Love Story : Berlin, 1942

[revtj]

(United Kingdom, 1997, 60 min., English, German with subtitles)


Today I went to the Breman Museum in Atlanta to view this film which was followed by a Q&A session with director, Catrine Clay. It was showing in conjunction with a display of the pink triangle exhibit on loan from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. This exhibit traces the Nazi increase in the use of Paragraph 175 to punish, imprison, torture, castrate, and eventually kill about 100,000 gay men. The exhibit notes that lesbianism was routinely ignored and also points out that some heterosexual men were charged under Paragraph 175, making it difficult to say exactly how many homosexual men died under the Nazi rule.

The film is a true love story about a model Aryan hausfrau with a husband in the army and a German motherhood medal for bearing four sons, Lily Wurst never expected to fall in love. Her feelings for Felice Schrader, a 20-year-old woman hiding her Jewish identity, challenged everything she knew about herself.

Eerily intimate and poignant, the documentary, anchored by detailed interviews with Lily, now 82, and Felice's former comrades from the Jewish underground, describes the deep and joyful relationship that developed between these unlikely lovers.

Catrine Clay joined the BBC Documentaries department as a researcher for the award-winning "40 Minutes" series in 1985. She directed and produced her first documentary, "Our Darren," in 1989 and continued to work in the same department for the next fifteen years, transferring to "Timewatch," the BBC History strand in 1993.

I highly recommend the film if it comes to a film festival or if you can rent it at your local 'cool' dvd shop.

[suzer1013]

There was also a film made of this story (I think in German with English subtitles) called "Aimee and Jaguar." Amazing and poignant story. My partner and I really enjoyed it.

Susan