A Love Story Between a German Housewife and a Jewish Journalist

Max Färberböck's adaptation of Erica Fischer's book 'Aimée & Jaguar' seems to be a conceptual film adaptation which means that the core of the story remained more or less the same although there are some significant changes in certain aspects of the original story. The film director focused more on the relationship between two lesbian females as such, satisfying more his own private male fantasies regarding such a relationship (see especially the passionate, almost pornographic film scene from the 62nd to the 65th minute of the film!) than translating Fischer's book about the German woman named Lilly (Elisabeth Wust, with nickname Aimée) and the Jewish woman named Felice Schragenheim (with the nickname Jaguar) into the film medium. Thus, he excluded many elements from the book and revealed that his inventions in the film had the aim to reduce the tragic dimension of the Jewish journalist's fate and to build a partly problematic sentimental end of the film with the German heroine confessing 1997 in the manner of a documentary film style that after Felice she did not have any lovers - contrary to the fact from Fischer's book about her second marriage after the war.

The director excluded rightly some elements from Fischer's book that show inconsistency and miss the chance to balance the German housewife's one-sided views on the whole love affair. One of the biggest problems remains the dilemma that Ms. Elenai Predski-Kramer, a witness of the time, Ms. Esther Dischereit and Ms. Katharina Sperber have been referring to: Is Lilly (Aimée) to be praised as a heroine for harboring a Jewish friend from the Nazis or is she rather to blame for possible handling her lover indirectly to the Gestapo (nobody knows who gave the Nazi police Felice's photo) and then sending her indirectly to death after visiting her in the concentration camp Theresienstadt in September 1944? Supposedly, Lilly wanted to know whether Felice was unfaithful to her there in the concentration camp and possibly wanted indirectly to prevent others from becoming Felice's lovers? Was not this visit (to bring her warm clothes) more an expression of narcissism than of wisdom and readiness to save the lover's life - especially if one knew that such visits regularly resulted in quicker executions.

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