When he was six years old Andreas Marquardt took martial arts lessons for the first time. The rigorous training, and the self-discipline, was both a means of escape and gave him a future perspective. Early athletic success encouraged manly self-confidence in the young boy who was beaten badly by his sadistic and violent father and sexually abused by his mother. Sport hardened him and showed him a way to defend himself. But when he comes into contact with the Berlin-Neukölln underworld, this newly won strength becomes destructive and dark. The karate champ becomes a brutal thug, a debt collector and finally the most feared pimp in all of Germany. He humiliated and exploited the young women he sent to turn tricks – his “hate program against women” Marquardt calls it now. Later he said, “the more brutal and distant I was, the more women I had.”

One of these women was Marion Erdmann, today his long-time partner. That she lives together with her former pimp is the story Rosa von Praunheim tells in TOUGH LOVE. After two long prison sentences Marquardt disclosed his life to the psychologist Jürgen Lemke and later published his notable autobiography HÄRTE – MEIN WEG AUS DEM TEUFELSKREIS DER GEWALT. In therapy Marquardt found a new outlet to work through his traumatic childhood experiences and used the chance to redirect his life. He leaves the violent milieu but stays loyal to his neighborhood and opened up a martial arts school for disadvantaged youth, which Marion managed while he was in jail. He was even honored for his exemplary engagement to end abuse and violence and he even met Pope Francis during private audience in Rome.

The stuff of happy endings made for film. Rosa von Praunheim adapts the brutally honest and unsettling docudrama. In his low-key style Praunheim jumps between present-day interviews and kitschy flashbacks shot in black-and-white. Due to the excellent acting of his protagonists Hanno Koffler (Marquard), Luise Heyer (Erdmann) and Katy Karrenbauer (the mother) Praunheim’s adaptation achieves a level of intensity that the director is known for. The documentary and dramatized parts of the film do not easily get fit together and represent in this way the two life worlds of Andreas Marquardt. Alongside Marquardt’s life story Praunheim works out existential dualism in the story and in dong so reveals the border between perpetrator and victim, devotion and self-abandonment, love and abuse. Praunheim’s film is a plea for a second chance, the possibility to start over, one that every person deserves.

Jens Mayer

Translation: Carla MacDougall