On the street of the lost called Reeperbahn

Once, Klaus and Jutta are eating. A magnum of champagne is about to vomit across the table. Given the environment she was placed in, she is very understandable. Whereby the environment does not only mean the aesthetic one, the patterned wallpaper in need of explanation, the green-yellowish colors and the cashy light. But also the culinary environment. There are fish sticks on mashed potatoes.

We are in Hamburg. early eighties. Which would at least explain the wallpaper and the colors. However, what is happening on Klaus and Jutta's table, the contradiction between champagne and fish fingers, is the central rift that runs through the all-new German Amazon series called "Luden". And which tells of an axis time in St. Pauli, the largest brothel in Europe. And from the rise of Klaus Barkowsky, who initially pitched his camp in the toilet of a pretty fucked-up pub in St. Pauli, to the meanwhile Ludenkönig of Hamburg. And from his crash. When hard drugs came and the international mafia and AIDS. And tourism.

The rift runs between what Klaus dreams of and the misery he makes a reality. What Klaus dreams of – the “beautiful Klaus”, the “Lamborghini Klaus” that really exists, today he is seventy and an artist – is a world in which he turns dirt into glitter, in St. Pauli a gigantic version from Warhol's Studio 54. Where everyone meets, really everyone, the really big ones and the really greedy and the completely normal. And then party. Potentially infinite. "First class jumbo jet," says Klaus. And he talks about love all the time. Although he doesn't even know what that is. Otherwise he couldn't do what he's doing.

If you like, the rift that runs through St. Pauli in “Luden” is exactly the one that runs through the capitalist system – that between desire and delusion and reality. And Klaus, who installs a sex start-up based on exploitation and makes women dependent under false pretenses, is the CEO, so to speak, in his mercilessly charming characterlessness. He has the coldness, the Jesus-like, supple exterior, a sense of humor that can be confused with self-mockery and cordiality, the ability to turn even the worst dirt into gold.

That this malicious mixture of young Siegfried and Parsifal eventually believes that what he is selling is gold and glitter and not dirt, that there is no price to pay for the misery he causes, and that he is a big player is that he gets lobster when he'll never get past fish fingers.

Aaron Hilmer – born in Freiburg, became an actor in Hamburg with the “Pefferkorns” and was seen in Edward Berger’s Oscar film “Nothing New in the West” during the First World War – makes the dichotomy, the ambivalence of this dazzling pimp, this merciless upstart downright physically.

Now "Luden" is a true crime series according to the genre. But of course – and that in turn was the price of the fictionalization of this long-cold case from the Reeperbahn legend box – no one should expect the total educational film, the naked analysis of a male exploitation apparatus.

“Luden” is all of that and a contemporary history panorama (filmed from below, so to speak) of the early eighties. The production of the Munich Neuesuper (from which the wonderful Bavarian provincial satire "Hindafing" originates) keeps remarkably away from embellishment, from false romanticizing of what is happening, even if the six-part mini-series ends up being more like a dark fairy tale.

The narrators from Rafael Parente's team have an attitude towards what they are showing. But they don't carry it in front of them like a monstrance. They avoid moralizing like fools avoid real love. Again and again the pictures - they were shot at original locations, but not in Hamburg's Herbertstraße, but in Munich's Straße der Bavaria - oppose what they could actually show. Side with the dirt, not the glitter.

What you see in "Luden" is of course a man's story. To show anything else would also have been a lie. The Reeperbahn system was (and is) a male system. But the “Luden” Writers Room tells this story of the lost from the victim's perspective, so to speak. Creates a not always successful narrative balance between the pranksters and the women they do violence to and who sell their freedom and their bodies for money, who love men but get grubby guys.

At some point, Jutta, who is an addict who failed to make handsome Klaus her tool, staggers through the streets. “We thought,” says Jeanette Haim, who plays Jutta with crazy courage and uncompromising physical exertion, “we were St. Pauli because of the money. But what we were really looking for there was what everyone is looking for. attention, friendship, love. A family."

She says that they wanted to be seen, while people walk over her, who is lying on the ground on the hard pavement of St. Pauli. "We didn't want people to forget us. Because only those who are forgotten are really dead.”

This is pathos, of course. This is Puccini for the 21st century. But at least this goal, not to forget those whose lives were lost on the street of the lost called Reeperbahn, over which the bachelor parties are now tottering, is already achieved by the six-part series.

And if you still long for the eighties and a brothel after "Luden", there is no longer any help in this world.