Page 59 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

More importantly, this little banal story, like the others in the film, displaces larger questions of
national history onto the more manageable and tame problems of the family; these are the stories that
comprise what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner call 'the amnesia archive' of collective memory.
Memory, like history, 'is the amnesia you like'. 14 Significantly, the final shot of the film frames
Barbara and her friends walking down Leopoldstrasse towards Munich's nineteenth-century Siegestor
(Victory Arch), a memorial to Bavarian militarism that was destroyed in World War Two, and
rebuilt and rededicated in 1973 as a national monument to peace. The Victory Arch functions in the
opening and closing shots of this film (and in the shots that bookends the entire series) to situate these
vignettes in the real space of German cities and in the narrative arc of German history which is always
being remembered, forgotten and revised. The Victory Arch performs for cultural memory what the
confession does for the individual. Foucault remarks that the confession exonerates and purifies the
confessor. 'It unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.'15
The redemptive act of remembering and recounting sex finds its inverse in those sexual acts that are
committed but suppressed. With the fourth and most interesting installment of the series, Was Eltern
oft Verzweifeln Läßt (What Drives Parents to Despair, 1972), Hofbauer explores more taboo scenarios
including incest, racially-charged gang rape, and sex between German girls and guest workers. In this
film, he abandons the confessions, the girl-on-the-street interviews and the P T A meetings, using only
a male voice-over narration to link one tale to the next. Rather than confessing and atoning for sexual
indiscretions in a public forum, the youth in these episodes, we are told, pass into a normal sex life by
forgetting and/or sublimating their introduction to libidinal wish fulfilment.

FIGURE 6 The final shot of the film - The Victory Arch: The Schoolgirl Reports, Part Two: What Keeps Parents Awake (1971)

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