Disclaimer: This transcript is automatically generated and therefore may have missing parts or spelling errors.

Maartje (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we are discussing Aimée and Jaguar, which came out in 1999 and was directed by Max Färberböck and written by Max Färberböck, Erica Fischer and Ronald Munro. It was based on a 1994 book, Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943, by Erica Fischer, and it’s a true story of two German women, Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim, who fell in love in Nazi Germany only to be separated by the Holocaust. This movie is available on YouTube — someone was nice enough to upload it for us. What did you think of this movie? And the book.

Sam (00:56)
Yes, so I did read the book. I thought it was a novel at first, and where I kind of ended up with it is that I think it’s mostly a historical book, but there are places that are somewhat fictionalised. I don’t really know. But it contained a lot of the letters that these women wrote to each other, including — Aimée wrote a lot of diary entries after Jaguar was gone and intended to send these as letters, but they never ended up being sent. So we have a lot of this primary source documentation, which is really nice, and we get to see how these women perceived their own relationship. Because I remember a couple of weeks ago when we were talking to Professor Sam about queer women in Nazi Germany, he was talking about how lots of the times as a historian you have to put the pieces together based on police reports, or based on what their neighbours said about them, or based on these outsider perspectives that may not have had much to do — or anything to do — with how these women perceived their own lives and their own relationships. So it was really lovely to get that in the book, to have all that pulled together. I thought it was nice to see this love story that may not have come down to us through history, or at least may not have been made famous or available for people to see if the book hadn’t been written and the movie hadn’t been made. And yeah, I think that the movie is a fair adaptation of the book, and I enjoyed seeing a story about lesbians in World War Two because that’s something we haven’t seen much of. How about you?

Maartje (02:24)
I watched it fairly late for this podcast. I watched it yesterday and I maybe wasn’t completely in the mood for a movie about a lot of feelings. There are a lot of feelings in this movie. It is German, by the way. And it’s well acted. I think it’s a good movie, but I’m at the moment not the very best judge of it because I didn’t feel like watching it — you know how they go sometimes. But it’s really interesting, like you said, to see a different kind of story on the screen again. I think it’s fairly relatable in a way, not because it’s a lesbian story, but just because these people are so incredibly human and they make very human mistakes. And I think it’s really interesting to see that on screen and then also to get to see some resistance in a way that’s very human and also very dangerous, but also almost a little bit ordinary. I don’t want to say that like — because what they were doing was not ordinary — but it felt so like they were just going about their lives and just also happened to be doing some resisting. I enjoyed that about it. So yeah. Kind of mixed feelings, but that’s just because I wasn’t in a mood for a feelings movie.

Sam (03:41)
It’s quite a nice little love story, but it is a tearjerker. So if you want to watch a romantic drama, then you might enjoy this one.

Maartje (03:50)
It is quite intimate, and I was watching it with my curtains open because I live in the Netherlands and we never close our curtains until late at night. And it’s quite intimate — not even in a physical way, but just — I don’t know. It just felt so intimate that I felt like I had to close my curtains. So yeah.

Sam (04:10)
Yeah, and it’s interesting — there’s not explicit nudity or anything, but there really is this intense feeling between these two women that feels intimate, I think.

Maartje (04:19)
Yes. That’s exactly it. So yeah, interesting, interesting. Are you ready to get into the plot?

Sam (04:25)
Yes, let’s do it.

Maartje (04:26)
Let’s get into the plot.

Maartje (04:36)
The movie opens in 1997. We see an old woman — we find out her name is Lilly. She’s played as an older woman by Inga Keller, as she moves into a retirement home and encounters her old friend from the 1940s, Ilse, played by Kira Ladek as an older woman. They clearly have a history and we will find out what that is in a minute.

Sam (05:00)
Yeah, I never mind when these movies do the thing where they bookend it with the older versions of themselves. I feel like it’s quite common, because obviously there was this era in the late nineties, early two thousands where people making World War Two movies really picked up steam. And I think that when we see movies bookended in this way, it’s kind of like the Saving Private Ryan thing — we know these people who lived through World War Two as older people, so it just makes sense to portray them as looking back at their lives. I thought this worked because in real life, real Lilly kind of went about her life and this story went untold for many years after the war. And then it wasn’t until she was an old woman that she finally got to share what had happened and all of these letters and mementos and things that she had kept from this brief relationship that she had had.

Maartje (05:48)
Yes, and I also think — at least for me, I don’t know what it was like for you — but it didn’t feel like it spoiled the ending because I didn’t know anything about these two women yet. So maybe you did because you read the book. But for me I just was like, alright, so these two are the two main characters — and they’re not, really. But I thought kind of that they were, which I think as a movie watcher is what you’re supposed to think. But I guess if you’ve read the book then you know that one of them is the main character, but the other one is not.

Sam (06:23)
Yeah, you’ve got to think — if they’re making a love story movie about lesbians during the Holocaust, it probably doesn’t have a happy ending.

Maartje (06:31)
No, that’s fair. But at the same time maybe I just wanted to be a little bit naive and I was like, maybe they’ll survive. Well, to be fair, I guess Ilse is also a lesbian and she did survive.

Sam (06:46)
Crucially she is not Jewish. So.

Maartje (06:48)
Very crucial. Extremely crucial. Yes.

Sam (06:52)
So we flip back to November of 1943. A young Ilse, played by Johanna Wokalek, narrates as she goes on a date with a beautiful young woman named Felice Schragenheim, played by Maria Schrader. They spot Ilse’s employer, a woman named Lilly Wust, played by Juliane Köhler, on a date with a man who is not her husband, and they are very — teehee, what’s the goss about this? Despite the air of frivolity, the night ends on a serious note when Felice is noticed not wearing the Star of David on her jacket, and that’s when we find out that she is Jewish.

