The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature by Agnes C. Mueller (review)

In The Inability to Love, Agnes C. Mueller examines the representations of Jews and of German memories of National Socialism in a range of fictional works published after the unification of East and West Germany. She deliberately selects novels and short stories that have achieved popularity or critical acclaim, arguing that they may represent attitudes held by a wide swath of the German readership.

Mueller's analysis locates either a disturbing absence of Jewish characters in recent fiction, or else a depiction of Jewishness distorted by stereotypes. She diagnoses this situation as revealing, in her title formulation, an "inability to love" either the Jewish other or the German self (20). Of course, she builds here on the influential book by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (1967). In each of four chapters, Mueller shows how, in works by first-, second-, and third-generation postwar writers, the inability to love is passed down from generation to generation because of an incapacity to come to terms with the past.

The first chapter examines works from each generation of postwar writers: Günther Grass's Im Krebsgang (2002), Martin Walser's Tod eines Kritikers (2002), Bernhard Schlink's "Das Mädchen mit der Eidechse" (2000), and Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper (2003). Mueller argues that Im Krebsgang and Tod eines Kritikers both revolve around symbolic murders of a Jewish male by a non-Jewish German male, interpreting these violent acts as representative of the absence of Jews in postwar German literature. She identifies a similar absence even in the younger writers' works. In Schlink's story, for instance, the only Jewish "character" is a figure in a painting that is later burned by the narrator. Likewise, Dückers's novel also emphasizes the plight of the narrator's grandparents at the expense of exploring the fate of victims of the Holocaust. Mueller argues that the novel encompasses "a void of the memory of Jews so vast and intense that it leads not only to the erasure of the memory of the Jews … but it also propagates a filling of this void—with German memories" (44).

Mueller builds on this insight in the remainder of her book, which explores tropes and stereotypes that distort the representation of Jewishness. She interrogates the gendered tropes of the belle Juive and the Jewish mother. In Schlink's story "Die Beschneidung" (2000), for instance, the American girlfriend of the narrator appears as a beautiful but unsettling seductress whom the German male ultimately fails to understand and love. Similarly, when reading Peter Schneider's Eduards Heimkehr (1999), Mueller offers an interpretation of Eduard's wife as a beautiful Jewish woman whose inability to orgasm threatens Eduard's confidence. In Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau (2007), Mueller argues that the figure of the Jewish mother appears "disturbing, negative, and deranged" (68). Rather than representing an excess of love, as in popular cultural stereotypes, Franck's mother figures suffer from an inability to love (68).

The third chapter specifically examines representations of masculinity. In "Die Beschneidung" and in Susanne Riedel's Eine Frau aus Amerika (2003), Mueller argues that German, non-Jewish masculinity is threatened when confronted with the female, Jewish other. On the other hand, she finds that in Die Mittagsfrau and Katharina Hacker's Die Habenichtse (2006) Jewish men are depicted as different, emasculated, or absent. Such stereotypes displace the locus of suffering onto the German masculine subject, which accords with the absence of the Jewish experience that Mueller has identified.

Finally, Mueller explores America as a space for the displaced other in recent novels. This chapter is thought provoking, but also a bit chaotic, as she links the nineteenth-century Karl May with postunification authors, while also mentioning numerous examples that challenge her argument. Mueller acknowledges that German cultural discourse contains conflicting images of America but strives to tease out how...