By Andrea Wulf, this was published in 2022. And the subtitle hoisted me on board immediately: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

I did a lot of work on German Romanticism during my undergrad years, and its ideas continued to intrigue and influence me long afterwards. So I was very keen not only to revisit this fascinating, shape-shifting world, but also to get a taste of the intervening 40-odd years of scholarship, during which period my intellectual focus has been in totally different places.

The first aim was realized more fully than the second.

Andrea Wulf was born in India, and moved to Germany as a child. So her mother-tongue is German. But she shifted to the UK in her late twenties, and now writes in English: "I sometimes feel that I was born into the wrong language," she says. "English liberated me -- German is incredibly precise but English is so much more descriptive." Interesting...

Magnificent Rebels covers the period from 1794 to 1806, so we're dealing with the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon (which puts it just before the period recounted in Bosnian Chronicle).

You can read a fairly detailed summary by the author here. But essentially she examines the extraordinary explosion of intellectual talent that took place in Jena, a small town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar (eastern Germany), over the period of those few years.

The figures that came together there form a who's who of German intellectual stardom: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Friedrich Schiller (there are a bewildering number of Friedrichs, so pay attention); August Wilhelm Schlegel; Caroline Schlegel (August Wilhem's wife, who later married Friedrich Schelling, another of the Jena Set); Friedrich Schlegel (August Wilhelm's brother); Dorothea Schlegel (Friedrich's wife); Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Alexander von Humboldt; Wilhelm von Humboldt (Alexander's older brother); Caroline von Humboldt (Wilhelm's wife); Friedrich von Hardenberg, aka Novalis; Ludwig Tieck; Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel; Friedrich Hoelderlin; and Friedrich Schleiermacher (never actually a Jena resident, but a regular correspondent). This group included poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, literary critics, translators, and scientists.


G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), The Hegel-Haus Museum, Stuttgart, 2023

Why Jena? A university town of some 4,500 inhabitants, it was a place of books, a place of transience, and most importantly, a place with a liberal atmosphere that attracted progressive thinkers (Germany would not be a unified country for many more decades, and fragmentation made censorhsip laws difficult to enforce). This environment facilitated the coming together of the "Jena Set", as Wulf calls them. Their ideas bounced off one another in a supremely fertile and synergistic way. Ground-breaking, and highly influential, their "symphilosophizing" (as they described their collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts) swept on out to the rest of Europe, and eventually further afield.

Most were bold and flamboyant individuals; many were ready to flout all kinds of conventions, whether religious, moral, or epistemological. The intellectual furore they created is fascinating.

It's also an epochal period. These people were born into an era of despotism and inequality. From 1789 onwards, they had watched the unfolding of the French Revolution, and then the rise of Napoleon. At many points during the time this book covers, the French are busy conquering bits of Germany (Jena itself ultimately falls, and we see Napoleon sleeping in what used to be Goethe's bed). Germans are divided. Whom to support? Your "people", or the better, more liberal, ideas of others (a choice that becomes even trickier when Napoleon embarks on a path to dictatorship)?


I'd recently wondered which part of Germany I'd like to spend more time in, if the opportunity ever arose. The Jena region seems perfect...

It is also a time when the Enlightenment, hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution, has made life faster, more predictable, and more utilitarian. Romanticism is notoriously amorphous and hard to define, but the movement arose as a reaction against the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. It prides itself on its dynamism and progressiveness; embraces the holistic and the synergistic; likes to blur boundaries; connects passionately with the natural world; is fascinated by human freedom, the role of the "self", and the possibility of self-exploration; elevates imagination to a starring role in the intellectual firmament (reason alone can never be enough); and tries to opens our minds to the magic and wonder of the world around us. Romanticism contrasts with "classicism": "In contrast to the strict rules of ancient poetry, August Wilhelm defined the new romantic movement as wild, raw, mysterious, chaotic and alive."


Romanticism is a fuzzy concept

It's a wildly exciting story, and Wulf tells it well. But it's also a sad tale. Floating around with the creativity was plenty of arrogance, jealousy, disloyalty, hypocrisy, and general nastiness, and many of the protagonists end up monumentally at each other's throats. In some ways, the majority of these characters are an object lesson in how NOT to live, and what NOT to do with your freedom... Eventually, they all go their separate ways. Many die young. Many are subject to depression. Many fall foul of the bizarre medical practice of the time.

Wulf's is a highly readable style. She just races you along. You wouldn't think a work of history/philosophy could be a page-turner, but it really is. It's a tad repetitive in places, and occasionally tips over just that bit too far into a novelistic tone. But you forgive that, because it's well researched, and correctly (and accessibly) referenced.

Frederick Beiser, in a rather negative review, classifies Magnificent Rebels as "Kulturkitsch" -- "a lesser manifestation of intellectual history... a popular introduction to a sphere of culture whose attractions are simplification of intellectual content and anecdotes about the personal lives of its creators". Ouch...