Maartje (07:25)
Yeah. I didn’t like Felice in the beginning. I was like, she’s so annoying — she’s just kind of gossiping about everybody and being sort of teehee about it all. But that does change for me later on in the movie, which is good, because you kind of want to root for these people and if you don’t, then what’s the point?

Sam (07:44)
Right. In real life, Ilse’s name was Inge, and she was twenty-one when her obligatory year of domestic service came due — and that’s when she went to work for Lilly. So this was a policy implemented by the Nazis in 1938. They figured if they made all women between — I don’t remember what the two ages were, but I think the upper age was twenty-five — if they made all these young women do a year of either domestic or agricultural service, they’d really come to look forward to and enjoy the domestic labours that lie ahead of them as wives and mothers. So she has to do her year. She’s none too pleased about it because she’s got other things to do, as we’ll discover. But she’d been on the hunt for an employer who was not openly a Nazi supporter, which was apparently a really difficult thing. She had been to a few different houses and the person would open the door with a Heil Hitler and she would be like, well, I can’t work here. And this is because she spent much of her time helping out her Jewish friends. Because though she was not Jewish herself, as a lesbian she tended to operate a little bit on the fringes of society. And as we talked about in our Professor Sam episode, quite often these people would end up joining resistance networks out of kind of necessity. And so she would help her Jewish friends find shelter, food rations, medicines, ID papers, track down escape possibilities, that kind of thing. And as we will learn, Felice — who’s one of our main characters — was also part of this resistance network. And meanwhile, on the flip side of this, Lilly was eligible to have domestic help in the first place because she had birthed four sons. And therefore she had received the bronze Mother Cross Award. And once you had four sons, you were eligible to get extra help around the house — it was like a little perk offered by the government to reward you for having so many good Aryan children.

Maartje (09:31)
Not to beg on mothers, but the Mother Cross Award gives me the freaking creeps. Just the idea of it — give us children and we shall give you an award — is scary.

Sam (09:43)
Yeah. Absolutely. And the more children you had, the more — it was like a competition. Can you have five children? Can you have eight? Can you have ten? It was like a whole thing.

Maartje (09:53)
No. Jesus.

I really enjoyed about this movie that we get to see a lot of cultural Germany — like you see all the buildings and you see people going out for drinks and it’s all very fabulous. It sets the scene really nicely and it starts kind of innocent. And I don’t know what I thought Germany would have looked like. I guess I’d seen pictures and stuff of it, but it feels kind of glamorous. Is it set in Berlin? I don’t remember. It is, right? Yeah. And it does really look like the cultural centre of Europe at that point. I think the movie did a really great job. The quality of the movie on YouTube is not great, but you can see sort of the glamour, and it’s kind of manifested I think in Felice, because she looks like the height of glamour too, and I enjoyed that.

Sam (10:48)
Yes, she’s a very good-looking woman. She’s very well put together, very glamorous.

Maartje (10:53)
Good-looking, but not in a typical way, I find. I find she looks classy but at the same time kind of different. I’m not sure how to put it into words, but she’s not like your standard Hollywood beautiful kind of thing.

Sam (11:10)
Right. She’s very striking, but maybe not traditional beauty. Yeah.

Maartje (11:14)
Yeah.

Sam (11:15)
I think it’s interesting too, because a lot of people will imagine the experiences of Jewish people in Germany and Nazi-occupied countries from the lens of Anne Frank, where she and her family hid in an attic for a couple of years. And that’s not what we’re seeing in this movie. We are seeing this group of young women who are kind of hiding in the open — hiding in plain sight, pretending that they are not Jewish and living under false identities. And in Felice’s case, working at a Nazi newspaper, so she’s right under their noses. And so they are in hiding, but they’re out on the street, they are going to the cinema — as you see in this scene. They are kind of living their lives, but at the same time they’re in extreme danger all the time.

Maartje (12:00)
Meanwhile she kind of casually pays off this woman who sees her not wearing her Star of David. At that moment in the movie it’s fairly early on and you’re like, wait a second — they are acting very cavalier about the whole thing. But then this happens and you’re like, wait, they’re actually in danger.

Sam (12:21)
Yeah. We just mentioned Lilly having her four sons. Her youngest son was actually the result of an affair — it was not her husband’s baby. He was a soldier, but he had some kind of administrative job so he was not stationed at the front, and then later on in the war he ended up going to the front, so he was away for longer and longer periods of time. So she was having all these affairs. And I just think it’s very interesting that — you know, for all of this, wife and motherhood and these institutions are so important and this family structure is so important — the Nazis were like, it’s more important to us that you punch out a bunch of sons. We don’t really care if it’s with your husband or not. Just crank them out.

Maartje (13:03)
She’s very blonde and very Aryan-looking, I guess.

Sam (13:06)
Yes. Exactly.

Maartje (13:08)
But what made me laugh is how absolutely wildly she screams at her children to behave.

Sam (13:15)
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like she was really on top of things motherhood-wise. I think the way it was described in the book was that, you know, you have your first kid and you’re happy and you have your second kid and you’re like, this is pretty good — and then one of her pregnancies ended up being really, really dangerous. She had some significant health issues and she didn’t want any more kids, and then her husband kind of coerced her into it in a way that she was not really appreciative of, and then of course she had this fourth kid via an affair. So I don’t know that it was in her plans to have four children necessarily. Not everyone’s meant to be a mum.

Maartje (13:51)
No. I get a real going-along-with-the-vibe kind of vibe from her, especially in the beginning. She’s like, got to be a good person, got to do what I’m told.

Sam (14:02)
She’s such a good example of one of these deeply incurious people — like so many Germans were — who were like, well, we go along to get along. My life is not measurably affected and so I simply will not make waves and I won’t ask questions and I won’t upset my comfortable life.

Maartje (14:18)
Yes. It gives it a whole other dimension to have her go on this journey of self-discovery with Felice. So Felice works under a false name at a Nazi newspaper — they respect her and they trust her, and she uses her access to pass information to the resistance. And at the same time she’s writing love poems in her spare time. She goes to visit her grandmother, who urges Ilse from before to look after Felice because she’s not cautious enough in the current antisemitic atmosphere. She’s kind of living life to the fullest.

