German Series in the USA
The Pimp — No F***ing Fairy Tale

Loosely based on true events, the Prime Video series Luden sets viewers loose in Hamburg’s infamous St. Pauli red-light district at its seedy late 1970s and ‘80s peak, or perhaps that should be low point. These were the boom years for prostitution, porn shops, strip clubs and even live sex shows. Tourists, businessmen and of course sailors on shore leave piled into the Eros Center, a six-story brothel that served as the hive of the local sex work industry. Our entry point into this world is the young Klaus Barkowsky (Aaron Hilmer), a bar owner turned pimp, or Zuhalter, who forms the “Nutella gang,” an upstart band of pimps who take on the reigning cartel of flesh peddlers known as the GMBH. Needless to say, a turf war ensues.

By Mark Tompkins

BAD BOY 2.0, THE NEXT GENERATION

Even viewers accustomed to cable and streaming series that love to show us the wild and crazy times people had when no one was looking at their phones may find Luden a lot to take. The setting that might have seemed colorfully raffish when the Beatles did their 1962 apprenticeship at the Star Club is not just more hard-edged two decades on, but supercharged with drugs and money. It’s a fallen world, raunchy and sensational, yet never titillating.
  
Over six episodes, as the late 1970s obliviously party on into the ‘80s, Klaus becomes a player on the mile-long Reeperbahn. His principal rival and nemesis in the pimping business is the grizzled thug ‘Beatle’ Vogler (Karsten Mielke), no Superfly he. Klaus in contrast arrives on the scene with disco flash and the affect of a holy fool, which causes everyone to laugh at him, at first. But mockery is just fuel for a born disruptor’s ego, and Klaus has vision, absurd as that might sound in this milieu.
Klaus keeps talking up how he wants to bring a Studio 54 vibe to his floor of the Eros Center. So perhaps it’s no surprise that prostitutes start opting to work for him rather than the beer-soaked brutes who have been slapping them around for ages. And Klaus’ ascent is aided by the love and counsel of Jutta (Jeanette Hain), an older sex worker who happens to be Vogler’s onetime moll, which gives a quasi-Oedipal charge to Klaus’ usurpation.

YOU MAY WANT TO SHOWER BETWEEN EPISODES

Luden excels when it comes to evoking the grit and grime of an old-school red-light district. Klaus and his fellow wannabes strut around a few blocks that daylight, or almost any sign of the outside world, seems unable to reach. Their neon-lit misadventures take place in a handful of dingy bars and clubs, with ceilings shrouded in cigarette smoke and every surface coated with a layer of scum. It’s not hard to imagine the reek of beer or vomit, or worse, that must pervade the air. And every location comes decorated in 1970s Eyesore.
Apart from a shot of the harbor that Klaus ignores as he cruises by in his Lamborghini, the series barely shows anything of Hamburg, which feels less like a sign of a pinched budget than a recognition of just how self-contained Klaus’ milieu is. The Reeperbahn is his kingdom, and the Zuhälter has no interest in the outside world that does not flatter or defer to him.

THE BAD OLD GOOD OLD DAYS

Luden presents its squalid locale with surprisingly little handwringing about modern-day sensitivities. While the female characters are granted a degree of agency, the sexual exploitation that is the foundation of the red-light economy is presented as a blunt fact of life. (The opening episode is by far the most seamy, which could be the producers’ way of letting audiences know what they’re getting into. Or maybe just a come-on.) The dialogue doesn’t have the ring of a 21st-century writers’ room fretting about political correctness.

We see that young Klaus is a bit less of a Neanderthal in his sexual politics than the muttonchop veteran pimps he seeks to wrest power from, but as a protagonist, he is hardly buffed and polished to meet contemporary standards. When we see how he orders one luckless girlfriend to a grotesque exile of servicing workers on an oil rig, where she will be a kind of sacrificial lamb, we can’t ignore how much the character is deluding himself with a fantasy of providing good times for everyone. (It’s arguable whether the show itself fully reckons with the more odious aspects of his character.)

The scripts eventually nod to past sexual abuse that helps drive at least some of the girls into prostitution, and an elliptical flashback indicates that even Klaus himself suffered abuse from a guardian when he was an adolescent. But in contrast to more than a few fictional narratives nowadays, the show doesn’t dwell on past trauma. The rough-and-tumble setting doesn’t allow for that, and the characters don’t allow trauma to define them. Anyone here who makes it past their early 20s is a hardened survivor.

More provocative is the idea that some of the girls who become Klaus’ employees are fleeing hometowns of suffocating boredom and conformity, and life in St. Pauli is a way to be bad, or at least tell themselves they’re rebelling. But the arrival of AIDS in the mid ‘80s brings the fantasy of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll to a screeching halt for everyone. When business at his brothel dries up, Klaus turns to smuggling cocaine, at which point the story of Luden becomes far more familiar. Luden is watchable, but it’s an open question whether the creators found a compelling reason to tell this story in 2023. The long wallow in anything-goes kinkiness, drugs and groovy needle drops could make one wonder, after the success of Amazon Prime Video’s We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, did an executive there pick up a phone and say, “Get me more period sleaze, pronto!” This viewer can even imagine a compilation of the two shows’ soundtracks, called Bundesrepublik: The Down and Dirty Years.
  Luden / The Pimp - No F***ing Fairy Tale
Six episodes, approx. 50 min. each.
Starring: Aaron Hilmer, Jeanette Hain, Henning Flüsloh, Lena Urzendowsky, Noah Tinwa, Karsten Mielke, Lara Feith
Creators: Niklas Hoffmann, Peter Kocyla, Rafael Parente
Directors: Laura Lackmann, Stefan A. Lukacs
Production Company: Neuesuper
Content advisory: Nudity, violence, substance use, alcohol use, smoking, foul language, sexual content