Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943

This book doesn't seem to realize it is less about lesbianism and love than it is a jolting social history--achtung. It purports to be a tender wartime memoir of two Berlin lesbian lovers, one of whom turns out to be perhaps the most ordinary woman in Nazi Germany. It is hard to put down. Our sympathy is tapped because one of the lovers, Felice Schragenheim (Jaguar), is a U-boat--a Jew living underground. Fischer, a Viennese feminist and journalist, pieces together diaries, interviews, reminiscences--sometimes self-serving in the extreme on the part of their authors. For instance, 80-year-old Elisabeth Wust (Aimee) swears in interviews with the dubious Fischer that she didn't now what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, yet the instant Soviet troops tramped into Berlin, she passed off herself and her four kids as Jewish. Her husband, a Nazi officer, was swallowed up on the eastern front while Aimee dallied with every Heinz, Dick and Harry who crossed her threshold, as well as women lovers. The diary entries of Elisabeth reflect the unreflective, self-centered musings of a hausfrau that are in their own way as revealing of the Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany as any report by a minister of state. Tumbling into obscurity in the postwar years, Elisabeth hangs on to her love for the lost Felice, and all that spent passion comes across as simply obsession. (Dec.)