Sam (14:55)
Yes. This is 1943. The previous year — November of 1942 — there was a new SS sheriff in town, so to speak, in Berlin: Alois Brunner. He was the personal secretary to Adolf Eichmann, who we’ve talked about before as the sort of bureaucrat behind the Holocaust. And he was responsible for sending over a hundred thousand European Jews to concentration camps. He turned up in Berlin in November of 1942, and his goal was to rid Berlin of its remaining Jewish population. He had already done it in Vienna, so he’s coming here to work his questionable magic. And during his three months in Berlin, he deported fifty-six thousand Jewish people. So obviously this is a time when people are just being pulled off the street. It’s very dangerous. Felice’s grandmother was actually taken in the summer of 1942, I believe, in real life. And Felice had then received her own deportation order shortly thereafter. And that was when she went into hiding. She left her old identity behind and changed her last name to Schrader, I believe. And that’s when she took up this job at this Nazi newspaper and tried to essentially pass as Aryan. And then the following winter — in February of 1943, right after the defeat at Stalingrad — the Germans did not take that well and they blamed the Jewish people for that defeat. And then they started a fresh round of deportations. They called it Operation Factory and they essentially rounded up all remaining Jewish people from their places of work. And Goebbels had promised that there would be no Jewish people left in Berlin by the time Hitler’s birthday came on April twentieth. And so around this time Felice left Berlin for a little while to hide out in the mountains, and she and Lilly ended up exchanging letters with one another at that time.

Maartje (16:37)
Ooh, I can’t wait to hear some of that later. But also — if you want to learn more about Eichmann, we talk about him in our Walking with the Enemy episode.

Sam (16:47)
Felice sends a love poem to Lilly under a pen name — Jaguar. So that’s where the title of the movie comes from. Lilly is very tickled about this. We get a glimpse into her unsatisfying home life with her husband away at the front and her four rambunctious young children running around. As we said, she’s had a few lovers since her husband has been away, but none of them have really lit the spark. And then she gets this beautiful love poem addressed to her out of nowhere, and she’s very excited about it. A couple of weeks ago, as we’ve said before, we had Professor Samuel Clowes Huneke on to talk about queer women in Nazi Germany. So you should definitely check that episode out. We talked a lot about what life was like for queer women under the Nazi regime, and there was no specific law outlawing being a lesbian in the way that there was with gay men. But these women sort of lived in this nebulous legal grey area where their neighbours would denounce them for being lesbians, and then that would put them on the radar of the Gestapo, and then they would be harassed and surveilled to the point where you would step one foot out of line and find yourself getting picked up by the police. And so this is kind of the world that Felice and her friends would have lived in — even if they weren’t Jewish, being a lesbian would have put a target on their backs anyway. But in terms of Lilly, because she is a housewife and because she has these four children, it offers her a certain layer of insulation — even if people knew that she was a lesbian, because she was still fulfilling this social duty as wife and mother, it would not have been as big of a deal. She was not someone who lived on the fringes of society, so she really got away with an extraordinary amount.

Maartje (18:30)
I also wonder if it’s almost easier in a way for women, because women can be sort of friendlier with each other than men would have been able to be — publicly anyway. And obviously you said there was no law, so they had sort of these little advantages maybe that men didn’t have.

Sam (18:52)
Yeah, which is interesting because the whole concept of this is rooted in misogyny, right? Because it’s like women who engage in lesbian behaviour can still be the ideal Nazi wife and have a bunch of Nazi children. And because she is a woman in Nazi Germany, she has way fewer venues to be independent and to live independently. So she is probably going to have to marry a man and she’s probably going to have a bunch of children. Whereas if you’re a gay man, you’re much more able to live independently — you can pursue alternative lifestyles in a way that women are not free to do.

Maartje (19:28)
Yes. I thought it was funny that at this point in the movie, Lilly kind of assumes — logically, I guess — that this letter is from a man, because she’s never thought about women — at least to our knowledge as we’re watching the movie — in that way. And Ilse is there, I think, when she reads it, when she gets it. And that’s when Ilse in turn gets kind of jealous and she gets upset with Felice — because first of all she likes Felice, they’ve been out on a date together. And because Lilly is the wife of a Nazi who has previously stated that she can quote-unquote smell Jews, and Felice doesn’t really care about any of it. She kind of enjoys it and sees it as a challenge.

Sam (20:14)
Yeah, I think there’s some debate over how much of a hardcore Nazi Lilly was. I get the impression that because she was married to a Nazi, she was very much one of those people who would hear a thing on the propaganda state radio and be like, yeah, that sounds right — anyway — and just go on with her day. She didn’t really ask questions. She was probably one of those people who would have considered themselves not political, even though as we’ve discussed before, there’s not really any such thing. So she may well have said some questionable things about Jewish people.

Maartje (20:45)
I think you said it pretty well earlier when you said she was deeply incurious and also very, very naive.

Sam (20:53)
Yeah, definitely naive for sure. Lilly’s man friend, a guy named Ernst Biermosel, played by Rüdiger Hacker, comes by for a little tryst, but her parents turn up — it’s mega awkward. Her parents are played by Klaus Manchen and Sarah Kamp, and her father, not knowing that Ernst is there in the other room, speaks out against Germany’s ability to win the war. And this is from real life too. Lilly’s parents did not approve of her marrying Gunther — her husband. Her parents did not approve of the marriage, and both of them were a bit critical of Hitler. So her father brings this up in the movie and then Ernst rolls up from the other room and he’s like, how dare you speak out against Hitler? And her dad is like, number one, why are you in my daughter’s room? So anyway, they have this little spat and Ernst threatens to report him, and Lilly is not very pleased about this, so they end up breaking up.