For my part, I loved her wealth of pithy contemporary detail. For example:

-- 25 per cent of the births in Jena were illegitimate, compared with just 2 per cent elsewhere;
-- Germans were "fanatical readers"; by 1790 there were 6,000 published writers in Germany; and the market for books was four to five times bigger than its equivalent in England;
-- Goethe and Schiller enjoyed a most productive and mutually inspirational friendship;
-- And what a very nice human being Goethe seems to be, really the best of the bunch; and how interested he was in science; plus he was Duke Carl August's privy councillor, really quite the official;
-- Schiller hated to travel anywhere; the world out there might be exciting, "but I also feel comfortable in my hazelnut shell" (and he worked best in the presence of rotting apples, a detail I think I vaguely recall from undergrad days...);
-- Novalis studied at the mining academy in Freiberg, and actually worked in the mines, which seems so at odds with his beautiful exterior and his delicate poetry -- and yet the dark womb of the earth fed his imagination, and his voyage into himself, so it does make sense;
-- How extraordinarily sexist these supposedly free-thinking men are...;
-- Wilhelm von Humboldt studied Malay, and was the first to establish the linkages among the Austronesian languages that stretch from Madagascar to the Pitcairns;


Malay...

-- Madame de Stael promoted Romanticism across the world;
-- Lord Byron, that inveterate haunter of my blog pages, met A.W. Schegel in 1816 (the same year in which Mary Shelley -- influenced by the experiments of Alexander von Humboldt and the ideas of Galvanism -- wrote Frankenstein, in the Villa Diodati, just across Lac Leman from Madame de Stael's pad);
-- Etc.


Lac Leman, 2023

All very informative, then. But I had issues with both elements of Wulf's subtitle.

The smaller concern was the idea of "the first Romantics", and I was a bit dubious about her classification. Including Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel? But people can argue -- and have argued -- over vast tracts of page and screen about that kind of stuff. In a sense, it doesn't really matter.


Hegel: "... that this fear of being in error is already the error itself"

"The invention of the self", though...? I was from the beginning a little sceptical of the larger story she was telling. Is this really where the "self" began? Surely the idea of free will is much older?

It's true that Fichte himself said of his Wissenschaftslehre: "I believe that my system belongs to this [the French] nation. It is the first system of freedom... My first principle establishes man as an independent being. My system arose through an inner struggle with myself and against rooted prejudices in those years that the French struggled with outer force for their political freedom."

But Beiser feels she misunderstands and over-emphasizes Fichte. I'm not really qualified to judge on this.

On the macro-level, I feel Wulf deals with important debates in a very readable way: How we know things (the "realist", empirical, inductive approach versus the "idealist", theoretical, deductive one); how our self (the Ich) relates to the non-self (the non-Ich), and the ways in which philosophers' understanding of that relationship developed over time; how freedom relates to responsibilty; how philosophy relates to art; how science relates to art... Inevitably, in a book of this length and type, there will be simplifications.

But I see where Beiser is coming from with this critique: "She struggles to find a unifying theme for all her authors; but 'the invention of the self' is a post-modernist cliché which does not apply to the romantics. Wulf’s great strength is her narrative skills; but her great weakness is philosophy, where she lacks the basics of conceptual rigor and analysis."

Anthony Curtis Adler agrees: "[The book] wants to ask the big question -- 'why we are who we are.'... It is, however, precisely in addressing this grander question that Magnificent Rebels fails most magnificently. While Fichte’s radical attempt to ground Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in the self-and-other-positing 'I' is reduced to a caricature, this very caricature carries Wulf’s entire argument: it justifies her in conceiving the self as an invention, and of understanding the egoism and narcissism of her extravagant characters as practical Fichteanism."

Perhaps it is these wobbly foundations that account for the failure to really nail the flip-side to all this freedom and self-expression, which involves responsibility and an awareness of the wider community. Wulf brings up the question, but leaves it hanging: "The Jena Set gave wings to our minds. How we use them is entirely up to us." A quick discussion of subsequent strands of philosopy, which aim to help us ponder that dilemma, would have been useful.

While covering a wide range of cultural movements that were clearly influenced by Romanticism, she leaves out a couple of very obvious contenders: The French Symbolists (Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, for example, or Charles Baudelaire); and Nazism (there's one slightly oblique reference here, but not much discussion). She also bypasses two others that would be interesting to analyse further, namely, postmodernism (again, there's a quick reference, in the context of Novalis's Hymns to the Night, but no engagement), as well as its monster offspring, which is the whole sloppy, woolly mindset that underpins many of today's social idiocies (Brooke Allen puts it like this: "The denigration of Enlightenment principles and the acceptance of subjective feeling as 'truth' have proved exceedingly dangerous; their ill effects can instantly be perceived with even a cursory glance at the media, social or otherwise. While Alexander von Humboldt has shown a way forward that we can still profit from in managing, or trying to manage, our world, Fichte and the other Jena philosophers released Furies that have yet to be appeased. And Wulf, intent on celebrating the group, never quite confronts the darker side of its legacy")...

Ultimately, this book succeeded, though. Inspired by its stories, I'll definitely be dipping back into those Romantic waters that fascinated me as a much younger person. That is a tribute all by itself.