Rosa von Praunheim | Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I Am My Own Woman) / 1992

surviving murderous times

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentin Passoni (screenplay), Rosa von Praunheim (director) Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I Am My Own Woman) / 1992

 

The important LGBTQ director Rosa von Praunheim’s 1992 film I Am My Own Woman is a study in remarkable transsexual transgression and almost unimaginable acceptance by some in a society that was so restrictive that one might have presumed that anyone like the central character of this film would never have survived.

 

     Growing up in Nazi Germany, the young boy Lothar Berfelde, who even as a child began to collect objects, was first hired by second-hand dealer Max Bier in 1942 as they began to collect objects from the Jews left behind as they were being sent away to the camps. But even then, as objects flew out of windows when the Nazis raided Jewish homes, Lothar felt a sense of outrage for people being treated in such a manner, Max demanding that he remain quiet for fear they too might be sent away off.

      Meanwhile, the violence in his own home, his father nightly threatening his mother, resulted in a sense of fear as great as that he felt on the streets. When he attempted to intervene in his mother’s beatings, he himself was threatened by his swinish father, who seemed to represent the era’s general behavior, very similar to that of Franz Biberkopf’s Weimer Republic actions in Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a period in which he killed his own wife.

      But suddenly, in a brilliant maneuver, director von Praunheim interrupts the actions of his central figure Jens Taschner, playing Lothar, with the real figure, the elderly Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, entering the room to tell Taschner that he played the action perfectly, “just as it really happened.” And we realize that we are not experiencing a fictionalized portrait of the film’s central figure, but a real documentary that is focused on the actual character and that it will never go far off course from the truth of the factual narrative, something quite reassuring given the numerous bio-pics that have come before it. I Am My Own Wife, we realize, will not be a sensationalist recreation of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s life, but a testament to the figure herself. 

      Lothar, we soon are told is a transsexual, a man who prefers dressing as a woman, but still identifies as a male, not a transgender being. And that difference is important throughout as he/she negotiates the world as a gay man who dresses as a woman in Nazi and later society which has no place for either of those identities. I shall describe Lothar/Charlotte hereafter as “she,” despite the fact that speaking as Lothar he insists that although he is a feminine being in a masculine body, he is still cis gender, comfortable in with his male sexual organs. His compulsion is to dress as a woman, not necessarily to sexually become one, or as the title expresses it, “I am my own woman,” a special being who defines herself as a woman with male sexual desires.

        Only her father, she answers the boy’s question about her family members relationship to the Nazi Party, was a National Socialist. “He was very militant, moody, and brutal; you can almost say he was a madman.” On the other hand, she declares, her granduncle was a gracious being who warned her of the animalistic nature of the “brown-shirted criminals.” He died in July 1942, in the midst of the action we have just witnessed. Now, she explains, they were under her father’s mercy.

      During school break she was sent away to her Aunt Luise’s estate in East Prussia. We witness actor Taschner fitting himself into a corset as the young Lothar, putting on one of his aunt’s dresses. In the background, Luise enters, asking the boy if he enjoys dressing in that manner. When he answers yes, she helps him put on his necklace. This is clearly a world that accepts what the society in general rejects.

        Luise claims she has been watching him and realizes that nature has played on joke on them: “You should have been a woman, and I a man.” She permits the boy to wear her dresses in the house, but outside warns her to be careful.

        She also hands her a copy of a book from Weimar era by the famed Magnus Hirschfeld, The Transvestites, giving the young Lothar an advantage that hardly any young German child of the day was allowed.

        Seeing the young Lothar dressed as a female climbing the stairs of the bar to the hayloft, the farm’s young worker, Christian, follows the boy up, the engaging in sex. When Luise enters demanding her horse be saddled, she discovers the two together, apologizing to them for interrupting the idyll, and telling them to take their time finishing what they're about.

     Luise is the absolutely perfect match to young nephew, herself lived out her lesbianism in “murderous times” as well as living openly as a female transvestite, wearing only male clothing. Her lover, Charlotte Schroppsdorf, was murdered in “the so-called ‘euthanasia program’ of the Nazis.

        But the truly liberating vacation Lothar has in his aunt’s estate ends after the holidays, when he was forced to return to wartime Berlin. In the attic playing with his dolls, his father suddenly enters in Nazi uniform insisting that he will now make a man of his son.

        Charlotte now talks about the only two great forces of good in her life: her mother and her granduncle.” And then there was absolute evil, that was my father who punished and beat me until blood flowed from my nose and mouth.”

       The actor who performs her father asks whether there was ever a moment when she was to him? Her answer is a candid “Unfortunately, no point of contact.” She also tells us that after 6 months of marriage to her father, Lothar’s mother demanded a divorce, in response to which “he drew his pistol and aimed at her.” In fact, he shot at her, but Luise intervened, the bullet lodging in the ceiling, the granduncle saving Charlotte’s mother’s life.

        Back into the narrative of this work, Charlotte narrates that her mother used the excuse of the 1943 evacuations from Berlin to take her back to her aunt Luise’s home in East Prussia. When Charlotte’s father returned, his mother announced “that his threats would no longer keep her from a divorce.” Charlotte now knows that “something terrible would happen.” Seeking advice from her aunt, she is told that now that her granduncle is no longer living, the child must become his mother’s protector.