Maartje (21:48)
It’s also I think the first time that her perception of other German men kind of shatters a little bit. She’s like, how can you say that? I think as we’ve seen before, defeatism is punishable by death even. So I think her parents got lucky in that he didn’t actually report them. But yeah — Lilly just made me roll my eyes so often. Woman, come on, wake up.

Sam (22:16)
Yeah, she lives in a very small, privileged world, that’s for sure.

Maartje (22:21)
Yes. At a Berlin hotel bar, Felice is fending off male attention and buying food stamps in a hotel bathroom. She’s there with her friends — Ilse, Clara, played by Heike Makatch, and Lotte, played by Elisabeth Degen. Lilly also shows up, upset over her evening with Ernst, and she encounters the group. They all return to her place and then Felice starts to fall for Lilly a little bit.

Sam (22:48)
I wanted to mention the part where Felice gives Lilly an apple, because that also happened in real life according to the book. And that was the moment where Lilly started to — I don’t know if I would say fall in love with her, but Lilly was kind of tickled by the gesture. And then they have a little conversation in the film where I think Felice sort of seeds an opening, because Lilly’s talking about these affairs that she’s had with all these men, and she says, you have to live your life now — it’s very important. And of course they are living in this war-torn city during World War Two.

Maartje (23:22)
Yes. When they’re all meeting up together, Lilly is officially watching her children but she just leaves them in the zoo.

Sam (23:30)
Yeah, they’re at the zoo. Lilly’s like, it’s fine — the oldest one’s seven, he can look after the little ones. It is a different time.

Maartje (23:41)
There you go.

Sam (23:42)
Ilse and Felice argue about Felice’s feelings for Lilly, because Ilse is like, girl, what are you doing? And Ilse’s father — he’s overhearing them because he’s the one who’s been providing Felice with a place to live and sort of a hiding place. And he overhears this conversation and he throws her out because he’s found out she’s a lesbian.

Maartje (24:03)
This kind of confused me a little bit because does he not know his own daughter is also a lesbian?

Sam (24:10)
I don’t know, man. He seems not to. Or — I don’t know. It’s interesting to me that he’s a tolerant enough man that he is literally hiding a Jewish woman in his house, but he’s like, I can allow Judaism but I draw the line at lady love.

Maartje (24:24)
Yes. Felice and her friends take pin-up shots for soldiers in exchange for passports so that they can leave Berlin. Very spicy photographs. And as they are leaving the studio, Lotte — one of the friends — is stopped by the police, who are asking her for her papers, and she doesn’t have them and she ends up getting shot. This was so sudden — I was like, wait, hold on, this is too quickly, hang on. And the Gestapo find a photograph on her body that includes Felice. So they’re having a not very good time. And they also have to keep walking away after their friend is being shot because they can’t risk also being caught, which was heartbreaking.

Sam (25:11)
Yeah. That was really brutal. And yeah, they’re planting this little seed here — the Gestapo finds this photograph that has Felice in it and they’re like, we’re going to find this woman. Ultimately in real life we don’t really know how the Gestapo found Felice in the end, so the movie is just taking some artistic licence here, but I don’t mind it. Gunther — Lilly’s husband — returns home from the front. And during a New Year’s party, Lilly and Felice have a really intense conversation, after which Felice kisses her. Lilly initially rejects her advances, but then goes after her. And during this party as well, Gunther makes out with Ilse. And I think that Gunther for a really long time was just really willing to turn a blind eye to his wife effectively hosting these lesbian parties, because he would come home and be like, Lilly is so much happier than she used to be, Lilly has all these young attractive friends over who are nice to me, etcetera, etcetera.

Maartje (26:04)
Excuse me, you have to call him Gunther.

Sam (26:07)
No, sorry. Sorry. Gunther — you’re right, I should call him that.

Maartje (26:11)
I hate this man with a passion so much.

Sam (26:15)
Yeah, he kind of sucks, right?

Maartje (26:16)
Gunther has made out with Ilse at the party, so that’s weird. And he’s very surprised when Lilly isn’t very upset about it. She’s like, yes, that’s fine, go on then. And he returns to the front and that’s when Felice comes over. And this is when she and Lilly sleep together, and this is the very intimate scene that I was talking about earlier when I was watching it and felt like I had to close my curtains.

Sam (26:43)
Yes, you really almost feel like you’re intruding on a moment.

Maartje (26:47)
Yes, because Lilly has never been with a woman — I don’t think — and it’s like Felice being really kind of sweet and helping her discover who she is almost. Which felt way too intimate to be watching with the curtains open.

Sam (27:05)
That’s fair. I will say I laughed during the scene where Gunther comes into the kitchen in the morning and he knows that Lilly saw him making out with Ilse, who is their maid, and he comes in and he’s going on and on about how a man has urges and a man sometimes can’t resist those urges and you don’t understand what it’s like to have urges, and she’s like — lol. Anyway. How about you leave so I can make up with my girlfriend?

Maartje (27:32)
Yes. It is kind of a train wreck waiting to happen though. You can see it coming from a mile away.

Sam (27:39)
Yes. Felice’s grandmother is taken away — they just moved it a little bit later in the movie. And so Felice moves in with Lilly, and they write letters to one another during brief periods when they are apart. And I love a little epistolary moment in a film. You know, I love to find out what these people are thinking on the inside.

Maartje (27:56)
Yeah, there is a lot of thoughts and feelings in general in this movie. After Lilly’s birthday — the birthday’s kind of weird, can I just say?

Sam (28:07)
Yeah, we should talk about — I know I sort of glossed over it in the notes — but we should talk about Lilly’s birthday because they have this big party for her and she shows up dressed to the absolute nines in this intense dress and everything. And then she sees Ilse and Felice having a little drunken make-out session and she’s kind of mad about it. And then later on in the evening she makes a move on Felice, but Felice is kind of drunk and she’s like, no, I don’t want to. And so Lilly’s kind of mad about that as well. And they have kind of a little spat about it, but it’s weird because it almost has this strange, dreamlike quality to it.

