Katja Garloff's Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture PDF

Since the overdue eighteenth century, writers and thinkers have used the assumption of love—often unrequited or most unlikely love—to touch upon the altering cultural, social, and political place of Jews within the German-speaking nations. In Mixed Feelings, Katja Garloff asks what it capability for literature (and philosophy) to exploit love among members as a metaphor for team family. this query is of renewed curiosity this day, whilst theorists of multiculturalism flip towards love of their look for new versions of particularity and universality.

Mixed Feelings is dependent round transformative moments in German Jewish tradition and background that produced really wealthy clusters of interfaith love tales. round 1800, literature promoted the increase of the Romantic love excellent and the shift from prearranged to love-based marriages. within the German-speaking international locations, this modification within the concept and perform of affection coincided with the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, and either its supporters and competitors associated their arguments to tropes of affection. 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 increase of racial antisemitism had referred to as into query the guarantees of emancipation and ended in a obstacle of German Jewish identification. while, Jewish-Christian intermarriage brought on public debates that have been tied up with racial discourses and matters approximately procreation, heredity, and the mutability and immutability of the Jewish physique. Garloff exhibits how glossy German Jewish writers resembling Arthur Schnitzler, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Franz Rosenzweig wrest the assumption of affection clear of biologist notion and reinstate it as a version of sociopolitical family members. She concludes via tracing the relevance of this version in post-Holocaust works through Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Honigmann.