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’ appears to be a conceptual film adaptation, meaning that the core of the story remained 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, fulfilling more of his own private male fantasies regarding such a relationship (see especially the passionate, almost pornographic film scene from minute 62 to 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 film. 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 Jewish journalist’s fate and constructing a partly problematic sentimental ending to the film with the German heroine confessing 1997 in the manner of a style documentary film that after Felice she had no lovers, contrary to the fact in Fischer’s book about her second marriage after the war.
The director correctly left out some elements of 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 issues remains the dilemma that contemporary witness Mrs. Elenai Predski-Kramer, Mrs. Esther Dischereit and Mrs. Katharina Sperber have been referring to: Is Lilly (Aimée) to be commended as a heroine for harboring a Jewish Friend of the Nazis or is she rather to blame for indirectly handing over her lover to the Gestapo (no one knows who gave Felice’s photo to the Nazi police) and then indirectly sending her to the Gestapo? 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 indirectly wanted to prevent others from becoming Felice’s lovers. Wasn’t this visit of hers (bringing her warm clothes) 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 quicker 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 Nazi misdeeds and beliefs? her? (To the conviction of being able to smell Jews!). After living with Hitler’s bust during the war, she decided to put a menorah in her apartment and wear the yellow Star of David when confronted by the liberating/occupying Soviet forces, which her lover Felice actually did! never wanted to use! Or was Lilly’s entire behavior an expression of the simple urge to survive 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 story is the fact that Felice signed a gift deed on July 28, 1944, thus bequeathing the rest of her property to Lilly. But was it out of love or out of fear of betrayal? on August 21, 1944 – after bathing together in the Havel Ya River and taking photos – Felice was arrested by the Gestapo at 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. In addition, some witnesses stated that after Felice’s arrest, Lilly went to take all of Felice’s belongings (furniture, the best silver, jewelry, furs) according to the signed donation deed. Was greed then a motive for indirect betrayal? Or was the real motive made up of many conscious and unconscious emotional elements?
However, Felice’s death 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 of lesbianism as a ‘charm’ to prevent due criticism and satisfy voyeuristic needs and possibly the ideology of leftists who make believe that lesbianism was a kind of resistance against the Nazis, while only male homosexuality What was an actual 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 by turning Lilly’s husband into a German soldier who returns home unannounced and finds his wife with her lover? lesbian in bed? , then smashes his car in disgust at him, makes comments about his wife’s homosexuality, and demands a divorce. The film director rewrote Fischer’s book by creating in part sympathy for the poor, exhausted German soldier returning from the front and fuming after being taken from his family nest. Is lesbianism presented here as a kind of high treason against German military interests, like a stab in the back? Is the Jewish lesbian Felice in the film portrayed lightly but remarkably as a destroyer of the healthy German family, as a sick and intrusive factor converting the sexual orientation of a German housewife and mother of four through hellish seduction and body manipulation? The director underscored and exaggerated Lilly’s initial aversion to lesbian kissing in his film. 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 punching Felice out of the apartment!
Is the film a good cover-up story that proves there is no justice for the dead victims, offering the chance to show the perpetrators, Hitler’s supporters, as part ‘good guys’ at the same time? The Färberböck 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 full of bombers and bombs that even destroy 5,000 apartments in one night of bombing. However, this sad fact must be seen in the context of the truth that the fire that the Germans opened against 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 sing 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 a fairly liberal bisexual war ethic and a willingness to steal each other’s lovers and spouses, a case of love that extremely defies fate? Is it at the same time some kind of spiritual misalliance between a narrow-minded housewife and a charming, cosmopolitan girl who might not have lasted long in peacetime anyway? The best evidence for the assumption of this incompatibility could be Lilly’s birthday celebration scene with a dance: Lilly wears her blue petit bourgeois dress, while Felice wears a tailcoat and a top hat. Is the whole story, moreover, an example of unrequited love or 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 defied each other 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 us allow for the possibility that the film version of the ambivalent love story is really a monument to the human greatness and heroism of the German housewife Elisabeth Wust despite her human failings. She for a time managed 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 her subversive love, by her jaguar-like hunt for the simple, unhappy petty-bourgeois married woman.