Maartje (28:39)
Yeah, I also just wondered at this point in the movie — does Felice care less about Lilly than Lilly does about Felice? But also for Lilly, this is her first relationship where she feels seen for who she is rather than who society expects her to be, almost. So I guess that’s really sort of heavy if you don’t see that person who makes you feel so seen — so carelessly kissing someone else.

Sam (29:07)
Yeah, and I think that Felice comes from a circle where like all of those friends have slept together, right? So they’re very accustomed to — I mean, even when she was sort of seeing Ilse, she was writing these love letters to Lilly. I think she’s just very accustomed to that kind of style of living. They’re young, they’re trying to get what they can while they can get it in this very dangerous atmosphere that they live in. And meanwhile Lilly’s very accustomed to serial monogamy, right? You have your husband, or when you meet your one true love then that’s it and you don’t have eyes for anyone else.

Maartje (29:42)
Yeah, I guess their lifestyle was a lot more open than Lilly’s — live in the moment, be happy, be free kind of thing.

Sam (29:50)
Yeah.

Maartje (29:51)
So after Lilly’s birthday, after that weird moment, we hear that the Allies have invaded Normandy. That’s when Gunther returns and discovers Lilly in bed with Felice. So good times are no longer being had. He’s very upset, by the way, and Lilly asks him for a divorce — kind of, well, we’ll just get the divorce in, please. And not really understanding the potential repercussions that will have for her friends if the courts become involved in her life.

Sam (30:19)
Yeah, exactly. You would say someone who had some worldliness would understand at this point that all of her friends are not only lesbians but many of them are Jewish. But she hasn’t twigged to that and no one has told her. And a lot of these women are also, you know, tangentially or even directly related to the resistance. And so they do not want the cops involved, they don’t want scrutiny, they don’t want any of that. And Lilly doesn’t really seem to understand this. And so she comes in the house and she’s like, I asked him for a divorce. And everyone’s like, you did what? You know? You have this cushy safe setup here. Why would you jeopardise that for yourself and for all of us?

Maartje (30:59)
Yeah, she lived such a sheltered life that she just doesn’t see it. But I also think it’s a little bit on her friends and on Felice’s part that they could have, you know, reminded her that she probably shouldn’t be talking about them too much and bringing attention to her life. Like I feel kind of bad.

Sam (31:22)
Well, I think the difficult part is that all of Felice’s friends viewed Lilly as the Nazi’s wife. And so they didn’t want her to know that any of them were Jewish, that any of them were involved with the resistance, so they were very careful not to let her in on their activities.

Maartje (31:42)
And I also very much got the vibe that Felice — for what it’s worth — just kind of thought, well, she would never do that. No one in her right mind would say something like that to their husband and jeopardise everything like that. I don’t think it even occurred to them really that Lilly was going to do that.

Sam (32:03)
Yeah. So after this Felice leaves for a few days so she can lie low, and all of her friends stop visiting Lilly as well. And it’s around this time the 20 July assassination attempt on Hitler happens — and you can hear us talk more about that in our Valkyrie episode, the Tom Cruise Buttpad movie. The assassination attempt on Hitler happens and Felice returns to Lilly. There’s a moment where it kind of feels like the war might be over or ending, and so Felice goes back to her.

Maartje (32:32)
And this is so heartbreaking again, because as she’s coming into the house the radio’s playing and you can hear Hitler say how he survived, and her face just falls completely. It’s so heartbreaking.

Sam (32:46)
Yeah.

Maartje (32:47)
Lilly at this point sends her older children to safety in the countryside as air raids on Berlin intensify. We’ve been seeing air raids since the beginning of the movie, more or less, but they’re getting more and more serious, and for some reason Lilly is kind of so depressed that she doesn’t even move when the air raid sirens go off. She just stays in her house and hopes for the best. And this is when Felice and her Jewish friends decide that it’s time to get out of Berlin because they’re in more and more danger. But when Felice admits to Lilly that she’s Jewish after they have an argument, she finds that she doesn’t want to leave her. So she was all set to go on a train out of Berlin and then she decides — I have to stay with this woman that I apparently love.

Sam (33:36)
Yeah, it’s interesting because there were some things in motion to help Felice get out of the country before this. She had a sister who lived in England and a stepmother who lived in Palestine. I believe she also had an uncle who lived in the US, and all of these people were trying to go through the correct political channels to get her a visa and vouch for her. And then it just kept falling through. Then the Nazis started to make it more and more difficult, and at a certain point they stopped allowing Jewish people to emigrate altogether. And so this had finally fallen through the cracks. And that’s when she got together with her friends and she was like, we’re going to try and get out. And then she ended up staying in Berlin, and we don’t 100% know why. Part of it probably is that she had this relationship with Lilly, but we don’t really know for sure, unfortunately, because she did not survive the war.

Maartje (34:29)
Spoilers.

Sam (34:30)
Yeah. It’s the summer of 1944. Lilly and Felice enjoy a brief period of happiness wherein Lilly’s parents, though bewildered, offer a sort of acceptance. And I did enjoy that little scene. And the two of them go swimming together and they take pictures of one another with Felice’s camera because she wants to be a photojournalist. And these pictures survive and they are very lovely. So if you want to go online and have a look at them, I’m sure we can put a link to some of them on the website.

Maartje (34:57)
Or put them on the website if they’re free to put on websites.

Sam (35:02)
Yes.

Maartje (35:02)
When they get home from their outing — which was indeed very cute — the Gestapo are there, which is heartbreaking. I’ve said heartbreaking about a million times but it’s just because it is, okay? And they drag Felice away, leaving Lilly to grieve. They really do not gently bring her out — they kick her and I think the downstairs neighbours try to hide her and then they find her anyway and drag her out. And sometime later Lilly is out with Ilse and she explains that she has her kids back but that Gunther is dead. She says that she went to visit Felice at Theresienstadt — you can see Ilse looking at her like she’s mental — and I’m sure you have a better way of putting this than me, Sam, so go ahead, what did you think about this.

