GLQ 7.

3-07 Zimmer

5/24/01

1:50 PM

Page 453

Film/Video Review

VERBOTEN LOVE
Catherine Zimmer

Paragraph 175. Written by Sharon Wood. Directed by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Telling Pictures, 1999. 76 min. Aime and Jaguar. Written and directed by Max Frberbck. Zeitgeist Films, 1999. 126 min.

Since representations of the Holocaust have bled into virtually every cultural
venue and genre, it should come as no surprise that queer cinema has also taken up the issue. It is a sad disappointment that it has generally done so as ineptly and unselfconsciously as mainstream Holocaust representations. While the documentary Paragraph 175 and the ctional Aime and Jaguar both hint at what it might mean to have a queer experience or reading of the Holocaust, neither lm crosses the line that demarcates the bounds of acceptable queer representation. However, since these lms unintentionally expose the erotic trajectory of much Holocaust representation, they can be useful for initiating a discussion of the traditionally undiscussable. It was perhaps inevitable that Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman eventually made Paragraph 175. Epstein received his rst Oscar for The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and, after joining forces with Friedman, won another Oscar for their Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989). With The Celluloid Closet (1995), the two directors established themselves as the virtual Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg of gay documentary, a franchise providing queer audiences with lmic histories aimed at satisfying a hunger for heritage. The next logical step for them, as for all ambitious documentarians, was of course the Holocaust. The nest documentaries in lm culture, the Oscar winners, have traditionally been
GLQ 7:3 pp. 453458 Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press

GLQ 7.3-07 Zimmer

5/24/01

1:50 PM

Page 454

454

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Holocaust-related.1 For any successful lmmaker with historical aspirations, the Holocaust is the king (now queen) of all spectacles, the nal frontier. Paragraph 175 tells the story of those who were persecuted under the German law that banned male homosexuality. Although the law predated the Nazi rise to power, the lm notes that the Nazis rewrote the law and enforced it with unprecedented ruthlessness. Through archival footage and interviews with survivors, the lm documents the deportations to concentration camps and the tortures suffered specically by homosexuals at the hands of the Nazis. To its credit, the lm begins by undermining the easy simplicity of normative Holocaust documentaries.2 After introducing the Berlin skyline, both as it is now and as it was during the war years, the lm quickly moves to an interview with a Holocaust survivor aboard a train. The setup is no surprise: we are used to survivor interviews establishing the context for Holocaust documentaries. It is the content of this rst interview that is so striking. The older gentleman being interviewed (at rst we only hear his voice, overlying a scene of a train station) vaguely discusses a closeness that developed on the deportation trains. The young interviewer (Dr. Klaus Mller, a self-identied gay man who works for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and whose research was the basis for the lm) pursues the point, and eventually his subject claries: yes, men had sex together on the deportation trains in Nazi Germany. This shocking revelation so effectively undermines our expectations of a Holocaust documentary, and so immediately queers the subject, that it appears as if Paragraph 175 might actually transgress the oppressive regularity of Holocaust representations. The deportation trains have long numbered among the most consistent and powerful symbols of these representations. To add the vision of sexuality to our previous knowledge of the overcrowding, disease, fear, and death on these trains accomplishes two things: rst, it jolts us out of an easy acceptance of what constitutes an experience of the Holocaust; second, and more crucially, it forces us to explore what sort of erotic pleasure could (and almost must) exist under the horric conditions of the Holocaust. However, Paragraph 175 does not pursue this angle. Quickly it deteriorates into what we all understand a Holocaust documentary to be: interviews overlying and interwoven with archival footage of Nazi Germany. This repetition of form has produced an easy spectacle of the Holocaust. We know what to expect; we will not be shocked; we will not be disturbed, except supercially. These documentaries have come to serve as pleasurable spectacles for consumer culture, full of predictable pathos, rather than as spurs to social awareness. Ironically, the knowledge of the sexual pleasures that took place in the past can undermine, for

