Page 54 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Koster's recollection suggests that the violent history of Nazi Germany ripples through the
intimate encounters between parents and their radical offspring, and that the older generation
adopts authoritarian tactics from an unreconciled past in its attempt to control and monitor
the adolescent body. Quarrels over bras and soiled fingernails in this story give way to historical
debate once Koster makes the connection between her parents and German history. Koster's
rebellion against her parents, she explains, is animated by her own sense of shame for acts
committed before her birth. For Dagmar Herzog, this statement should be read as an urgent
'flailing to free oneself from the cloying and everywhere inadequately acknowledged toxicities
of the supposedly so clean post-1945 period'. 2 Perhaps more significantly, however, the charge
marks a progression from adolescence into adulthood by becoming aware first of personal history
and then of national history - moving, as it were, from the parents to the nation, and from the
body to the state.
Recent scholarship on the German New Left reveals that this movement constructed mutually
defining sexual and political positions in reference to the Judeocide. The sexual revolution, in which
Koster was active, brought taboo, and presumably repressed, desires, fantasies and experiences into
the public domain with the goal of confronting the Wirtschaftwunder generation with the past
they suppressed. The liberated, nude body, free of the trappings of capitalist consumer cultute,
could function as a signifier of student victimisation and guilt, but also as a trope for laying bare
Germany's genocidal past. If the Nazis and Adenauer adults suffered from and perpetuated sexual
repression and historical amnesia, public nudity and free love represented, as Uli Linke puts it, 'a
return to the authentic, the natural, the unrepressed, that is, to a way of life untainted by the legacy
of Auschwitz'. 3 Confronting sex and confronting Germany's past were thus yoked in the student
endeavour to bring private experience and suppressed history into the public record. Yet, the
student appropriation of the Jewish victimisation was not only a provocative political gesture. The
recurrence of Holocaust imagery in the New Left discourse, Herzog notes, pointed to an essential
volatility, 'that the release of libido might be, not just liberatory, but rather dangerous, and that the
pursuit of pleasure might lead, not to social justice, but to evil'. 4
While the New Left found a rejoinder in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker
Schlondorff and Alexander Kluge, directots themselves of the left whose works spoke directly
to the 'sixty-eighters', the most popular interventions in the sexual revolution were the soft-core
exploitation 'Sex Report' films which began with Ernst Hofbauer's 1970 Schulmddchen Report
and include the twelve subsequent films in the series that ended in 1980. Part documentary, part
staged vignettes, the Schoolgirl Reports are pornographic exposes of the erotic life of Germany's
middle-class adolescent girls. The films ostensibly address themselves to adults who are struggling
to understand the sexual and cultural mores of the new generation, and to parents, in particular,
who know practically nothing about their daughters' illicit lives. Along with his collaborators
Walter Boos, writer Gunther Heller, and producer Wolf Hartwig, Hofbauer, born in 1925,
represented a voice of the older generation who came of age during the war and who was now
ambiguously implicated in Germany's past. My interest in this series is in how it accesses the
rhetoric of the sexual revolution while repackaging and eroticising the guilt associated with sexual
experience.

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