Sam (35:57)
Yeah, so in real life Lilly visited Felice at this sort of holding camp in Berlin where she was initially taken. And she went there almost every day — she would bring her food. They had a friendly guard who would turn a blind eye so they could have little conversations and that kind of thing. And there was a Nazi who worked there who was unhappy that this was happening. And so Felice was soon sent to Theresienstadt. We don’t know if this was because of Lilly’s visits — it’s possible she would have been sent there anyway. But Theresienstadt was kind of a temporary camp that a lot of people ended up in on their way to somewhere else, somewhere worse — in Felice’s case, Auschwitz ultimately. And while she was at Theresienstadt she was doing all kinds of labour. There was a brief period where she had scarlet fever and she ended up in the hospital, and that probably prolonged her life because she was actually getting care for a little while. She was hopeful that she would be allowed to stay in the hospital. Lilly decided she was going to visit her in Theresienstadt, and nobody visited people in the concentration camps — that was simply not done. And Lilly had to get a special travel permit. When she got there, she had to get someone to take her there. She basically blagged her way in to see the commandant. And when she got there, the commandant was furious — he was like, no, you can’t see one of our inmates, what are you doing here? And there is some thought that this put a target on Felice’s back and resulted in her being deported to Auschwitz. Like I said, we don’t have historical documentation. We don’t know if that’s true, but it is a possibility that Lilly constantly drawing attention to Felice in this way was not good for her. And I’ve referred to this in my notes as white lady obliviousness, which is not unlike the time when she asked for the divorce — she’s kind of ignorant of the way the world works.

Maartje (37:49)
Yes, but there’s just a strange kind of confidence in there that she can just do whatever she pleases and it’ll be okay in her mind.

Sam (38:00)
Well, and this strange confidence was not always a bad thing either, because like at the end of the war — in the book, when the Russians are coming into Berlin — she was very much going up to Russian soldiers, who had quite a reputation — as we have probably discussed before — for how they treated German women. And then she would go straight up to them and be like, my sons don’t have anything to eat, we need somewhere safe to sleep, make this happen, kind of thing. And so she ended up finding food and shelter for her children, as well as for the three Jewish women that she ended up hiding in her attic towards the end of the war. So sometimes this wild white-lady Karen-ness worked out in her favour.

Maartje (38:40)
Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. Is it naivety? Is it just confidence? Is it devil-may-care behaviour? Who knows? But it worked in her favour, I guess.

Sam (38:49)
It did. And I actually have an excerpt from the diary entries that Lilly wrote in the closing months of the war — this is during the Battle of Berlin when the Germans are making their last stand. And these were diary entries, but she addressed them to Felice because she intended for Felice to read them at some point. And so I’ll just read this here.

“From here we watch our proud soldiers of the Wehrmacht who have dug themselves in next to the streetcar shelter. We feel sorry for the poor fellows after all. Did you know that the words ‘Jews are prohibited from sitting on the benches’ were painted on the wall of the shelter? I never noticed it when we were sitting there. All places of work are shut down, the streetcars and subways aren’t running, all streets are closed off, almost all the shops are closed. Just splendid, this war. Heaven help us. And in two weeks there will be nothing at all left to eat, unless some fantastic miracle should occur. Will we survive conquest and hunger? Pray for us, my one and only. Perhaps this diary will be all that is left of my great love for you. Dear God, let us find one another again. Let us forget together what we have suffered. Dear God, I will love you, Felice Schragenheim, until I die.”

Maartje (40:02)
The fact that she’s never seen the writing on the bench — or the wall, whatever it was — it’s kind of telling, isn’t it?

Sam (40:10)
Yeah, I chose that entry because you do get to see that white lady obliviousness in there for sure.

Maartje (40:16)
Like she’d been with Felice and she’d known at this point that she was Jewish. How can you not have seen any of that?

Sam (40:25)
Yeah. Easy to miss stuff when you’re not the one being persecuted, I suppose.

Maartje (40:30)
Right. And I feel like it’s also indicative of some of the German population that was just like — if I look the other way then it’s not there. Kind of like if I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

Sam (40:45)
Right.

Maartje (40:45)
Huh. That’s wild.

Sam (40:47)
We flash forward again to 1997. The older version of Lilly admits to Ilse that she never stopped loving Felice. Ilse doesn’t hold her responsible any longer for whatever damage visiting Theresienstadt might have done to Felice. The two ladies amiably walk off together, any trace of old jealousies and conflicts buried.

Maartje (41:10)
This made me laugh. Ilse was just like, yeah — if I’ve loved and I’ve completely loved, I’ve been with a lot of people. It’s fine.

Sam (41:19)
Yes. I did love old Ilse. She was pretty feisty. I did think — in the book it was sort of curious to me that after the war Felice’s friends pretty much abandoned Lilly, you know — they didn’t hang around. And there was this odd thing where Felice had some goods — a fur coat, some clothes, some other odds and ends that she was getting people to hide for her while she in turn was in hiding. And her intent was to pick it up again after the war. And obviously she did not survive. And Lilly sort of went on this hunt to try and get all Felice’s stuff back — she was constantly writing letters, being like, I want the fur coat, I want the this, I want the that. She even wrote to Felice’s sister to discuss Felice’s inheritance, and Felice’s sister was like, I don’t care, whoever has the fur coat right now can keep it. And it’s just sort of this odd behaviour — kind of in line with, at the end of the war, a lot of German people were trying to acquire Jewish goods, using it as an opportunity to get nice stuff cheap, which is sort of grim. This is not to say that was Lilly’s goal or intention — she may just have wanted to have things that belonged to Felice — but it is a kind of odd thing that the other people who were close to Felice who survived didn’t really want to have anything to do with her, and then she was also having this strange behaviour around Felice’s inheritance.