         Sent back to Berlin, and now alone with her father, he demanded that the boy choose between him or his mother. And when his father takes up his gun and slams the cartridge shut, Lothar knows what his future may be if he insists upon returning to his mother.”There’s only one decision,” declares the father. “You have one night to think it over. Otherwise I’ll shoot them all, and I’ll beat you to death like a mangy dog.”

         The future Charlotte, as still young boy, takes up a large “stirring stick,” “crept into my father’s room before dawn, and struck,” beating him to death. In 1944 he was sent to Tübingen for a psychiatric examination by “Doctor Ritter,” asking him if his father had approached his sexually. The child answered “No.” Asked if he has had sexual intercourse, Lothar appears not understand what the question means, despite the fact that we have already seen the boy and Christian engaged in sex. But the next question says it all, “Why haven’t you joined the Hitler Youth?” If his amazingly brave answer, “Because it doesn’t interest me,” hasn’t yet convinced you at 17 ½ minutes into this hour and ½ film that what you are seeing is a startling insight into LGBTQ German history, then you simply don’t serve von Praunheim’s startlingly revelatory revelation of gay history. And you should turn it off and put on a nice heterosexual rom-com.

         Lothar is imprisoned, but the defeat of Germany during the Allied invasion sets him free to wander the Berlin streets, now just escaping be shot as a German deserter by remaining Nazi soldiers.

        By 1946, Lothar, finally identifying himself as a feminine being living in a man’s body, takes on the name of Carlotte von Mahlsdorf, the name Charlotte being a German parallel to Lottchen of Lothar, and perhaps a testament to his aunt’s lover, and Mahlsdorf referring to the section of Berlin where she now lives. Her character is now performed by Ichgola Androgyn.

        Charlotte returns to the mostly destroyed Friedrishfelde castle and spends hard years, working with others in attempting to restore it. But still being perceived still as an outsider in her own culture, she is removed from the property by East German authorities.

         Charlotte has no choice but to now enter work as a domestic, beginning a job in the household of Herbert von Zitzenau (Robert Dietl) a former equestrian officer. He soon seduces her and the two begin a secret relationship, the affair surviving a number of years until his death.

 

        Although life in East Germany is terribly difficult for LGBTQ men and women, many of them such as Charlotte discover ways around the restrictive social order. Cruising a public restroom, Charlotte meets up with man named Joechen, who quickly because her male lover, with who she develops a sadomasochistic role-playing relationship that lasts for 27 years until Joechen’s death.

         Despite all the forces against her, Charlotte survives as an open transvestite in East Germany for 30 years, working to preserve the contents of East Berlin’s first and, for a long while, its only gay bar after the DDR government closed it down and demolished the building it which it had existed. Eventually those contents are transferred to the Gründerzeit Museum in Mahlsdorf, managed by Charlotte and a lesbian couple.

         Charlotte even plays a figure in the first East German gay film, Coming Out by Heiner Carow, a film I also review.

 

        If one might have thought that the fall of Berlin Wall and the joining of the reunification meant better times for Charlotte Mahlsdorf, you haven’t dealt with the realities of a new government that was still not totally friendly with gay issues, and certainly had no conception of gay life in East Berlin. The German government now takes over the objects and management of Gründerzeit Museum and she and gay friends she has invited for a celebratory LGBT day, the first East-West gay and lesbian gathering, are attacked by neo-Nazi punks.

         Finally in 1992 Mahlsdorf incredible life and her endless activities is awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit from the government for furthering the cause of sexual freedom.

         But far more importantly, I would argue, was Rosa von Praunheim’s film of the same year. The very fact that she, herself, is featured and is permitted interchange with artists depicting her, gives a depth and significance to this documentary work to which most such films cannot possibly make claim.

       If in some senses it reminds me of the amazing documentaries of Albert and David Mayles, particularly of Grey Gardens (1975), one quickly perceives that whereas the characters in that film are basically eccentric freaks, Mahlsdorf, despite living as a transvestite in a world that surely perceived such a sexual difference as freakish and unacceptable, was a far more significant being whose sense of self-worth and pride kept her functioning at full level while the worlds around her fell apart. She is not just a survivor, a figure whose eccentricities allowed her a small space left in a world that had forgotten her existence like Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, but recognizing early in her life as a different but absolutely normal sexual being Charlotte Mahlsdorf demanded her rights from the horrific world into which she was born, and this film demonstrates, and fought against that world with everything she was capable of, refusing to give into its prejudices and hates, standing as a basically unknown hero for decades for LGBTQ rights.

       We need such films desperately to understand our history, and Germany needs them perhaps even more to help heal its own transgressions of all differences, sexual, religious, artistic, and political.

       And finally, such a figure as Mahlsdorf tells us, once again, that faced always with future abnormalities of political culture, that no matter how those who gain power might struggle to reiterate a bland normative notion of human life and its sexual, social, and sacred activities, they can never fully succeed.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2024).