GLQ 7.3-07 Zimmer

5/24/01

1:50 PM

Page 455

VERBOTEN LOVE

455

the lms viewer, a too easy visual pleasure in the present. Hitting too close to home, such a revelation forces us to examine the pleasures we take from Holocaust representations; it interferes with our tendency to sublimate them to questionable ends. But the promise made at the beginning of Paragraph 175 goes unfullled. Is it enough merely to add that homosexual men were persecuted under the Nazi regime? Perhaps. This lm seems to fall squarely into the project of gay historical recuperation, which seeks earnestly but sedately to unearth the buried voices of homosexuality underlying mainstream history. Paragraph 175 does locate voices we have yet to hear, the voices of the persecuted, tortured, and murdered gay men of the Nazi era. Additionally, it provides a compelling and joyful account of queer life in pre-Nazi Berlin; the photos and lms of foxy German boys in tight 1920s bathing trunks are sure to titillate and amuse. However, in uncovering these hidden voices (and asses), the lm covers over others: those of gay women. To be sure, the lm attempts to address the treatment of gay women in Nazi Germany. It supplies what can only be described as a token lesbian interviewee, Annette Eick, who is apparently supposed to speak for all lesbian experience. We are also shown a few archival photos and a ash of Marlene Dietrich, whose effect is merely to highlight the iconic nature of lesbians in Paragraph 175. Symptomatically, the lm defends its token references to lesbians by pointing out that the language of Paragraph 175, the German law banning homosexuality, explicitly addressed only men. The narrator, Rupert Everett (clearly the only gay man in Hollywood), informs us that lesbianism was considered a curable phase, while homosexuality among men was dangerous and infectious.3 The overwhelming visibility of gay men relative to lesbians is thus rationalized by the mens targeting for deportation, while the women were largely tolerated and ignored. The reference to women and the token lesbian interviewee serve as classic disavowals on the part of the lmmakers. Women, though mentioned, are largely just tolerated and ignored.4 With these passing references to the nonexperience of women, and with the downplaying of theHolocaust erotic, Paragraph 175 renders itself more notable for what it does not explore than for what it does. Its subtle, unintentional gestures are more telling than its overt, repetitive proclamations. The survivor interviews and the archival footage are not in any way unique interventions in the realm of Holocaust representation. They pain us, but they do not disturb. It is the pleasure, both in the lms and in the spectators, rather than the pain, that needs to be explored if we are truly to resist taking the Holocaust and its representations for granted, and Paragraph 175 is not up to the task. Perhaps we can look to a more

GLQ 7.3-07 Zimmer

5/24/01

1:50 PM

Page 456

456

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

sexually explicit, lesbian historical drama to keep the promises and fulll the gestures of Paragraph 175? Perhaps not. Max Frberbcks Aime and Jaguar is the true story, based on Erica Fischers book, of a love affair between a Jewish lesbian and a married Gentile woman in 1943 Berlin. While the lm presents a relatively hot lesbian love affair (and is worth recommending if only for that), it is a poor Holocaust drama, for it shows us an even less complicated view of Holocaust-era sexuality than Paragraph 175. While Paragraph 175 largely ignores women, Aime and Jaguar completely ignores Paragraph 175; it suggests that only Jews were persecuted. The lm thus evades the complexity of sexual identity and desire in that political era. The story is as follows: Felice Schragenheim is a Jew posing as a Gentile. She is also gorgeous, a party girl, and a spy for the Resistance (however true this story might be, it also smacks of an overdeveloped lesbian masturbatory fantasy). She falls in love, seemingly at rst sight, with Lilly Wust, wife of a Nazi ofcer, mother of four, and paragon of female Nazi virtue (excepting her hysterically enacted indelities). Felice and Lilly get involved (after a brief homosexual panic on Lillys part), but of course Felice keeps her Jewish identity a secret at rst. Finally, after revealing herself to a suddenly accepting Lilly, Felice is discovered and deported and is assumed to have died in a concentration camp. With such a narrative, compounded with the fetish value of the real that accrues to any true story, Aime and Jaguar seems ripe with opportunities for exploring the hidden Holocaust, but the lm ignores its potential and slips into something more comfortable: a facile, if pleasurable, romance. It provides us with no greater understanding of what the lesbian situation in Nazi Germany really was; it never mentions the possibility of a problem. Even the one gay man in the lm, a drag-queen hairdresser, is remarkably unaffected by the regime. The lm takes the simpleminded, outdated position that only Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The historical moment becomes a backdrop for a love affair, not a moment in queer history. Furthermore, the love affair between a Jewish spy and a Nazi housewife leaves the particular erotic of such a situation shamefully unexamined. When Felice rst sets eyes on Lilly, she decides she must have her. But while the lm succeeds in characterizing Felice as a playful but determined womanizer, her single-minded pursuit of Lilly remains mystifying. Lilly is attractive but hardly stunning; she seems rather dimwitted; she is reported to have made anti-Semitic comments; she is married to a Nazi ofcer on whom she cheats with other Nazi ofcers: on the whole, this character is simply distasteful. That a Jewish lesbian spy would