Maartje (42:49)
Yeah, I do wonder — Felice’s friends probably knew, but the other people — Lilly was nobody to them, I guess. And then there’s also the question of whether Felice’s family and her non-lesbian friends, if she had any — did they accept her for who she was in the first place?

Sam (43:12)
Yeah. And I think it’s hard because we only have whatever letters that Felice sent to Lilly that survive — which to be fair is quite a few of them. Lilly kept all that stuff. But aside from that, we only have Lilly’s side of the story, so of course the account is flavoured from her point of view.

Maartje (43:32)
So we flash back to — I guess happier times in 1943 for a brief moment — where Felice, Lilly, and their friends are sitting around a table and they’re talking and laughing, and Felice says about love: “I don’t want forever, I want now.” And Lilly takes a photograph of her, preserving that now for posterity.

Sam (43:55)
Yeah, I liked that little scene. It made everything that came before a little bit more poignant — because you know how it ends.

Maartje (44:01)
Does the photo exist still?

Sam (44:04)
It might. Felice had a camera and she toted it around with her, so there are quite a lot of existing photos.

Maartje (44:10)
That’s cool that they survived. Did Lilly keep her camera then?

Sam (44:15)
Yes, I believe so. Lilly had it. I guess they came home from their beach day and Felice was taken away and she didn’t take any of her stuff with her, so. And I believe I read something about how Lilly didn’t get the film developed until after the war. So it just — yeah.

Maartje (44:34)
Ooh yeah. Captured there, yeah.

Sam (44:36)
Yeah. There are some end cards that say: after the war, Lilly waited in vain for Felice for many years. The exact circumstances of Felice’s death are unknown. She probably died during one of the notorious death marches. Today — in the spring of 1999 — eighty-five-year-old Lilly Wust lives in Berlin.

Maartje (44:53)
She got to be an old lady. It feels to me like people who survived the war just get really old for some reason.

Sam (45:01)
Yeah, I suppose eating their Wheaties.

Maartje (45:03)
Anyway, that’s the end of the movie. It was a ride. I thought it was quite intense. We do also have some notes.

Sam (45:19)
Yeah. So this is a postscript about Lilly. Lilly subsequently took in three Jewish women in early 1945 and hid them for the remainder of the war, for which she was later recognised as Righteous Among Nations — a title that is bestowed upon people who assisted Jewish people during the Holocaust. And so Lilly was not simply — she didn’t just hide Felice because she was in love with her. She also went out of her way to help these three other women that she encountered later. At the end of the war she missed the deadline to get her divorce annulled, and as a result she received no war widow’s pension.

Maartje (45:56)
That fits. That tracks honestly.

Sam (45:59)
It really does. And to be fair, at the end of the war she was spending a lot of time trying to track down Felice, which is understandable. But yeah, she could have had that divorce annulled and then she would have got that pension after Gunther’s death, but she did not do that. Gunther’s body was never returned home and he was not officially declared dead until 1974 — one of those ones where he just went missing in action and they never found him. Lilly made some efforts to insinuate herself with the Jewish community in Berlin after the war, though it never went very far. One of her sons described it as — Jewish people were cordial, but they were never warm and inviting. They always kept her at arm’s length. She did register her sons as Jewish at school, and I think in her mind she kind of saw it as like — her and Felice were a couple, and Felice was sort of a stand-in parent for the boys, and so in her mind she sort of considered it as: we’re a Jewish family now. For whatever that’s worth. And one of them took it seriously enough that he subsequently emigrated to Israel.

Maartje (46:59)
In the movie Felice is better with her boys than Lilly is — like she’s the fun aunt or something.

Sam (47:07)
Yes, the boys seemed to get a kick out of living with Aunt Felice, for sure.

Maartje (47:13)
Yes.

Sam (47:13)
In 1948, Felice was officially registered as having died on 31 December 1944. We don’t actually know specifically when she died — it could have been any time before the end of March 1945. She had been transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in October of 1944, and then she was taken on a march to a couple of other places. She may have ended up as far as Bergen-Belsen, but we just don’t really know. Lilly attempted suicide in 1949 and again in 1953. She also had a brief, super rough marriage in the early ’50s that ended in divorce. She ended up married to this guy — there’s a part in the movie, which also happened in real life, where Felice briefly gets away from the Gestapo and she’s hiding behind a couch in some woman’s apartment, and it was this woman’s son that Lilly married after the war — they were married for like eleven months or something. And it just didn’t go well. She was one of those people who I think wanted to be settled with someone, wanted to do things for someone, wanted to keep a house, wanted to raise children. But if you’re someone who is constantly the giver in a relationship, sometimes you end up with people who are the taker. And so the marriage didn’t go well. She got divorced again. And she always struggled financially — she would try and take on jobs to supplement some of the money that she was getting as, you know, child support from the state, but she never did super well for herself. In 1981, she received the Federal Service Cross as recognition for the women she hid during the Holocaust. And she was contacted four years later by an American journalist — which was the beginning of her telling her story. It ended up then being made into a book and then into a movie. Lilly still wore the rings that she and Felice had exchanged — they had a little sort of fake marriage ceremony at one point. She died in 2006 and her gravestone is a memorial to them both. It has both of their names on it.

Maartje (49:13)
That’s pretty impressive. I feel like this woman, Lilly — she feels like a woman in between worlds, almost. Like she can’t really be the Nazi wife that she was, but then she also never fully got integrated into the Jewish community or the lesbian community. So she’s kind of always just not quite in any of them.

Sam (49:36)
Yeah, I think that she really wanted to be validated by having one person who loved her more than anything. And I think she briefly had that with Felice, and then she never had it again.

Maartje (49:50)
It’s so sad. Also there’s the two suicide attempts — man, imagine. That’s just so sad.

