The Demystification of Love

Sentiment, Practicality, and the Body in Turn-of-theCentury Berlin

Abstract

English Abstract: This essay explores corporeality and the search for love at the turn of the twentieth century, when newspaper personal ads offered an anonymous, disembodied, rationalized, and seemingly “modern” and more efficient method of finding a mate. It demonstrates that bodies were, at every turn, surprisingly stubborn in the face of this supposed rationalization and in fact complicated the attempts of self-consciously modern individuals to disembody and de-sentimentalize the search for love. In this way, corporeality and, indeed, the body itself subverted what was potentially emerging as a “modern” affective regime. The essay then traces this triad dynamic of corporeality, rationalization, and affect into the 1920s—vis-à-vis war invalids and transvestites—and up to the digital world of the twenty-first century, when love and bodies interact in strikingly similar ways.