Mixed Feelings

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.

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.

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.

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.