Herzblatt oder Wie sag ich’s meiner Tochter? (1969)

Paul, nicknamed “Little Man,” lives with his daughter, nicknamed “Sweetheart,” whom he raised on his own after his wife died. Following the instructions in a book by Dr. Seebauer, he taught Sweetheart not to be ashamed of her body. She learned at a young age that a person’s nudity is normal, too. This led her to become fixated on her father, who is at once her father, mother, friend, and playmate. Even now, when Sweetheart should be well into puberty, she still bathes with her father, and they both enjoy making soap suds. She also moves about the apartment and the roof terrace naked without embarrassment, unaware of the effect she has on men. Paul seeks advice from Dr. Seebauer, who suggests finding Sweetheart a young man who will shift her attention from Paul to a partner of her own. Paul turns to Max, a building contractor who has so far suffered indirectly from Sweetheart’s charms: his construction site is opposite her roof terrace. The workers, meanwhile, regularly fall off the scaffolding when they try to get a look at the naked Sweetheart. Max has three sons: Olaf, Otto, and Oskar, who are respectively the sporty, alternative, and well-brought-up type. The three are introduced to Sweetheart one by one, and she eventually rejects each of them. The first kisses her and gets slapped; she lets the second undress her but feels nothing; the third admits that he wants to sleep with her, but she has no interest. Her ideal is a scene described by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls: a couple comes together, and the earth trembles. Sweetheart takes the actual earthquake in the book as the ideal of true love, but she has felt no tremor with any of Max’s sons. Sweetheart grows increasingly annoyed because all they talk about is sex. The Ministry has published a sex-education book to be used in schools, but the teachers are having a hard time with it. When the student newspaper’s editors start trying to use the paper to put forward their own sexual demands, Sweetheart would rather write about Hemingway and the romantic aspects of his novels—and is excluded from the editorial team. She does, however, sense that she is slowly growing up. On her way to school, she repeatedly encounters a young man on a bridge handing out flyers. One day, he presses a sheet of paper into her hand with “I love you” written on it. Sweetheart is unsure how to respond and eventually asks Paul how he knew he was in love with her mother. At first he concocts a strange story, but then admits that it was the simple words “I love you” that he said to her. Sweetheart hurries to the flyer distributor and shows him his sheet. They go out into the countryside together and kiss in a meadow. Since a controlled blast is taking place nearby at that very moment, the earth briefly trembles at just the right time.