Aimee and Jaguar by Erica Fischer

Aimee and Jaguar by Erica Fischer

Berlin 1942. Lilly Wust, twenty-nine, married, four children, led a life as did millions of German women. But then she met the twenty-one-year-old Felice Schragenheim.

It was love almost at first sight. Aim e (Lilly) and Jaguar (Felice) started forging plans for the future. They composed poems and love letters to each other, and wrote their own marriage contract. When Jaguar admitted to her lover that she was Jewish, this dangerous secret drew the two women even closer to each other. But their luck didn't last. On August 21, 1944, Jaguar was arrested and deported.

At the age of eighty, Lilly Wust told her story to Erica Fischer, who turned it into a poignant testimony. After the book appeared in 1994 she was contacted by additional contemporaries of Aim e and Jaguar who offered new material that has been integrated into the present edition.

The book, translated into twenty languages, and the film based on it--directed by Max F rberb ck, with Juliane K hler and Maria Schrader in the leading roles--have made Aim e and Jaguar's story known around the world.

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