Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

Katja Garloff

Published by Cornell University Press 2016

Mixed Feelings

Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

Katja Garloff
Funded by: Cornell University Library

In the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501706011

Overview
Contents

About this book

Since the late eighteenth century, writers and thinkers have used the idea of love—often unrequited or impossible love—to comment on the changing cultural, social, and political position of Jews in the German-speaking countries. In Mixed Feelings, Katja Garloff asks what it means for literature (and philosophy) to use love between individuals as a metaphor for group relations. This question is of renewed interest today, when theorists of multiculturalism turn toward love in their search for new models of particularity and universality.

Mixed Feelings is structured around two transformative moments in German Jewish culture and history that produced particularly rich clusters of interfaith love stories. Around 1800, literature promoted the rise of the Romantic love ideal and the shift from prearranged to love-based marriages. In the German-speaking countries, this change in the theory and practice of love coincided with the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, and both its supporters and opponents linked their arguments to tropes of love. Garloff explores the generative powers of such tropes in Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and Achim von Arnim.

Around 1900, the rise of racial antisemitism had called into question the promises of emancipation and led to a crisis of German Jewish identity. At the same time, Jewish- Christian intermarriage prompted public debates that were tied up with racial discourses and concerns about procreation, heredity, and the mutability and immutability of the Jewish body. Garloff shows how modern German Jewish writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Franz Rosenzweig wrest the idea of love away from biologist thought and reinstate it as a model of sociopolitical relations. She concludes by tracing the relevance of this model in post-Holocaust works by Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Honigmann.

Author / Editor information

Katja Garloff is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. She is the author of Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers.

Reviews

Paul Reitter, Director, Humanities Institute, The Ohio State University:

This is a splendid book. It takes on a topic that is both underexamined and of obvious importance, and it does so with insight, erudition, clarity, theoretical savvy, and much in the way of plain good sense. Mixed Feelings is a major contribution both to German Jewish studies and the ongoing conversations about love as an ethical force in the here and now. Katja Garloff's book deepens our sense of the complexity of the dynamics of Jewish assimilation by illuminating the role of a complex discourse of emotion in representations of and interventions into the assimilation process. Garloff has an impressive command of the relevant secondary literature, which she invokes with a light touch, and she creatively mobilizes cultural theory—like Homi Bhabha's notion of colonial mimicry—to highly productive ends. Yet it is in her subtle, elegant close readings that Garloff gives us perhaps the keenest insights into the works she examines.

Liliane Weissberg, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania:

Katja Garloff is one of the most interesting scholars working in German literature today, and her work in the fields of eighteenth-century studies, contemporary German literature, and Jewish studies has been highly acclaimed. Garloff's new book, Mixed Feelings, is another important contribution.

Garloff's main insight, and one that bears productive and fascinating analytic fruit, is that tracing the rhetoric of "love" can lead scholars toward a more nuanced understanding of the intricacies and difficulties of Jewish assimilation in modern German culture.... This book should be an essential read for anyone interested in Jewish-Gentile relations in modern German literature.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I 1800: Romantic Love and the Beginnings of Jewish Emancipation
1. Interfaith Love and the Pursuit of Emancipation Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. Romantic Love and the Denial of Difference Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3. Figures of Love in Later Romantic Antisemitism Achim von Arnim Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Part II 1900: The Crisis of Jewish Emancipation and Assimilation
4. Refiguring the Language of Race Ludwig Jacobowski, Max Nordau, Georg Hermann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
5. Eros and Thanatos in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, Arthur Schnitzler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
6. Revelatory Love, or the Dynamics of Dissimilation Franz Rosenzweig and Else Lasker-Schüler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Conclusion: Toward the Present and the Future Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Barbara Honigmann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 228
Keywords: GERMAN STUDIES; Literary Studies; JEWISH STUDIES

eBook

Published: November 15, 2016
ISBN: 9781501706011