Cornell University
Library
Cornell UniversityLibrary

eCommons

Help
Log In(current)
  1. Home
  2. Cornell University Press
  3. Cornell Open
  4. Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

File(s)
9781501706011.pdf (1.41 MB)
9781501706561_epub.epub (725.49 KB)
9781501704963_fc.jpg (253.83 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://doi.org/10.7298/nhdw-vb55
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/110722
Collections
Cornell Open
Author
Garloff, Katja
Abstract

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.

Date Issued
2016-12-15
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Keywords
German Studies
•
Literary & Cultural Studies
•
Moses Mendelssohn
•
G. E. Lessing
•
Friedrich Schlegel
•
Dorothea Veit
•
Achim von Arnim
•
antisemitism
•
Jewish-Christian intermarriage
•
the Jewish body
•
Arthur Schnitzler
•
Else Lasker-Schüler
•
Franz Rosenzweig
•
Gershom Scholem
•
Hannah Arendt
•
Barbara Honigmann
ISBN
9781501704963 (print)
9781501706561 (epub)
9781501706011 (PDF ebook)
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Type
book
Accessibility Feature
readingOrder
structuralNavigation
displayTransformability
Accessibility Hazard
none
Accessibility Summary
"Accessibility Feature(s)" apply only to the EPUB file.

Site Statistics | Help

About eCommons | Policies | Terms of use | Contact Us

copyright © 2002-2026 Cornell University Library | Privacy | Web Accessibility Assistance