Cops, alcohol, Stasi, prison: the past of the jungle queen is a thriller

Author: Simon Meier

When Djamila Rowe opens her file, everything suddenly makes sense. Her entire life so far. She hadn’t even expected the Stasi to even start a file on her. She ordered them more for fun. Because that’s what everyone who lived in the GDR did after reunification.

Now in her early twenties, she lives in West Berlin and works at KaDeWe as a cosmetics salesman and make-up artist. She learns from her Stasi file that she has been followed since childhood. First, because her mother fled West in 1970, leaving the three-year-old with her grandparents. Secondly, because her father was not a Persian student, as the family always claimed, but an Afghan agent: “My father belonged to a group of agents who were supposed to track down Afghan terrorists for the communists, who were in turn training.” American military bases in West Germany were,” she writes in her autobiography.

State security suspected that he was working as a double agent, leaking Russian weapons secrets to the US-backed mujahideen. He had used Djamila’s mother as a ‘connection’ to East Berlin. Djamila’s mother hated her daughter for this and allowed her new boyfriend to put out his cigarettes on the baby’s sensitive skin. The grandparents, as we know them from the “jungle camp”, were heavy alcoholics who bought their things with the granddaughter’s childcare allowance.

Grandma and Grandpa had set up a supply chain, sending Djamila to the nearby supermarket, where the grandparents’ butcher friend wrapped liquor bottles in butcher paper and the child smuggled the alcohol past the unsuspecting cashiers disguised as meat. For Djamila herself there was not enough of everything: too little affection, too little food, when she wanted sweets she sucked the sugar coating from grandmother’s rheumatism tablets.

She is beaten, she is almost killed – it is a miserable childhood in the middle of East Germany. Youth services only intervene when the grandfather is imprisoned for check fraud. Djamila is already 14. After a short time she comes from the youth home to the youth prison in Crimmitschau, ie to the youth prison, she has never committed a crime, she learns the reason from a conversation between two guards who talk about their “criminal relatives”. . Djamila tries to escape and kill herself, but it only earns her brutal solitary confinement.

She will be released after 36 months, she worked in the textile factory in prison, she has had only minimal education and no training. The apartment that is already waiting for her is particularly suitable for surveillance, as she learns from her file. Unfortunately, she and her then-boyfriend behave completely harmlessly: “In the house she behaves inconspicuously, kindly and politely. She appears clean and well-groomed and greets the occupants of the house without having close contact with individual tenants. Due to the isolation of the persons found, no in-depth assessment can be made with regard to professional activity and basic political attitude,” said a report dated July 26, 1988.

Only one thing arouses the detectives’ suspicion: Djamila and her boyfriend visit the American embassy several times. They do this with the completely naive intention of leafing through Western magazines and making patterns based on clothing in Vogue. But they are now considered “dipl. substitute”. In theory, they could go to jail for this.

Djamila Rowe leaves East Berlin in the days of the fall of the Wall. She asks for a job at KaDeWe and gets it. First in hair accessories, soon in cosmetics. She continues to behave inconspicuously and in 1997 becomes the mother of a son.

Until she appeared on the Swiss boulevard in the spring of 2002 and everything changed: her life and that of the Swiss ambassador in Berlin. But she does not write about that in her autobiography entitled “Botox for my soul”. She hardly talks about it either.

In 2002, she confessed to the “SonntagsBlick” of an affair with Thomas Borer and unleashed a “Blick” campaign against the ambassador. Rowe later retracts her story, saying that the author of the article pressured her into giving false testimony. Publisher Michael Ringier admits that Rowe received an “information fee” of 10,000 francs and apologizes on the front page of “Blick”.

Thomas Borer receives more than a million francs in damages from Ringier, leaves the diplomatic service and becomes a consultant. The then “SoBli” boss Matthias Nolte loses his job and becomes a writer. The author of the article moves from “Blick” to “Image”.

From now on, Djamila Rowe is the “ambassador bitch”. The press follows them. Sometimes she likes to present herself as a bitch. Stands half-naked with a German flag in front of the Reichstag in Berlin and calls the self-installation “German Unity”. Sometimes she goes too far. In January 2006 she took 27 sleeping pills and half a bottle of whisky, she wanted to die.

She just had the “Die Alm” reality format behind her and “Big Brother” ahead of her, she is now a celebrity, one of those women with ever-expanding breasts shared by a few men, some entrepreneurs and princes: Djamila Rowe has something to do with Playmate Kader Loth’s exes and alleged plastic surgeon killer Tatjana Gsell.

In general, she has devoted herself entirely to the superficial in all its splendor and perfection, she wears Harald Glööckler fashion, has her nose and breasts fixed four times, often accompanied by RTL, occasionally by bad quacks of doctors, one of whom killed during the Shoot arrested. She does one ‘Uschi’ format after another, i.e. lower-class television, as reality was called in the noughties, and she also works as a make-up artist.

Now, after reading her autobiography, which she ghost-wrote during the pandemic, it seems like she’s covered up and eradicated the deep wounds of her childhood and youth with every glitter, every eyeliner, every implant, every cheesy TV format. want to . In a naive, but quite efficient way: with every Botox injection she does something for herself.

And underneath, which the slime bath of the jungle camp has brought to light of all things, is a person who suddenly everyone loves. A warm, self-deprecating, vulnerable 55-year-old woman. She is now «Queen D». The queen of hearts from the wild, desert world of trash TV. There’s never been anything like it.