Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 - Hardcover

Fischer, Erica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060183500 ISBN 13: 9780060183509

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1995

Synopsis

Out of the vacuum created by history's scant attention to Nazi persecution of homosexuals comes a unique and maddeningly tragic story of love between two women of startling contrast. Aimee & Jaguar is the first book of its kind: it tells, through Rashomon-like firsthand accounts, of the horrors - and the joysshared by Felice Schragenheim, who did not survive the war, and Elisabeth Wust, who lived to finally tell their story after more than fifty years of silence. Aimee & Jaguar is set against a compelling historical backdrop of increasing pressure placed on Jews, homosexuals, and non-Aryans in Nazi Germany beginning in the early 1930s.

About this title

Review:

Acclaimed in Germany and England, this tragic and remarkable real-life love story won a Lambda Literary Award when it was first published in America in 1995. Lilly Wust ("Aimée") was a conventional middle-class mother of four, estranged from her philandering husband, when she met Felice Schragenheim ("Jaguar") in 1941. Their passionate affair unfolded against the backdrop of the deportation of Jews from Berlin, but several months passed before Felice could even bring herself to tell Lilly that she was Jewish and living illegally on the streets. "I knew, of course, what it meant," Lilly recalled in old age. "Not for a moment did I think that I too could be in danger. On the contrary, all I wanted to do now was to save her." Lilly's heroic efforts to conceal and protect Felice through the next two years make for painful and inspiring reading. Felice was arrested in August 1944 and sent her last letter to Lilly four months later. In 1981 Lilly was awarded the German Federal Service Cross, though no one could read this as a happy ending. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Erica Fischer was born in 1943 in England. Her parents were refugees there and returned to Austria with their two children in 1948. Erica Fischer studied at the Interpreting Institute of the University of Vienna, was a founding member of the second wave women's movement in Vienna, and started working there as a journalist in the mid-1970s. She has been living in Germany since 1988 as a freelance journalist, writer, and translator, residing in Berlin since 1994.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0060183500
• ISBN 13: 9780060183509
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288