Ich bin meine eigene Frau (1992, Germany)

A fascinating autobiographical film about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who had been born male in 1928, and lived full-time as a woman, but without surgery.

The film is a sequence of narrative to camera by Charlotte, interspersed with recontructions by two young actors, Jens Taschner, playing Charlotte as a youngster and Ichgola Androgyn playing her as an adult. Many of these sections involved Charlotte herself explaining how things were to the younger actor in role. In different circumstances this could get confusing and irritating but I was enchanted by the whole thing.

Lothar was growing up as the Nazi party was gaining strength and becoming more brutal, and the young Lothar was alarmed by what was going on.

His father was unsympathetic and violent, but in 1942 Lothar went to spend a summer holiday on the estate of his Aunt Luise in East Prussia. Lothar had a wonderful time there, and we soon see him trying on his aunt's clothing in secret.

But Aunt Luise comes in a surprises him; "Do you like wearing those things?"

Lothar looks scared stiff, but he says yes, he does. However Aunt Luise is sympathetic; "I have been observing you for some time; Mother Nature has played a joke on both of us: you should have been a girl, and I should have been a man!"

Saying that, Luise helps Lothar to dress fully, and tells him he can dress freely inside the house, but to be careful outside. She lends him the archetypal reference book Transvestites, by the eminent gender psychologist, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld. "Read it carefully: it concerns us both!"

A few minutes later we see Charlotte, as Lothar has started to become, climbing a ladder in the stables, into the hayloft, and a farm worker climbs up after her, and intimacy follows. Luise comes looking for Charlotte, and is cross that she seems to be hiding, but when she discovers the two of them, she softens and tells them to carry on.

But the school holidays are soon over and Charlotte returns home to Berlin. One evening she is playing with her dolls and her father discovers her, apparently unaware of developments, and he goes berserk and beats her. However when father is asleep, Charlotte finds a heavy stick and beats him to death, for which she is sent away to a reformatory.

Towards the end of the war, the reformatory staff let the inmates go (so as to make good whatever escape they could arrange, as the Russians were getting near) and Charlotte was left wandering the streets, homeless. The horrors of the impact of war on a civilian population are spelt out pretty clearly, and Charlotte narrowly escapes death and rape.

In later years Charlotte made herself the keeper of an old stately home, in the Mahlsdorf suburb of Berlin, and set about gradually restoring it. In the house, she is telling some gay and transgender visitors about the transvestite balls that were held in the place in the 19th century. And now there are some army officers and their ladies in period costume in the present day too.

Charlotte takes us to Elli's beer bar in a Berlin suburb, which was evidently a tranny hang-out in the old days, and pretty much unchanged now, it seems. Charlotte has taken her old wind-up gramophone along and dresses in costume ...

... and then we see her in her younger persona (played by Androgen).

Charlotte was hounded by the authorities in East Germany but she persisted and successfully ran the old stately home at Mahlsdorf as a visitor attraction. Here (pic) she is showing paying visitors around.

The whole film is certainly not a slick, high budget production, but the touchingly sincere personality of its heroine, and the story she has to tell, shine through, and make this a great film for me.

There is a version with (US) English subtitles, called I Am My Own Woman. The title comes from a statement Charlotte makes when explaining that she is not a transsexual, but a crossdresser.

HF December 2008

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