Die sündige Kleinstadt (1975)

The little, sleepy town of Bumburg is an entirely ordinary small town in the provinces of northern Germany. It has young, open-minded girls who think about nothing but boys and sex all day; an academic, Dr. Dierig (played by director Brönneke), who is having an affair with a younger woman but wants the neighbors kept in the dark; a constantly horny milkman who sometimes has trouble keeping his hands to himself; a prudish, easily aroused teacher named Stubentreu; and Bumburg city councilman Hannemann, who is married to the nagging “dragon” Luise. This rail-thin woman enjoys getting worked up about everything and everyone, currently about some graffiti vandals who have once again—now for the third time this week—added an “s” to the town’s entrance sign between the “m” and the “b,” turning the little backwater into “Bumsburg.” This is the starting point for the story that follows: amid this agitated atmosphere of perfectly ordinary small-town, respectable-citizen madness, another “scandal” erupts. Three pretty schoolgirls of marriageable age lie naked in bed, giggling and cackling as they read one girl’s erotic notes, collected in a notebook entitled “My Intimate Diary.” One day, the author of those late-pubescent outpourings, Monika Hannemann, the councilman’s daughter, leaves her erotic fantasies behind in the classroom. They fall into the hands of the prim teacher, Miss Stubentreu. Reading them, she concludes that Monika must have become the village mattress and slept with half the men in Bumburg. The erotic contents soon make the rounds and become the talk of the small town, while speculation and allegations about who had, or might have had, what with whom in Bumburg run wild. Even a rather unscrupulous reporter named Waltraut Henze arrives, sensing a sensational story in the scribblings. Her methods also include blackmailing some of the people named in the little notebook. Now the entire moral order of the supposedly sinful small town threatens to be thrown off balance, and Moni’s outpourings cause plenty of turmoil—until the whole thing turns out to be what it is: a pubescent daydream by adolescent schoolgirls who are constantly thinking about sex.