Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture by Katja Garloff (review)

As Katja Garloff writes in her opening line, this book is about a particular figure of speech: “love.” More specifically, it is about how various sorts of love, denominated by their preceding adjectives (“unhappy love,” “interfaith love,” “romantic love,” “un/requited love,” and “revelatory love”), find expression in major works of German and German-Jewish literature over the past 250 years. 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. The book, she writes, is about how noticing that the “obsession with love in German-Jewish thought and literature does not reflect naïveté about the political realities of emancipation but rather calls attention to its unfulfilled promises—and to the creative acts their fulfillment would require” (6). The “trope of love,” in other words, is not just about interpersonal interactions between Jews and Gentiles in the age of emancipation, but also addresses how art and creativity fulfill the role of cultural moderator when politics fails to achieve its most enlightened aims.

Mixed Feelings is divided into two main parts—the first focused on works clustered around the turn of the nineteenth century and the second on works from the early twentieth century—with a conclusion that brings her thesis to the present day. In Part 1, “Romantic Love and the Beginnings of Jewish Emancipation,” Garloff examines the writings of five authors, pairing works by a Jew and a non-Jew in the opening chapters: Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779), and Dorthea Veit’s Florentin (1801) with Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799). A chapter is also devoted to the antisemitic stories of Achim von Arnim. Garloff describes her choices as focused on “the sociopolitical visions that become possible when Jewish emancipation is discussed in terms of love” (her emphasis, 21). For Mendelssohn and Lessing, she argues, love is about coexistence, about carving out mutual but ultimately separate spheres within a single overarching polity. In the writings of Veit and Schlegel, whose personal love affair has immense symbolic resonance, love takes on an impervious individualization, a “romantic” quality that, in Garloff’s reading, “hinges upon the negation of Judaism, or its transformation into an unspeakable difference” (51). Finally, for Arnim, it is “ambiguity and ambivalence” that take center stage (76), with Arnim presenting various possible love affairs between Jews and non-Jews and then rejecting them because of a perceived inability of Jews (or their Jewishness) to truly be assimilated into German culture. Engaging with postcolonial theory, Garloff argues that “ambiguity, which expresses a psychical ambivalence about the process of modernization, ultimately enhances the political efficacy of antisemitism” (her emphasis, 91).

In Part 2, “The Crisis of Jewish Emancipation and Assimilation,” Garloff traces the story of Jewish integration and religious/ethnic difference into the twentieth century, where it comes into conflict with homogenizing and racializing nationalist tendencies. In three chapters, Garloff examines the works of Ludwig Jacobowski, Max Nordau, Georg Hermann, Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Rosenzweig, and Else Lasker-Schüler, all of whom “seek to wrest love away from biologist thought and reinstate it as a model of sociopolitical integration” (98). Because of the many political trends with which Jews were engaged by the early twentieth century, across these chapters Garloff uses each writer as a cipher through which to address larger social concerns, such as race, nationalism (of which Zionism was the uniquely Jewish facet), and gender. Chapter 5, “Eros and Thanatos in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” is an excellent example of Garloff’s method at work. Concerning Freud, the dean of writing on human psycho-sexuality, she makes the remarkable observation that “Freud maintained a resonant silence about the subject of Jewish-Gentile sex and love” (130), and...