Description
Book SynopsisSince the late eighteenth century, writers and thinkers have used the idea of loveoften unrequited or impossible loveto 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, an
Trade Review
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.
* German Studies Review *
