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 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 Woman, 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 German society which has no place for
either of those identities. I shall describe Lothar/Charlotte hereafter as “he,”
despite the fact that speaking as Lothar he insists that he describes himself as a feminine being in a masculine body; yet,
he observes, that he is still cis gender, comfortable 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 himself as a woman with male sexual desires.
Only
his father was a National Socialist, he answers the boy’s question about his
family members relationship to the Nazi Party. “He was very militant, moody,
and brutal; you can almost say he was a madman.” On the other hand, he
declares, his granduncle was a gracious being who warned him of the animalistic
nature of the “brown-shirted criminals.” The grandfather died in July 1942, in
the midst of the action we have just witnessed. Now, Charlotte explains, they
were under his father’s mercy.
During school break he 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 a 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 other young German child of the day was permitted.
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
two 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 all the time that they want.
Luise, the absolutely perfect match to her young nephew, herself survived
as a lesbian 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 is forced to return to wartime Berlin. While she is
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 he was kind to him? Charlotte’s answer is a candid “Unfortunately, no
point of contact.” He 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 the mother’s father intervened,
the bullet lodging in the ceiling, the grandfather 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 him back to his
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 knew that “something terrible would happen.” Seeking advice from his aunt, he
is told that now that since her grandfather 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 a young boy, takes up a large “stirring
stick.” I “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 him sexually. The child answered “No.” Asked if he has had sexual
intercourse, Lothar appears not to comprehend 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 a half 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, just escaping being 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, while Mahlsdorf refers to the section of Berlin
where she now lives. His adult 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 his own culture, he 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 Charlotte 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 became his lover, with who he develops a sadomasochistic
role-playing relationship that lasts for 27 years until Joechen’s death.
Despite all the forces against him, 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 until 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, to where he
invites his gay friends for a celebratory LGBT day, the first East-West gay and
lesbian gathering; they are attacked by neo-Nazi punks.
Finally in 1992 Mahlsdorf's incredible life and his endless activities is
awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit from the government for furthering the
cause of sexual freedom.
But far more important, I would argue, was Rosa von Praunheim’s film
of the same year. The very fact that he, himself, is featured and is permitted
interchange with artists depicting him, 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 him functioning at
full level while the worlds around him fell apart. Charlotte is not just a
survivor, a figure whose eccentricities allowed him a small space left in a
world that had forgotten his existence like Edith "Little Edie"
Bouvier Beale, but recognizing early in his life as a different but absolutely
normal sexual being Charlotte Mahlsdorf demanded “her” rights from the horrific
world into which he was born. This film demonstrates that he fought against
that world with everything he 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, 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).