Sam (49:59)
Yeah. I mean, especially if you look at the timeline — 1948, she officially has to give up on Felice being alive, and then the following year she attempts to die by suicide, you know.

Maartje (50:09)
Mm. So sad. It’s also sad that none of Felice’s friends would stick up for her or stay with her or be in touch.

Sam (50:18)
I don’t mean to cast doubt or aspersions on their relationship. I think maybe they never stopped viewing her as kind of the Nazi’s wife — they always kept her at arm’s length for that reason.

Maartje (50:29)
Yeah. And I can also very much imagine that maybe the relationship was stronger for Lilly than it was perhaps for Felice, who had a very different sort of lifestyle. And so I guess if all her friends had a similar kind of lifestyle, they wouldn’t have understood what that meant to Lilly. That would also make sense to me, but we’ll never know because none of these people are alive anymore.

Sam (50:57)
Yeah, I think that’s definitely a fair assessment. Here’s a poem that Felice wrote to Lilly. It’s slightly risky, but not too bad.

Maartje (51:06)
Hmm.

Sam (51:06)
“I promised myself solemnly that I would practice silent restraint, but when I saw your mouth it confused me. Did I cause you pain? With plans I now must pass my time, heart pounding like a xylophone, plans for wonderful things sublime, more than mere illusion alone. How could it have happened? I no longer want ever again to wander. There is one thing, however, I ponder — what would it be like, I only can wonder, to lie at your breast and dream of your mouth?”

Maartje (51:35)
Uh-huh. Right. Imagine someone writing poetry like that — especially in that time. I mean, now we would probably consider it quite tame, but back then — holy shit.

Sam (51:47)
For sure. You’re writing this to some guy’s wife, right? You’re like —

Maartje (51:51)
Yeah.

Sam (51:52)
I wanna get this lady going.

Maartje (51:54)
Yep. Yeah. So, Sam, we have to rate this movie. But before we do, I would like to remind everyone that you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us and write a review — and especially follow us on Apple Podcasts and leave a review there, because I will read them out. And you can send this episode to a friend.

Sam (52:16)
Every time you send this episode to a friend, a repressed housewife gets her first real orgasm with a woman.

Maartje (52:21)
And with that, we have to rate this movie. How many lesbians in top hats would you rate this movie?

Sam (52:28)
I would rate this movie seven debonair, gorgeous lesbians in top hats out of ten. I really liked that Professor Huneke recommended this movie to us — or I don’t even know if he recommended it, we just asked him if he knew any movies about queer people in World War Two and he happened to have this one ready to mind. But I really enjoyed watching these two women who are so totally different, from totally different worlds, come together in a way that was really indicative of the history and context of the time. I feel like we got so much history in a movie that was fundamentally a really tight, close little love story between these two people. And I think that the movie does a fair job of depicting this relationship — getting us to care about these people and become invested in them in such a way that it is genuinely quite sad the way it ends, with Felice being taken away and then Lilly never seeing her again. And I really appreciate that this movie was made. I’m glad that it exists and I’m glad that we watched it. What about you?

Maartje (53:33)
I’m gonna rate it six and a half lesbians in top hats out of ten. I think I might be a little bit broken because I no longer like sappy movies and I used to be the queen of sappy movies, so I don’t know what’s going on with me. But my threshold for emotional movies is a bit off at the moment — I didn’t have too good a time, I was kind of struggling through it. Not because it’s a bad movie, just because I wasn’t in the mood for it. So it’s my fault. But it did introduce me once again to a very interesting story, so that’s why it gets a not-bad rating, I guess. And it’s well acted — a lot of things about it are quite good. I just didn’t enjoy my time too much. So I guess that’s why.

Sam (54:18)
Yeah, I will say I do think both Lilly and Felice were really well cast. They both looked and acted the way I expected them to after reading the book, and they made me care about their relationship.

Maartje (54:29)
Yes, that is true — I also agree on that — but I cannot give it a higher rating today. It’s my fault, not the movie’s.

Sam (54:37)
It’s difficult because when people started listening — if people have been listening to this podcast from the beginning, from way back — if I rated a movie highly, you’d think, cool, if I like action movies I’m gonna like this movie. And if you rated a movie highly, people thought, cool, if I like romantic dramas I’ll like this movie. And now you’re changing it all around. People are not gonna know what to do. It’s pandemonium.

Maartje (55:00)
It’s called character growth.

Sam (55:03)
Character growth, looking up.

Maartje (55:04)
Anyway, are you reading anything?

Sam (55:10)
I just finished reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. That’s the second book I’ve read by her — I also read Beloved, which I really enjoyed. Her stuff is great. I think a lot of times people recommend you a classic and you’re like, I don’t know if I’m gonna like this. But Toni Morrison is the real deal, man. Her stuff is great.

Maartje (55:28)
What is it about?

Sam (55:30)
It’s about a Black community, and there’s one girl in particular who has a really bad home life and she wishes more than anything that she had the bluest eyes of anyone in the world, and it’s sort of about her life and that kind of stuff.

Maartje (55:47)
Ooh, that sounds good. It sounds like something I would like.

Sam (55:51)
It’s good stuff. And actually it’s a pretty short one — I think it’s like two hundred and some odd pages.

Maartje (55:57)
Ooh. Speaking of short books — I’m also reading another book. I’m still reading Project Hail Mary, which God knows when I’ll finish that. But I’ve also started reading a book called Reunion by Fred Uhlman. And it’s about an Aryan boy and a Jewish boy meeting in 1932, and it’s beautifully written. I’m going to recommend this to you as well, Sam, to put on your list, because it’s extremely short — it’s only like a hundred pages or something.

Sam (56:30)
Amazing.

Maartje (56:30)
I guess that’s it for this week. I’m gonna close this off. Thank you once again for listening to yet another episode of Rosie. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts, or you can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast, or you can visit our website rosiethereviewer.com. And please do — so you can rate this movie with us. Okay, see you next week.

Sam (56:52)
See you next week.