Aimee & Jaguar (1999) – A love story between a German housewife and a Jewish journalist

Max Färberböck’s adaptation of Erica Fischer’s book ‘Aimée & Jaguar’ seems to be a conceptual film adaptation, which means that the core of the story stayed more or less the same, although there are some significant changes to certain aspects of the original story. . The film director focused more on the relationship between two lesbian women as such, more satisfying his own private male fantasies regarding such a relationship (see especially the passionate, almost pornographic film scene from minute 62 to minute 65 of the film! ) than in translating Fischer’s book about the German woman named Lilly (Elisabeth Wust, nicknamed Aimée) and the Jewish woman named Felice Schragenheim (nicknamed Jaguar) into the medium of cinema. Thus, he excluded many elements from the book and revealed that his inventions in the film were aimed at reducing the tragic dimension of the fate of the Jewish journalist and constructing a partly problematic sentimental ending to the film with the German heroine confessing 1997 in a style from a documentary film that after Felice he had no lovers, contrary to the fact in Fischer’s book about his second marriage after the war.

The director rightly excluded some elements from Fischer’s book that show inconsistency and miss the opportunity to balance the German housewife’s one-sided views on the whole love story. One of the biggest problems remains the dilemma to which Ms. Elenai Predski-Kramer, a witness at the time, Ms. Esther Dischereit and Ms. Katharina Sperber have been referring: Should Lilly (Aimée) be praised as a heroine for harboring a Jewish friend of the Nazis, or is she rather to blame for indirectly handing her lover over to the Gestapo (no one knows who gave the photo of Felice to the Nazi police) and then indirectly sending her to the death after visiting her in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in September 1944? Supposedly, Lilly wanted to know if Felice was unfaithful to her there in the concentration camp and possibly she wanted to indirectly prevent others from becoming Felice’s lovers. Wasn’t this visit of hers (bringing him warm clothing) more an expression of narcissism than of wisdom and willingness to save the life of her lover, especially if one knew that such visits regularly resulted in speedier executions? Might we also question whether Lilly’s eventual conversion to Judaism and the ‘re-education’ of her children as Jews in post-war Germany could be interpreted as signs of a guilty conscience, as an attempt to make up for one’s own wrongdoings and Nazi beliefs? her? (even the conviction of being able to smell Jews!). After living with the bust of Hitler during the war, she decided to put a menorah in her apartment and wear the yellow Star of David when she faced the Soviet liberation/occupation forces, which her lover Felice actually! never wanted to use! Or was all of Lilly’s behavior an expression of the simple drive for survival and the need to adapt to the respective changing political situations in the course of history?

One of the most embarrassing circumstances of the so-called love affair is the fact that Felice signed a deed of gift on July 28, 1944, thus bequeathing the remainder of her property to Lilly. But was it out of love or fear of betrayal? On August 21, 1944 – after bathing together in the Havel Ya River and taking photos – Felice was arrested by the Gestapo in Lilly’s apartment. His life ended on December 31, 1944 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The film is silent on the fact that the Gestapo did not severely punish Lilly for harboring a Jew at a time when the persecution of Jews still in hiding became more fanatical the more desperate the war situation became, and the Jews were to blame for every bomb he bombed. fell on Germany. Furthermore, some witness claimed that after Felice’s arrest, Lilly went to take all of Felice’s belongings (furniture, the best silver, jewelry, furs) according to the signed deed of gift. Was greed then a motive for vicarious betrayal? Or was the real motive made up of many conscious and unconscious emotional elements?

However, the death of Felice eliminated the possibility of looking at the entire personal history from another point of view, so there is no possibility of shedding an alternative light on the specific case. Does the film then portray a misconstrued story with the case for lesbianism as a ‘charm’ to prevent due criticism and to satisfy the voyeuristic needs and possibly the ideology of leftists who make believe that lesbianism was some kind of resistance against the Nazis, while only male homosexuality What was a real subject of punishment according to the notorious paragraph 175? On the other hand, how could this film be interpreted as a possible defense of lesbianism if the director changed the text of the original story turning Lilly’s husband into a German soldier who returns home without warning to find his wife with her lover? lesbian in bed , then vandalizes his car in outrage at him, makes comments about his wife’s homosexuality, and demands a divorce. The film director rewrote Fischer’s book in part out of sympathy for the poor, exhausted German soldier who returned from the front and raged after being taken from his family nest. Is lesbianism presented here as a kind of high treason against German military interests, as a stab in the back? Is the Jewish lesbian Felice in the film lightly but noticeably portrayed as a destroyer of the healthy German family, as a sick factor and intruder in converting the sexual orientation of a German housewife and mother of four through hellish seduction and body manipulation? The director underlined and exaggerated in his film Lilly’s initial aversion to the lesbian kiss. While the scene in the book contains Lilly’s outrage at Felice staying in the apartment, the scene in the movie contains Lilly’s nervous breakdown and beating Felice out of the apartment!

Is the movie a good cover-up story that proves there is no justice for dead victims, offering the chance to show the perpetrators, Hitler supporters, as part ‘good guys’ at the same time? Färberböck’s film also seems to be an expression of the German need to make a more humane image of Germans during the Holocaust. In other words, not all Germans would be monsters during World War II. In addition, they suffered massive terrorist bombardments against the civilian population and against cities declared open. At the beginning of the film, the night sky over Berlin is filled with bombers and bombs that destroy as many as 5000 apartments in one night of bombing. However, this sad fact must be seen in the context of the truth that the fire which the Germans opened on the attacked states, their citizens and their possessions boomeranged back with exaggerated cruelty and hatred even towards the innocent German victims who ambivalently they still believed in the wonder weapon to conquer the world and still proudly sings the national anthem ‘Germany Above All’, at least on the radio.

Is this movie really a true love story? Or is it a mixture of passion and a drive to survive in an alien context with rather liberal bisexual war morale and a willingness to steal each other’s lovers and spouses, a case of love that defies fate in the extreme? Is it at the same time some kind of spiritual misalignment between a narrow-minded housewife and a charming, cosmopolitan girl who couldn’t have lasted long in peacetime anyway? The best proof for the assumption of this incompatibility could be the scene of Lilly’s birthday celebration with dance: Lilly wears her petit bourgeois blue dress, while Felice wears tails and a top hat. Is the whole story, moreover, an example of unrequited love or of love feigned with the mask of passion? It is the film, on the contrary, about a true love prevented by horrible circumstances, a love that blindly mutually defied all reason and defied all dangers, wanting to be consumed immediately, with extreme intensity, but a love too weak, too exhausted. to achieve a possible happy ending? Definitive and clear answers to all these questions could not be given, for all the reasons already mentioned above. So let’s allow for the possibility that the movie version of the ambivalent love story is really a monument to German housewife Elisabeth Wust’s human greatness and heroism despite her human failings. She managed for a time to save the life of the Jewish journalist Felice, who would not have died in the Holocaust if she had escaped in time along with some of her friends and resistance members who survived the war. Unfortunately, Felice was tragically blinded by his subversive love for her, by hunting her like a jaguar for the unhappy and simple petit bourgeois married woman.