In the lead up to the awards season I mentioned in interviews that I’d discovered Wiebke at a community theatre night in Kreuzberg. It made a sort of sense: I’d been on the lookout for a fit for my spectral protagonist, saw Wiebke playing Chekhov’s Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya in front of 20 or 30 people, and in that understated, captivating performance envisioned a future best actor winner, so I offered her a read-through and screen test and the rest was history.
The story raised the profile of my young star, especially as we kept other details mysterious. It also stoked some envy among actors in the industry as she hadn’t come through the accepted schools and channels. But the German media gorged on it and even those who never saw Parasomnie knew of its breakout star. Wiebke Joestens was soon hawking perfume and caramel popcorn and had a supporting role lined up in a Keanu Reeves film. She avoided the talk shows and interviews but when cornered never bothered to contradict my origin story. She learned how to deflect questions with a smile and non sequitur.
Wiebke was never comfortable with being idolised and won’t mind now, I think, if I set the record straight – if I come clean, so to speak, one thing Wiebke never managed. Last week I wrote a loving eulogy, but now I need to exorcise some inner moral contortions and self-recriminations. There was a “dictator director drives starlet to overdose” take in the Tagesspiegel, but the public and media are generally tolerant of excesses in the industry, and I don’t want this loss to be met with a shrug and early-onset amnesia. I am not sure if this tragedy was preventable, if I condemned her, if I postponed or hastened an inevitability. I saw the world in her, but a world that was crushing her before I met her, and crushed her more after stardom.
Here’s the reality. Two years ago I changed trains at the U-Bahn station at Hermannplatz in Neukölln, and as I waited for the connection a rough sleeper interrupted my ruminations. She was asking for money for a “dry place to sleep”, and instinctively I waved her away before even looking up. Then her words and the way she said them seeped in and froze me. Her quiet tone bore the intensity of desperation. This wasn’t some prepared spiel; every word felt like a matter of life and death. I looked at her and she averted her gaze, as if eye contact were too wounding. She wore a soiled T-shirt and jeans, face was bruised and smudged, as if she’d been sleeping in Hasenheide park. She couldn’t have been more than 20, a small bony creature with a nose ring. I stared at her for a second as the train arrived, couldn’t verbalise a response and stepped onto the train as a way to escape my own discomfort. She got on one door down, but not to push the point, simply headed the same way. At the end of the carriage her head was down and she held herself, shivering. It was 25 degrees outside and warmer in the train; her shivers were not from cold but were those typical of withdrawal. I’d never seen someone in the prime of life at their absolute nadir, so I walked up and handed her a 10-euro note, which she took without words but with a small shock of disbelief. I exited at the next stop and went to a friend’s birthday party.
There were some film people at the party and at one point I danced with a swirl of drunks to Gloria Gaynor until the downstairs neighbour called the police. But through the conversations and shots, the homeless girl at the station shimmered at the forefront of my thoughts. How long had she been in Berlin, how had she fallen on hard times, what sort of future awaited her? Or was she simply a pretty face acting her way to money for her next fix, and in me she’d seen an easy mark?
The next day I pitched Parasomnie to a production company but I was at sea; all I could think of was her. How could I help, and should I help or would it be counterproductive? Inviting her back to my small flat would sound like the height of creepiness, but I just wanted her to have a square meal and the chance to sleep off her withdrawals.
And I had many questions. Hermannplatz was out of my way but I passed the station again in the evening, hoping for another urchin sighting; I rode the trains back and forth for an hour before giving up. Three more nights that week I tried again. I was aware of the double standards; the city had thousands of rough sleepers and I probably passed dozens every day without giving any a second thought, while this one teenager consumed me. But that was the thing; she was so unusual. Young, beautiful, she should have had the world at her feet. Yet she could barely stand. What series of bad luck or bad decisions had culminated in this?
Two weeks later I did see her again, close to midnight at Kottbusser Tor. She was in a similar state but vaguely remembered me. This time I managed some questions, and slowly she answered. Her name was Wiebke. She’d been staying off and on at a local shelter, trying and failing to break a heroin spiral, tired of being harassed but also conscious people were more likely to give her money than the litany of other bums at the stations.
I said she could crash in my living room for a few days. She should have been suspicious but followed without a murmur. Perhaps she figured I’d feed her or murder her and either way it would be an improvement.
I gave her some clothes left behind by an ex-girlfriend and some of my shirts, and everything she was wearing went into the washing machine while she went for a 20-minute shower. Like an overbearing parent, I set some ground rules. She could crash for a week or two, but she couldn’t stay home alone (I didn’t want my camera equipment funding her habit), she couldn’t do drugs here and had to actively work on recovery.
