Imagendering II

16      After Felice had been sent from the collection camp in Berlin to Theresienstadt, Lilly was determined to visit her. Theresienstadt was a labor camp that at that point did not have a reputation for extermination of Jews. It was however, unheard of for an Aryan to visit a Jew at a labor camp. Elenai remembers trying to talk Lilly out of her plan. In addition to endangering herself, it could be harmful to Felice, and have unforeseen consequences (Fischer 192). In effect, when Lilly made it to Theresienstadt, she was thrown out with threats from the camp leader, and Felice was sent to Gross-Rosen concentration camp shortly thereafter. In this way, Lilly facilitated Felice's transfer from a labor camp to a concentration camp, which is where Felice presumably was killed.

17      Lilly also faced consequences from her visit to Theresienstadt, in the form of a official summons from the Gestapo. She was interrogated as to her relationship with Felice. The possibility of a romantic relationship between the two women was seen as unlikely and dismissed in order to focus on the real crime: having "aided and abetted" a Jew (Fischer 222). At the end of the interrogation, Lilly was forced to sign a document stating that because she had aided and abetted a Jew, she belonged in a concentration camp, but was spared because her four children depended on her. Once again, Lilly's status as mother of the Aryan race protected her.

18      Both in the novel and in the movie, it is clear that Lilly goes to see Felice because she cannot help herself. She goes at risk to herself and Felice, overcome by the desire to see her loved one. Lilly ignores the risk differential to herself and Felice, despite cautions from her friends. As an Aryan German citizen and mother of four sons, Lilly enjoyed social and political protections that were never available to Felice. Lilly's visit to Felice at Theresienstadt is what likely sealed Felice's fate. This act of selfish love reveals how Lilly's unexamined privilege is directly harmful to Felice. This first act of ostensible murder is followed by further discursive erasure of Felice's reality by Lilly.

19      Because of Lilly's conflation of herself with Felice, what is described by Anna Parkinson as the narcissistic model of lesbian identification, Lilly cannibalistically takes on Felice's identity: "[Felice] was my counterpart, my complement, literally. I felt I was both myself and Felice. We were a mirror image" (Fischer 34). After Felice's death, Lilly enters melancholic identification. This is minimalized in the movie in a final scene where Lilly and Ilse meet in a home for the aged, and they compare notes on their lives after they lost touch. Lilly declares that she never loved anyone else. "I only thought of her…Fifty years - one thought - one face - one name." Here Lilly represents the tragic figure of the survivor of a lost love. When Lilly states that fate has betrayed her, Ilse prevents the seamless reading of Lilly as the abstinent heroine by saying, "First it was the Führer, now fate. It's always something, preferably something big. You betrayed yourself, Lilly, no one else." Ilse clearly returns responsibility for Lilly's own life (and maybe Felice's) to Lilly, alluding to the choices that she made during and after the war.

20      The book allows a much more explicit reading of Lilly's melancholic incorporation of Felice through her attempted conversion to Judaism, what Parkinson refers to as an interiorization of an idealized Jewishness (160). Lilly disassociates herself from her German past before the war is even over. When the Russians arrive at Berlin, Lilly sews Felice's Star of David to her coat and told Russian soldiers "We nix Nazis, we Jews. War over, you our liberators" (Fischer 241). While this could have been a survival strategy, it also presents the beginning of Lilly's assumption of a Jewish identity. Her sons report how she imposed herself on a Jewish community in Berlin, enrolled them in Jewish schools, and unsuccessfully attempted to convert to Judaism herself. Thus Lilly never properly mourned Felice, or the Holocaust.[5]Anna Parkinson addresses the cultural phenomenon of melancholia described by Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, who posit that "the relentless work of the German Wiederaufbau was a deflection from the necessary forms of national and individual mourning that should have occurred after the devastating events of the Second World War…Instead of the necessary mourning that usually takes place after significant and traumatic loss, post-war German society was riddled with melancholic identifications that were collectively disavowed through the obsession with manically and frenetically rebuilding Germany. Thus the necessary act of confronting and working through their interiorized ideals of the 'Vaterland' and the 'Führer myth', and the mass crimes of the National Socialist regime never really took place on a collective, or often even individual level" (159). She distances herself from her German/Aryan identity through a cannibalistic/melancholic identification with Felice, the lost object of her love. But through this identification with Jewishness, Lilly denies her own responsibility in both the relationship between her and Felice and the larger context of the Nazi regime. Under the cover of the tragic heroine, she assumes victim status and erases her role in history. And finally, she relates her love story to the world, while Felice is forever silenced and accessible only through poems, letters, and the memory of others.