The eyes of children look different. More spectacular, larger, new. In “Beat into the world with a fist” There is a scene in which brothers Philipp (Anton Franke) and Tobi (Camille Loup Moltzen) grow up in the Saxon province to the city. The camera looks admiringly with the eyes of the youngest, Tobi, the plate construction facades. “When I'm big, I also live in a skyscraper,” enthuses Tobi. The dreams don't grow as high in Görlitz and Hoyerswerda.
Constanze Klaue's cinema adaptation of the novel of the same name by Lukas Rietzschel remains true to this children's perspective over long distances and draws its greatest strengths from it – especially in the first half, in which much that will be dealt with in the following remains a little hidden. This is a story in close-up-also a consistent approach to a child's world life in which everything is incredibly intense, but the individual perceptions are not yet in contact with each other.
Sometimes Tobi (Camille Loup Moltzen) simply wants to “hit the world with his fist”.
Something is constantly happening that implications cannot be assessed. People appear who drag a past with themselves, in an unknown country, a world in which you have not yet been and in which the adults have already lived a whole life. You snap down sentences that you half understand and let the thoughts fall back on it, because something else happens again that the child's perception continues in the next, in turn.
Whenever it gets into the consciousness, Constanze Klue's directorial debut is most convincing, because then family drama and social realism are almost a little impressionistic narrative, which takes the childish perspective seriously to adequate filmic Find funds for your expression. The topics that then tear the second half of the film more and more are already there: the loss of work and the progressive alcoholism of father Stefan (Christian Näthe), the revision and bitterness of Mother Sabine (Anja Schneider), the gradual break Before, and finally the rapprochement of the older Philipp to the local neo -Nazi subculture. But in these stronger passages of “hit the world with a fist”, this severity remains a little below the surface, walks into Tobi's children's world again and again.
The end of childhood
However, every childhood comes to an end at some point, and here this end point may be marked where everything that Tobi does not or half understands is gradually composed of larger problem areas. Klaue's film also becomes noticeably a straightforward, then tells of the lack of work and perspective in the post-reversal, of youthful frustration that leads to right-wing violence in search of belonging. This is also not badly told, you have seen all of this much, much worse in the social -realistic German theme film. But you have already seen it, and for example, “hit the world with a fist” did not have to add these narratives. Instead, it seems more like he gives up a piece of cinematic freedom that he initially still takes for his coming-of-age narration, only to become semiritical.
And towards the end he even sits a bit between the chairs, perhaps above all because these two different narrative modes never really get together. There is a time jump, from 2006 to 2015 – not up to our present, but at a time that still shapes our social presence to this day. 2015, that is the year of “We can do it!”, The year in which Chancellor Angela Merkel made the decision not to seal off the German border against the influx of fugitive, especially from the Syrian civil war. A decision that defined its chancellorship and determines the political debates of the country to this day.
In the second half, the child's carefree is increasingly dissolving in the usual topic of the socially relevant cinema.
Also in these final minutes of “hit the world with a fist”, the announced arrival of the refugees waves, in view of the events previously told a little unexpected. Unfortunately, this epilogue does not really work, and what emotional force develops could, fizzle out too ineffective. Sure, the time jump over almost a decade should tear gaps and raise new questions after all what could have happened in the meantime and what the brothers and us now led here. Unfortunately, above all, he finally throws the rhythm of the film over the pile, and this closing piece then looks a little too abruptly, overloaded, glued.
So it may not be successful in this novel adaptation, but you can definitely look forward to the upcoming work of directorial debutante Constanze Klue. Because at the end of “Beating with a fist into the world”, not only things are remembered that do not work so well, but also a whole series of moments, vignettes, small intensities, which are given space, especially in the first half of the film. Perhaps that would be a nice motto for a second film of this talented young director: Dare to do less topic?
Conclusion: A fairly beautiful, almost impressionist first half follows a much more cumbersome second if the coming-of-age story in Saxony of the nineteen years can be nailed too much on the outsourcing of socially relevant topics. Constanze Klaue's adaptation of the novel by Lukas Rietzschel was not completely successful, but a whole bunch of nice moments sticks to the memory.
We saw “hit the world with a fist” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown in the Perspectives section.