Page 55 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

VOICING TEENAGE SEXUALITY IN POSTWAR GERMANY
In the pre-credit sequence of Part One: Was Eltern nicht für möglich halten (Possibilities Parents Do Not
Consider, 1970), we follow a group of teenagers who are driving a Volkswagen Bug down Munich's
Leopoldstrasse. A girl's voice-over defiantly declares:

Here we are. We, the youth of today. We are subjugated and disagreeable. Why? Because we
doubt, because we have our own kind of music, and because we want a new kind of morality.

Shifting to a montage of individual schoolgirls, the voice-over continues: 'Here we are. The girls of
today. We are curious and true to ourselves because our parents have lied too often.' The girl's voice
is then supplanted by an authoritative, older male voice that invites us to witness first hand the new
protocol of the sexual revolution, 'how it works in these new times, and how it really is.'
In the first scene of the film, a girl sneaks away from her class field trip to have sex with the
school bus driver. Upon being discovered in the act by her prudish instructor, the girl is brought
before the school's parent-teacher board that will decide whether or not this offence is grounds for
expulsion. The rest of the film is structured around stories that the school's resident psychologist
shares with the board about teenage sexuality in general. Flashbacks within flashbacks take us
to the most private and intimate moments of girls' sexual awakenings. From fifteen-year-old
Barbara, who confesses to carrying on an affair with her stepfather since she was twelve, to her peer
Claudia who seduces an older life guard and sends him to a two-year jail sentence, each episode
is relayed through a girl's own voice-over recollection as she submits details of her delinquency
for scientific scrutiny and moral judgement. We then shift to documentary-style woman-on-the-
street interviews where 'real' women respond to questions each of the vignettes raise. As a foil to
the clearly fictional patent-teacher groups who condemn the teenage dalliances, these random
respondents, in sharing their own personal experiences, often confirm the 'truth' and normalcy
of the erotic encounters. In so doing they suggest that the letter of the law and the code of the
classroom are both inadequate to the reality of teenage sexuality which, however criminal and
immoral, is nonetheless natural.
A product of their time, the sex report films came about in response to shifts in the West
German film industry. By the late 1960s the self-governing film censorship organisation, the FSK
(Freiwillige Selbstkontolle der Filmwirtschaft), had liberalised its guidelines concerning acceptable
film content, such that by 1972 it had ceased altogether to regulate adult films designated for
audiences eighteen and older. At the same time, new laws prohibiting the glorification of violence
and pornography meant that films deemed obscene could still be confiscated by the police or banned
by local officials.5 The on-the-street interviews, P T A meetings and often motally compensating
endings of the Schoolgirl Reports offset the pornographic content with quasi-scientific appeals to
sex education and documentary reportage; in this way producers might circumvent obscenity
laws by making claims for the redeeming social value of the genre. This strategy explains, in part,
an ambivalence in these texts that both celebrate teenage sexuality and expose the maleficence of
unchecked desire.

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