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.