Mixed feelings : tropes of love in German Jewish culture / Katja Garloff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Garloff, Katja, author.

Series:

Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)

Signale

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Germany--History--1800-1933.

Jews.

Ethnic relations.

History.

Germany.

Germany--Ethnic relations--History--19th century.

Germany--Ethnic relations--History--20th century.

Germany--Intellectual life--19th century.

Intellectual life.

Germany--Intellectual life--20th century.

Physical Description:

xi, 213 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2016.

Summary:

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. 00'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. 00Around 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.

Contents:

1800: romantic love and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation

Interfaith love and the pursuit of emancipation

Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Romantic love and the denial of difference

Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit

Figures of love in later Romantic antisemitism

Achim von Arnim

1900: the crisis of Jewish emancipation and assimilation

Refiguring the language of race

Ludwig Jacobowski, Max Nordau, Georg Hermann

Eros and thanatos in fin-de-siecle Vienna

Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, Arthur Schnitzler

Revelatory love, or the dynamics of dissimilation

Franz Rosenzweig and Else Lasker-Schuler

Toward the present and the future

Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Barbara Honigmann.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781501704963

1501704966

9781501704970

1501704974

OCLC:

951507661