MARC WERMKE
Doctor of Nuclear Medicine, Martial Artist, Brutal exponent from Munich, Germany.

For those of you who received our newsletter, you would have read about Marc and his extremely interesting email he sent us. It was from the strength of that initial email that we contacted Marc and asked him if he would be our profile for Issue 29. Enjoy!

Hi Haydn,
Thank you very much for your mail and the opportunity. I felt slightly uncomfortable answering the questions, as I see myself in a rather critical light most of the time and I see it as a great honour to be profiled on your site, a site that gave me a lot - so I hope I can give back a little. Some of the questions would deserve a whole book as an answer, but I tried to keep it brief. I hope the answers are neither too long, nor too short. And I hope I got the words and the grammar right. Keep up the good work and thanks again!

Best wishes,
Marc

Thanks a lot Marc for having such good English and for letting us profile you. Tell us about your training background in the martial arts.

Thanks Haydn, for the opportunity. I’ve been training Aikido for some time, but due to my ‘tight schedule’ I quit that a couple of years ago. At least I thought it was my schedule. As it turned out, I just didn’t make room for it, most probably out of ignorance and convenience. Last year I started looking for a Kenjitsu (Japanese sword art) school here in Munich. Back then I didn’t really know why, I just felt a deep attraction to it. After some Internet research I found the Shin-Ken-Ryu-Do and it turned out that three Dan-carriers were about to found a dojo in Munich and they asked me to join. Apart from the sword we are doing Jiu Jitsu and Tang Soo Do. Again it is hard for me to explain but I just found what I had been looking for. The training is tough (my Jiu Jitsu Sensei is the trainer of the local police forces) and demanding, but if that wouldn’t suit me I would have started Tae Bo… Whereas Jiu Jitsu is suited for self-defence, sword obviously isn’t, but it is not this aspect that drew me to martial arts. It is the ‘Do’, or way. In each and every hour you learn something about yourself, sometimes through pain and through defeat and sometimes by just not achieving what you want. Especially the sword, it is like a tool that helps me to undergo my very own forging process. I like the saying, “If you seek mastery of the sword, seek sincerity of the heart first, because the first is just a reflection of the latter.”