At The Movies
`Aimee & Jaguar'
A story of a dangerous love affair in Nazi Berlin
comes to the silver screen.
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
A
II afternoon, a despairing
Max Farberbock paced his
Berlin hotel room, drinking
coffee and cognac. For three
months, the German TV writer-director
had been holed up in the hotel, tackling
the script of his debut feature film,
Aimee & Jaguar. Based on a 1994 book,
the movie was to tell the true story of
doomed lesbian love between Lilly
Wust, a Nazi hausfrau, and Felice
Schragenheim, a glamorous Jew-in-hid-
ing in 1943 Berlin.
But suddenly, Farberbock, now 49,
doubted that the story was true. How
could the elegant, educated Felice, a
member of the Jewish underground,
possibly fall for the simple, bigoted Lilly?
"I felt panicked," says Farberbock, who
began to read and re-read Felice's love
letters to Lilly.
In the writing, he believes, he dis-
cerned "the heart of Felice."
"If the letters were true, the love story
was true," says Farberbock, who went on
to complete the final script 26 days later.
The project had been a long time
coming. When the best-selling book
Aimee & Jaguar hit the stands in 1994,
the director refused even to glance at it
while visiting his local bookstore. The
married-with-children director felt
threatened because he already had his
own lesbian-themed script, prompted by
a memory that had stayed with him
since he had visited Paris alone at 15.
At that impressionable age, he had
been startled by a vision in a window
across the way from his pension: two
bold young women, fully clothed, gaz-
ing at each other into a mirror for a very
long time.
Around 1996, the director realized
there was another reason he was avoid-
ing Aimee & Jaguar "I was a coward,"
admits Farberbock, who knew a lesbian
story set during the Holocaust was
bound to raise eyebrows.
Ultimately, however, the saga seduced
him. Farberbock was captivated by a tale
that broke every Holocaust-film cliche
and captured the chaos of 1943 Berlin, a
place where "women put make-up on,
looked attractive, and climbed over
corpses on the way to their rendezvous,"
he says.
"People who had lost their relatives ...
danced at parties until they collapsed.
The Small
Screen
Witler's Perfict Children" reveals the legacy
of Germanys Lebensborn program.
A
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
lmost weekly in the mid-1990s, Tor
Brandacher learned that another one of
his friends had committed suicide.
"I would hear that someone had
jumped out a window, drunk himself to death or was
run over by a car," Brandacher says in Hitler's Perfict
Children, a documentary that explores the shocking
flip side of the Shoa.h, It airs Dec. 13 on the History
Channel.
12/8
2000
92
Director Max Farberbock's film is based on the real-life relationship between
Felice Schragenheim ("Jaguar'), a Jewish member of the underground played
by Maria Schrader, and Lilly Wust (`Aimee'), an exemplar of Nazi mother-
hood played by Juliane Kohler.
Felice was also known for her [sexual]
conquests. ... She took what she could
from life. Every moment she stole from
the Nazis was a victory."
Aimee &Jaguar, which refers to the
lovers' pet names for each other, went on
to earn a Golden Globe nomination and
best actress awards at the Berlin
International Film Festival. It also
pleased Wust, now 86, who hid two
other Jewish women after Felice was
taken off to Theresienstadt.
After the war, Lilly says she never
loved again. According to Newsweek and
other reports, she stored her mementos
of Felice in two suitcases, and so
A Lebensborn
home in
Steinhoring
(Upper Bavaria
Brandacher and his friends grew up orphaned,
tormented and reviled because their very birth was
linked to the Nazis. They were bred as part of a top-
secret master plan to create a blond-haired, blue-eyed
master race: The Lebensbom program, the brainchild
of SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler, a former chicken farmer, was so eager
for "racially-pure" human stock that he encouraged
SS men to father as many children as possible —
legitimate or not.
Ten Lebensbom homes were opened in Germany
to house the unwed mothers and to indoctrinate the
unwanted children they left behind.
When Germans didn't provide enough offspring
despised Germany that, upon her death,
she vowed to send the documents to her
son, a convert to Judaism who now lives
in Israel.
Seeing Germans embrace the film
changed her mind: Now the documents
are willed to the new Jewish Museum in
Berlin. "I gave my consent for the book
and the film because I wanted to create a
memorial to Felice," Wust has said.
❑
Aimee and Jaguar" opens today at
the Main Art Theatre.
(the stigma against illegitimacy was too strong), hun-
dreds of thousands of blond children were kidnapped
from Poland or snatched from single mothers in
occupied Norway.
The Norwegian children, who were often aban-
doned to sadistic orphanages after the war, now have
a lawsuit pending against their government, the doc-
umentary reveals. And while the German children
fared better, falsified documents have made it impos-
sible for many to find their birth parents.
For all the Lebensborn, the stigma is still so strong
that it was difficult to persuade people to speak on
camera, says producer-director Rob Blumenstein.
Helga, a dark-headed woman with soulful eyes,
offers a due as to why: "For the first four years of my
life, I was a member of the SS." ❑
Hitler's Perfect Children airs on History's
Mysteries 8-9 p.m. Monday, Dec. 13, on the
History Channel.