GLQ 7.3-07 Zimmer

5/24/01

1:50 PM

Page 457

VERBOTEN LOVE

457

nd her an amusing sexual conquest is understandable,5 but the idea that this affair would become true love requires closer scrutiny. Indeed, the unproblematic naturalization of this love is facile and naive. While the lm seems to suggest, as Paragraph 175 does, that it would like to explore the eroticism of the Holocaust years, it backs off from this dangerous, even sacrilegious, topic, presenting the love between the two women as if it transcended their situations and ideologies. Perhaps this tactic would make sense if we were ever given some way to fathom their powerful and intimate connection, but we are not. Aime and Jaguar would have been a far more interesting lm if it had shown the womens mutual attraction blossoming because of their differences, rather than in spite of them. Instead of ignoring Lillys despicability, the lm might have explored the appeal inhering in such a character. The purity of Felice and Lillys love is a representation as idealistic as fascism itself. That this love destroys Felice, the Jew, while elevating Lilly, the Nazi, to the status of hero is another detail that demands greater consideration. Both Paragraph 175 and Aime and Jaguar hint at more complex understandings of the Holocaust years, but these hints remain mere suggestions. The erotics of the Holocaust era are the real hidden voices in these histories, and it is not simply the desire to explore political sadomasochism and the exigencies of love, sex, and war that propels us to ask more from these lms. The expanding consumption of Holocaust imagery implies, after all, not just an earnest need to explore our history but also a pleasure in viewing these images, albeit a pleasure we are loath to admit. Only in examining this pleasure, and in reecting on ourselves as spectators of the Holocaust, can we begin to dismantle the dangerous mystique of these images.6 We need not destroy pleasure to take control of it, but we must certainly acknowledge it.

Notes
1. Can any of us forget Night and Fog (1955), The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), or Shoah (1985)? Nor has the production of such lms slowed with time: Spielbergs Schindlers List capitalized on the black-and-white newsreel aesthetic to take an Oscar in 1993, and James Molls Last Days took one of its own for best documentary in 1998. The basic Holocaust documentary, so recognizable that I doubt any reader is unfamiliar with it, is replete with archival footage of Nazi rallies and concentration camps. A voice-over narration alternates with rst-person accounts of time spent either under Nazi occupation or in the camps. The genres most notable feature is the recycling of the footage, lm after lm, with little variation, which leads one to wonder why we are drawn to watch essentially the same lm over and over again.

2.

GLQ 7.3-07 Zimmer

5/24/01

1:50 PM

Page 458

458

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

3.

4.

5.

6.

This term, of course, provides us with an opportunity to understand the way that gay history is structured around current understanding. Thus the contemporary gay movement, so profoundly structured and produced by the AIDS crisis, is projected back on the past. The press kit for the lm, in addressing the gure of Annette Eick, claims that under Paragraph 175 lesbians sought refuge in invisibility. This heritage of invisibility seems to become the destiny of lesbians for these lmmakers. Rather than undo it, they perpetuate it. Indeed, the lm explores this topic. When Felice discovers that Lilly has said that she can smell a Jew, she takes it as a dare and plans to make a joke of Lilly and her pathetic anti-Semitism. That Felice seems to retain her humanity in the midst of war by compulsively sexualizing women (and having what seems to be a lot of sex) is a frankly refreshing portrayal of a lesbian, if at odds with some traditional feminist thought. Sadly, this goal has not been achieved, or even attempted, in lm since Liliana Cavanis Night Porter (1974). This unsettling lm, considered tasteless by some, willingly undoes the sacred structure of Holocaust representations and exposes the imsy scaffolding of that structure.