who ruined the fun for me was Kremer in social studies – ultra-conservative. When I cited Bernt Engelmann’s “United Against Law and Freedom” as a source for my presentation on the Weimar Republic, he lost it. One week before my one-hour talk (which I had really been looking forward to): “No presentation anymore, just a short exposé, maximum 10 lines.”
I could have copied that straight out of Brockhaus. All my preparation down the drain.
So I gave the full one-hour presentation anyway. Grade: straight six (F). He was furious, but he couldn’t slap a six on my report card because I had done too well on the tests.
I simply ignored him. We quickly shot one more film, “The Last Bet” – the adaptation of an old urban legend: Drunk guys in a bar bet that whoever steals a grave cross doesn’t have to pay anymore. One does it, brings it back, sees his own face on it, freaks out, wants to return it – and gets strangled on the cemetary by the dead man.
Unfortunately: extras instead of real actors. Out of desperation I played the killer myself. The film deserved the Golden Raspberry, but technically it was flawless.
We took our final exams, and I passed with a solid average. Almost everyone already had a job lined up at some station – except me, because I had never built the necessary network at the networks. But then a little miracle happened.
Rita, a sports student, also worked at the blueprint shop where I was grinding away part-time. One day she asked me what I actually did. I dryly told her that I’d probably soon be an unemployed camera assistant. “That’s funny,” she replied, “my sister-in-law is a production manager in film. I always go there as an extra – want to come along?” Of course I did! The pay was good; we were just supposed to do a little dancing in “Meadow,” a disco on Olivaer Platz. The movie was called Asphaltnacht and was directed by Peter Fratscher; the cinematographer was Bernd Heinl. We set off into the big wide world of film. I had no idea this would be my lucky day.
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