More to the Story: Discursive Violence in Aimée and Jaguar
1 The story of Aimée and Jaguar[1]"Aimée" is Felice's nickname for Lilly, and Lilly calls Felice her "Jaguar." can be read on multiple levels. Indeed, it comes to us already in two incarnations. Erica Fischer published her novel Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 in 1994. In 2001, Max Färberböck's movie, Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Greater than Death was released. Though these two different representations reveal oppositional and competing sociological, political, and cultural agendas, what emerges is that there is no ultimate, objective "truth." Instead, it is more productive to analyze the cultural commentary enabled by these texts, situating them within historical context, contemporary politics, and personal investment. This story, as is it is told by Fischer and Färberböck, can be read as a universal "love in the face of adversity" story. It is also a project of recuperating lesbian history. It represents lesbianism as a site of resistance to the National Socialist eugenicist agenda. But finally, this story of resistance is also tainted with the imbalance and inequality of the social context in which it exists. It reinscribes the racist and classist dynamics it sets out to critique. What emerges from close readings of both the novel and the film is that non-heteronormative relationships are not inherently revolutionary, but instead often reproduce (whether consciously or not) hegemonic power relations and discursive violence.
2 The plot of the novel and the film are roughly the same. Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust is a mother of four, married to a Nazi soldier fighting on the front. While her husband is away, she has affairs with various other high-power members of the National Socialist party. Through her domestic assistant, Inge Wolf, she meets Felice, and they fall in love. Felice comes to live with Lilly, and from then on her home is filled with various lesbian and bisexual women and occasional male friends. Eventually Felice discloses to Lilly that she is Jewish. Lilly is amazed that Felice can love her despite Lilly's history of anti-Semitic remarks. Shortly after they declare their mutual love and exchange rings, Felice is discovered by the Gestapo and sent to a Jewish collection center in the city. Lilly visits her there daily until Felice is sent to a labor camp. When Lilly tries to visit her at the labor camp as well, Felice is sent to a concentration camp. What happens to Felice after that is unclear, but she is not heard from again. In 1948, the municipal court of Berlin-Charlottenburg declares her legally dead as of December 31, 1944.
3 Erica Fischer's novel is based on interviews with Elisabeth Wust (Lilly), excerpts from her diary, letters from Felice Schragenheim and Lilly, as well as interviews with surviving relatives and friends, and historical documents tracing the growing restrictions on Jews during the reign of the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany. Because Fischer's story is based to a significant extent on archival documents, it could be read as a closer approximation to the lived realities of its characters than the movie, which minimizes the Holocaust to an interesting backdrop to a lesbian love story. Färberböck's movie leaves out several important historical occurrences, including Lilly's second marriage and her conversion to Judaism after the war.
4 Anna Parkinson describes how the movie was received differently by lesbian feminists and German Jews (147-150). While lesbian feminists predictably interpreted the movie as evidence of a "lesbian history," German Jewish feminists point to the purely narcissistic type of lesbianism embodied by Lilly. Fischer also "deploys a reductive psycho-analytical understanding of lesbianism where she clearly equates Felice's lesbian sexuality with an attachment to the mother's body" and "dismisses the philo-Semitism of Lilly as Lilly's conflation of lesbian love, represented here as a dissolving of boundaries between the self an the other, with Jewish identification" (Parkinson 148-149).
5 Another significant criticism of both the movie and the novel is that they ignore the persecution of homosexuals during the Nazi regime. For example, in her review of the film, Catherine Zimmer states: "The film takes the simpleminded, outdated position that only Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The historical moment becomes a backdrop for a love affair, not a moment in queer history" (456). In fact, lesbians were not mentioned in Paragraph 175.[2]The vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subjected to systematic persecution. While lesbian bars were closed, few women are believed to have been arrested. Paragraph 175 did not mention female homosexuality. Lesbianism was seen by many Nazi officials as alien to the nature of the Aryan woman. In some cases, the police arrested lesbians as "asocials" or "prostitutes" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, pamphlet) Myrna Goldenberg explains this omission:
While their love for women may have made some of them vulnerable, lesbianism was not illegal and therefore not defined as a category in the concentration camp system of crimes. Lesbians did not wear the pink triangle, as gay men did; instead they wore triangles that designated them as "asocial" or as "political" prisoners. Because "Nazi ideology saw the 'Aryan' woman as predestined to motherhood and marriage as a matter of principle," Nazis regarded lesbians as women who were not fulfilling their biological destiny and as women in need of intercourse (p. 11). Generally, women were commodified and lesbians were victimized as a result of pernicious Nazi misogyny. (678)