The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.
The Inability to Loveborrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark bookThe Inability to Mourn,which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.
Agnes C. Mueller is a professor of German at the University of South Carolina. She is the editor ofGerman Pop Culture: How “American” Is It?(2004).
Introduction
Chapter I
Absence: Guilt and Shame
Chapter II
Femininity, theBelle Juive, and the “Jewish Mother”
Chapter III
Masculinities and the Body
Chapter IV
Jews and Germans in AmlSe
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