Magnificent Rebels

April 1, 2022

Author of The Invention of Nature, a New York Times best seller that grabbed 15 literary awards worldwide, Wulf looks back at the German poets, philosophers, and intellectuals who launched Romanticism (think Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel, not to mention the influential Caroline Schlegel) to understand our absorption with the self today. Not just for the philosophizing set.

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July 25, 2022
Historian Wulf (The Invention of Nature) delivers an engrossing group biography of the late-18th-century German intellectuals whose “obsession with the free self” initiated the Romantic movement and led to the modern conception of self-determination. The group, which came together in the German university town of Jena, included poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who promulgated the idea of the Ich, or self, as the center of free will; Friedrich Schiller, whose breakout play, The Robbers, “showed how a good person could become a criminal as a result of experiencing injustice”; and philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who promoted “being in nature” as a means to self-discovery. Known as the Young Romantics, their lives and work embodied the “wild, raw, mysterious, chaotic, and alive,” according to group member August Wilhelm Schelling. Wulf pays particular attention to the cohort’s oft-overlooked female members, including Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a free-spirited intellectual with a “core of steel” whose “refus to be restricted by the role that society had intended for women” landed her in prison, among other controversies. Wulf also delves into the influence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars on the group and explains heady philosophical concepts in clear prose (“Is the tree that I’m seeing in my garden the tree-as-it-appears-to-us or the tree-in-itself?”). The result is a colorful and page-turning intellectual history.

Starred review from August 1, 2022
A spirited re-creation of the world of the German founders of the post-Enlightenment movement. Following on her excellent biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, Wulf reconstructs the intellectual circle of the German town of Jena, which Caroline B�hmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a local "translator, literary critic and muse," called "the Kingdom of Philosophy." The reigning spirit of that circle was, perhaps arguably, the eminent writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe--arguably because his pals played snarky games behind his back, one calling him an "old worn-out demigod," and because his real home was nearby Weimar, not Jena. "The Jena Set" would do their squabbling English romantic successors proud: A new argument or schism was always brewing, sometimes over matters of philosophy and sometimes over personality, as with the split between the Schlegel and Schiller clans. "As her dislike grew, Charlotte Schiller began to advise others to fumigate their rooms once Caroline Schlegel had left," writes Wulf of one episode in the feud, while August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote in a letter to a friend, "People hate us--good! They curse us--even better! They make the sign of the cross to ward us off like blasphemers, Jacobins, and corrupters of youth--God be praised!" For all the rancor, Wulf notes, the productivity of the Jena circle was astounding: dozens of philosophical tomes (especially Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit), natural-history treatises, poems, and, from Goethe, long-in-the-making works such as Faust. Indeed, "The Jena Set's ideas rippled out from the small town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar to the wider world," championed in Britain by Coleridge and Carlyle and by Thoreau and Emerson in the U.S. Many of their fruitful ideas remain: nature as a living thing, art as a way of uniting humans with nature, and, against the background of the Napoleonic Wars, their insistence on individual rights. An illuminating exploration of the life of the mind and the sometimes-fraught production of art.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
Wulf's quest "to understand why we are who we are" inspired her highly awarded, best-selling The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World (2015), which led her to the small German university town of Jena. There, in the 1790s, in the shuddering aftermath of the French Revolution as France and Germany were at war, an extraordinary group of radical thinkers and poets questioned the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and considered the significance of the individual. Philosopher Fichte's emphasis on the primacy of the self inspired the Jena Set to elevate the imagination, define nature as a living "interconnected whole," assert that art is as important for navigating life as science, transform literature, and claim personal freedom. Wulf anchors every evolving aspect of this new paradigm to exceptionally well-informed and vital profiles of the "First Romantics," including the protean Goethe, poets Schiller and Novalis, the literary-critic Schlegel brothers, the von Humboldt brothers (Wilhelm a linguist and diplomat), and philosopher Schelling, chronicling their complex personalities, accomplishments, "intellectual symbiosis," and often-contentious relationships within remarkably detailed settings and social and cultural contexts. Wulf is particularly attuned to Caroline B�hmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a "writer, translator, literary critic and muse" of exceptional magnetism and intellectual power. An extensively researched, gorgeously written, vibrant, multifaceted, and richly elucidative portrait of a group that "changed our world."

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