More to the Story: Discursive Violence in Aimée and Jaguar — Page 5:
21 Authorship becomes a confounded subject in this instance, where the story of Lilly and Felice is narrated by Lilly, through Erica Fischer, who is Jewish and not German.[6]Erica Fischer is claimed as "one of Vienna's foremost feminist writers and journals" who currently resides in Berlin, Germany. (Back cover of Aimée and Jaguar). In her epilogue, she identifies herself as Jewish. While a reductive reading of the story would have Felice be the unheard and oppressed voice that comes to us through Lilly's memories of her, Fischer reclaims Felice from Lilly's narration. In her epilogue, Fischer declares of Lilly: "I do not grant her the status of victim. I guard the line that runs between her and Felice, my Jewish mother, and myself obdurately, protective of my small piece of identity. She tried again and again to cross that line [...] as if she had nothing to do with her own land of Germany" (271). She continues, "I don't believe Jaguar would have stayed with Aimée. I don't think Lilly did either - and she found cold comfort in the suspicion that she would be spared this lot" (Fischer 272).
22 Finally, completing the circle of oppressor and oppressed, victim and perpetrator, Fischer discloses that she wrote the story of Aimée and Jaguar during the Bosnian war, while her Austrian husband, in an effort to undo some of the "looking the other way" of his own parents, devoted himself to finding homes for Muslim refugees in Germany. Fischer describes having to choose between advancing the story of Felice Schragenheim and intervening in the ethnic cleansing that Bosnian Serbs had learned from the Third Reich. Her women friends encouraged her to continue with her writing. In the end, she passes the judgment that she has not withheld from others: "During the time it took me to complete this book, living without the benefit of his love, Martin [her husband], the moralist, saved the lives of fifteen hundred people" (274). This last sentence of her epilogue to Aimée and Jaguar attests to the multiple identifications inhabited by all of us. As oppressed, we are also oppressors, and in liberating or giving voice to some, we sacrifice others. Every action, in any name, has benefactors and those that pay the price.