The German film Aimée and Jaguar, based on Erica Fischer’s 1994 book of the same title and directed by Max Färberböck, is a biography of how beautiful Lilly Wust (played by Juliane Köhler) coped with everyday life in Berlin during the last twenty months of World War II, when the city was being bombed and Allied forces advanced on Germany. While her husband Günther (played by Detlev Buck) fought in the Wehrmacht, she was a model Nazi mother, raising four children. But she found something missing in her life. What was missing was love, but her search for love ultimately led to tragedy for most of her friends. Her first extramarital affair, with a Wehrmacht officer, is interrupted by a visit of her mother and father. While the officer hides to avoid disgrace, her Communist Party father makes a remark that the officer regards as unpatriotic, so he comes out from hiding to denounce her father, who is never seen again in the film. Her next affair is with Felice Schragenheim, who tried to disguise her Jewish ancestry by using the surname Schrader (the part is played by Maria Schrader) while employed at a Berlin newspaper. Felice takes the initiative in the love affair. Lilly, fascinated with the strength of Felice and her friends, falls deeply in love because she realizes that she can give love with a cosmopolitan woman rather than merely receive love from a parochial man. The film features both sensual erotic encounters and sentimental love poems (quoted from the book), and during one love scene a poetic line emerges in which Lilly is an Aimée to Felice as Jaguar. However, Felice is so busy with the anti-Nazi underground and her own survival that she cannot see Lilly every day. On one occasion, Lilly erupts in anger over Felice’s unexplained absence for a few days, so Felice must share her secret or the relationship will end. Then one day Lilly’s husband gets leave from the front and arrives home, only to see Felice and Lilly in bed. Although he then hoped merely to punish her for her indiscretion so that his marriage would return to normal, Lilly surprises him by asking for a divorce. In court, however, his grounds for divorce are that his wife is the lover of a Jewish Lesbian. However, he later dies at the front. Lilly’s Jewish friends understandably fear for their lives and arrange to flee Germany before they are rounded up. Felice, however, prefers to take her chances in order to enjoy the love of her life, though unfortunately not for long, as Felice is soon sent to Terezine Concentration Camp from which she never returns. The story has two bookends. When the film begins in 1997, an 83-year-old Lilly (then played by Inge Keller) is taking up residence in a dilapidated flat that once served as an underground hideout. Lilly’s Jewish maid Ilse (played by Kyra Mladeck in the 1940s, by Johanna Wokalek in 1997), who was rounded up during 1945, is already a tenant. Lilly and Ilse reminisce as the film ends. Lilly, though saddened by the tragedy that she caused her friends and lovers, is unable to imagine how her life could have been any different, given her obsessive live-for-today-for-tomorrow-we-die mood, common among besieged Berliners. Today, Lilly Wust still lives in Berlin. The tagline of the film, "Love Transcends Death," underscores how the book and film serve as sentimental memorials to Felice Schragenheim. However, the life of Lilly Wust is a paradigm of sorts for contemporary Germany. MH

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Aimee & Jaguar : A Love Story, Berlin 1943
by Erica Fischer, Edna McCown

A unique and tragic love story between two women, set against the Holocaust and brought to life with letters, diaries, documents, and photographs.