The history of Jewish-German relations has long been described in terms of an unhappy or failed love affair. Why? Does describing such a fraught sociological and political topic in terms of an emotional relationship reduce it to sentimentality? This is the starting point for Katja Garloff's nuanced and complex study Mixed Feelings, in which she delves into over two centuries of discourse of Jewish-German relations and various text types that use iterations of love to reflect the strain and potential of Jewish integration into German society.

Over 187 pages, Garloff takes a closer look at seventeen different texts and references numerous others. The two major sections are anchored in pivotal moments in Jewish-German relations: the year 1800, straddled by burgeoning emancipation in the late eighteenth century and integration in the early nineteenth century; and the year 1900, around which swirl debates about Jewish assimilation into German society, political and religious Zionism, and the serious onset of racial antisemitic politics on a national level. The conclusion briefly sketches out how Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and Barbara Honigmann (born 1949) viewed Jewish-German relations after 1945, and the book closes with reflection, vis-à-vis Honigmann's work, on an unfulfilled German-Jewish-Turkish dialogue.

In the two primary sections, Garloff traces the use of tropes of love, ranging from filial to romantic to neighbor love, between Jews and non-Jews in German-language texts from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, demonstrating how the use of the trope reflects larger aesthetic, political, and sociological issues of a given era while making the sustained case for two radically divergent expectations of love. Non-Jewish German-language writers view love as “totalizing”: love erases differences to create a bond (13). For Jewish German-language writers, however, love is a bond that accepts and maintains difference. Hence numerous German-language Jewish authors, whatever their position on intermarriage and assimilation, make the case for Jews to be accepted as Jews, without erasing their religious or cultural distinctiveness, while non-Jewish German-language writers make their case for or against Jewish integration, emphasizing the erasure of difference. Garloff defines these divergent understandings of love by way of Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) and Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and draws on Kenneth Reinhard's explanation of the terms ger (stranger) and reaʿ (neighbor) in Leviticus. The thwarted, ambiguous, and failed loves she then elucidates review the well-known antisemitic argument (for example in the work of Achim von Arnim, 1781–1831) that interfaith (sometimes understood as “interracial”) love must fail because Jews must and never can erase their difference and highlight a different reading for the more numerous pro-integration writers: unfulfilled love opens a potential space to rethink Jewish-German relations. Whatever disruption leads to the failure isolates some aspect of the social and political framework that needs rethinking.

The book is at its strongest in Garloff's close readings. The comparisons of Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), and of Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (1799) and Dorothea Schlegel's (née Brendel Mendelssohn) Florentin (1801) insightfully show the two parallel trajectories of love against their respective historical backdrops. Mendelssohn is pro-integration but against intermarriage, which would historically necessitate the conversion of the Jewish spouse; instead, he suggests that “brotherly” love through common civic responsibility should make space for Jews as Jews. Lessing is likewise pro-integration, and even posits the potential for successful interfaith romantic love; the potential couple in Lessing's play, however, can never come to be—not because of their religious difference, but because they are revealed to be siblings, marking the easy transition from one kind of love to the other. The key to this family attachment is the emphasis on similarity rather than making space for difference. The case for Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel's works as relevant to the intermarriage and integration discussion is on more speculative ground, because the lovers in each work are never specifically identified as non-Jewish or Jewish. Garloff owns this speculation and makes a strong case for the ambiguous identity of the characters as representative and symptomatic of the aesthetics and politics of the era. She then shows how Friedrich Schlegel's couple emphasizes the erasure of difference in the process of creating the ideal Romantic love, whereas Dorothea Schlegel's characters demonstrate that it is the push to erase difference in pursuit of union that prevents fulfillment. Another standout example is Garloff's new reading of Else Lasker-Schüler's “The Wonder-Working Rabbi of Barcelona” (1921). Read alongside her preceding explication of Franz Rosenzweig's concept of “revelatory love” as neighbor love in his Star of Redemption (1921), Garloff argues that Lasker-Schüler's story critiques a Christian understanding of revelation and “suggests that this concept is implicated in the antisemitism that suppresses revelatory love and the new forms of community such love entails” (165).

Those familiar with Jewish German history may wonder why Heinrich Heine, the poster child of the struggle of Jews to integrate, is absent from this study. Garloff explains that she has “bracketed” the mid-nineteenth century, “a period in which literary representations of interreligious romance became more numerous and more openly political” (93), which is to say, her chosen task is to focus more on the tidal shifts than periods of stasis. Garloff asserts that the various texts about failed love affairs “generated new models of group relations that did not necessarily come to fruition at the time but that can serve as an inspiration in today's debates about pluralism and multiculturalism” (3). This is a tantalizing observation that remains unexcavated in the work, but that may well have taken this broad-spectrum study too far afield. The wide-ranging scope of Mixed Feelings makes it a solid introduction to the topic of Jewish-German relations for the newcomer. The consistent signposting throughout the book is particularly welcome, given the diverse perspectives and definitions of love represented; this also makes the book potentially suitable for classroom use. For scholars of the discourse on Jewish-German relations, Mixed Feelings offers a fresh and insightful look at a familiar topic.