Page 65 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

sex. In Part 6: Was Eltern gern vertuschen mochten {What Parents Would Gladly Hush Up, 1973),
a teenage couple is discovered having sex after school beneath the piano in the music room - an
appointment, the voice-over tells us, they have been keeping for the last two weeks. The couple is
subsequently brought before the parent-teacher board who, as in the first part, will hear the evidence
and decide whether the students should be expelled. Outraged that they should be punished for being
in love, the pair relays stories about themselves and other teens in order to compare their music-room
misdemeanour to the far more outlandish sexual escapades of their peers. Soon the teachers and
parents are on trial themselves. From the married fencing instructor who thrusts and parries with an
amorous schoolgirl in the locker room, to the alcoholic father who prostitutes his daughter in order
to pay off his debts, adults are as culpable for the misdeeds of high-school students as are the students
themselves, who bribe, rape and even kill out of frustrated desire. Lest we throw up our hands at
this rampant degeneracy or indiscriminately denounce all teenagers, the psychologist intervenes with
tempered advice. The problems of student insolence and lawlessness, and conflicts between parents
and their children, are really problems of sex. And the problem of sex can be distilled to the problem
of differentiating sex from love. In or out of wedlock, within or across generations, bad sex is a product
of irrational lust, and good sex is an expression of love. A n d love', the voice-over declares as the now-
vindicated couple walks with their parents through the Siegestor 'is the element of life'. This extended
and finally sentimental example speaks to the inherent conciliatory rhetoric of the series that attempts
to solve an array of problems through the cipher of sex and to blur the boundaries between the legal
and moral sense of guilt.

CONCLUSION

It may be appropriate to conclude this chapter with a consideration of the Schoolgirl Reports series in
connection with Michael Geyer's work on post-war memory politics. For Geyer, one of the principle
symptoms of historical reckoning in West Germany was a conceptual melding of religious ethics and
secular politics:

Individual introspection, public tribunals to assure collectivity, critiques of hidden motives
and intentions — all made up a culture of guilt and salvation. ... The acknowledgement of
guilt under the watchful eye of Western modernity became the measure of progress, individual
and collective, in the West German politics of memory.27

And yet, for most Germans the actual work of remembering occurred not in the form of individual
recollection; nor where memories subject to a 'tribunal of conscious in a culture of guilt'. It was rather
the mass-mediated morality plays of the Holocaust in television and film that liberated Germans from
their past - representations, Geyer comments

that implicated no one in particular, but merely represented actions and non-actions, attit-
udes and behaviours which everyone remembered, and whose bitter consequences were now
summed up in a story that led inescapably to annihilation and catastrophe.28

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