I cooked her some salmon and broccoli, gave her a glass of wine and had her fill in some details of her story.
After her mother’s death, she’d come four months previously from Essen as an Abiturientin, or graduate from a top-tier high school. In Berlin she got into a clubbing routine, trying various drugs like most everyone else. To impress her, the boys offered her K one night, another night coke, then MDMA, then acid – until she tried one she couldn’t rotate past. Heroin was her favourite, so the enamoured boys got her more. It was never enough so she gave all her savings to the dealers on Telegram or at Görlitzer Park. Her father sent her some money until he cut her off. Heroin had become the only thing that mattered.
She slept on the sofa, silently. My T-shirt on her was an oversized nightdress. Asleep and clean, she looked angelic, though my cat kept her distance, sniffing at her suspiciously from half a room away. In the morning, withdrawal was already shaking her and she lay rocking and sweating, twisting and writhing in my T-shirt. I gave her an oxycodone, which I kept around for the occasional pick-me-up. The next days when things got bad again I allowed her some tramadol, which I still had around since that one time I broke my shoulder in Cambodia.
I gave Wiebke some money and the deal was that she would pose for some photographs. I still did the odd photo commission but mainly to subsidise my shift into film-making. This was a return to creative photography for me. Her unsmiling portraits, in neutral black and white, were extraordinary. I put her in oversized shirts again and she was mesmeric to look at but had caverns for eyes from which no light escaped.
If she could captivate in black and white, without trying, what could she do on screen? I’d been writing Parasomnie, and the character, Angela, who is already dead throughout the script as the timeline reverses to the point of her suicide at the end of the movie but before all the other events of the film. A final twist to bring clarity to the previous 100 inscrutable minutes.
I began rewriting the script through Wiebke’s eyes, then asked her to read some lines. As she did so, the character was no longer some abstraction on the page but stood alive and present in the room with me. Not just alive but veritably tortured. To butcher Keats, Wiebke was Angela, Angela Wiebke, that was all I knew on earth and all I needed to know. Beauty was truth, and she had graduated from angelic to Angela-ic.
We filmed a teaser in my living room – a shoestring “sizzle reel”. I paid her five hundred euros for it and set her up in a shared flat with some responsible music students. In February I took the teaser to the film market at the Berlinale. Incredibly, I got the funding I needed and the licence to shoot it the way I wanted. I picked my crew and Wiebke starred opposite Moritz Bleibtreu. She was still strung out, still an addict, but her pains and withering dreams now had a channel, a purpose. The crew thought she was a particularly motivated method actor, but the truth was she wasn’t acting. Wiebke was living Angela’s pain, suffering her anguish, reliving her death over and over. And just as Angela was alive in a flashback after her death, Wiebke was living a future in which she no longer lived.
I made a point of not paying her until the film was done; I knew where that money would disappear. I paid her bills, accommodation, her food, some booze, the occasional oxy or tramadol for when the world became too much. But once the film was out, I could no longer withhold her salary. She and Parasomnie won one award after another on the festival circuit, but the attention exacerbated her anxieties. By the time she won the best actress Lola, I had to collect it for her; she was lost in an opiate haze. When I went to call on her, the sharpness was gone, she wasn’t listening. I told her to get help, I gave her some numbers, but she was swimming alone in a murky sea. And I left her there. Until two Tuesdays ago when she shot up some smack laced with deadly fentanyl and drowned.
I think she’d suspected that day would eventually come, and I guess I had too. But that didn’t lessen the horror, the pain in us left behind. We loved Wiebke but never knew who she was beyond the protagonist we’d superimposed on her. We feel the pain of a loss we can’t describe, of a woman we never really bothered to understand.
You can say I led her to it but you can also say I saved her from it for a time. I helped her realise her potential before leaving her to her fate. Or I was the cause of it; I used a vulnerable young women for my own project, wrung from her every drop of creativity before leaving her adrift without help. Everything is true. I can see it play out in trials by social media. And I can accept your judgement, as long as you know the background. I found her not on an amateur theatre stage off the Maybachufer but at rock bottom – the vomit-stained U-Bahn platforms beneath Hermannplatz. From there I dragged her out onto the apex of the world stage, where she was torn apart by the ravens of scrutiny. Too angelic or susceptible for this age or this world, she found the wrong crutch, then the wrong person pretending to help, and was dead at 21.