Wulf takes you by the hand and leads you through the streets and lecture theatres (and gardens) of Jena. She
balances setting the historical and political context, providing useful introductions to the ideas and work of the protagonists, and providing an intimate, gossipy account of their lives. It’s a relief to know that, for all their cleverness, the Jena set were subject to the same petty feuds and jealousies as the rest of us!

Long time ago I got a grant to study German in Stuttgart. Stuttgart is not the hometown of German Romanticism but it's a place where there's a lot of memories of Hegel and Schiller.
This book was fascinating as it's well researched but never dry or dull. You meet the early German Romantics and you can feel their charm and their strength.
I'm not one of their fan but I would have like to live in Jena at the beginning of XIX century.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Obviously on one level all biographies take place in the same shared world, but this feels a lot like an expanded universe for Wulf's earlier, excellent biography of Alexander von Humboldt. Who does feature here, but is very much the expensive guest star, turning up "driven by fretful energy as if chased by '10,000 pigs'" (no mere 30-50 feral hogs here), enlivening Goethe more than the animals on whom the pair of them delightedly experiment, and as such, deeply pissing off the resentful Izzy Hands of the piece: "Alexander would never accomplish anything great, Schiller wrote, because he was interested in too many things." That so, Schiller? How many penguins are named after you, then? Oh? How about squid? Yeah, thought so. Loser. But as I say, that's very much a guest spot; the Humboldt who plays an ongoing role is his brother, Wilhelm, one of a few figures here who aren't necessarily major players in their own rights – someone who wasn't that brilliant a writer, but who'd ask the right questions, make the right connections, to enhance the work being done by those around him. Brian Eno's term 'scenius' doesn't appear in Magnificent Rebels, which is probably for the best, but encapsulates its theme – those moments when a group of talented individuals convene, interact, argue through the night, probably fuck, and end up producing something greater than the sum of the parts. But for Wulf, while the Jena set who kicked off Romanticism in Germany can be compared to the likes of the North American Transcendentalists or the Bloomsbury Set, they're even more important. In a personal foreword she argues, convincingly, that compared to the pre-Jena world where your ruler could decide your residence, your faith, your job and even your relationships, "We still think with their minds, see with their imaginations and feel with their emotions." Too few of us, you might reply, but it's true at least to the extent that the retrograde scum have learned to talk in the language of rights and conscience even as they subvert them.

What really impresses, though, is that where that open investment could easily have kicked off a personal journey kind of book, Wulf thereafter ducks behind the curtain, serving as an expert but invisible guide to the people among whom she takes us. She explains why it was Jena specifically where this all happened – how while it still felt mediaeval in terms of architecture, being in the centre of Germany made it a crossroads, and in turn how while France, Spain and England had colonies, and America the West, "everything in Germany was small, splintered and inward-looking" – but this coming with the result that Germans had more appetite for travelling in words; as the 18th century closed, it was the world's most literate country, which combined with population size to make for "the German book trade enjoying a market four to five times larger than that in England". And then, back to Jena specifically, how the large proportion of students made it bohemian by default: "a staggering quarter of all births in Jena were illegitimate, compared to just two per cent elsewhere in the German territories." Also, more leeway, so people in trouble elsewhere in Germany gravitated there; four different duchies had to agree on rules, making them tough to enact and enforce. This in contrast to England's two hidebound universities, or the horribly practical 'ecoles speciales' with which revolutionary France had replaced its own. Whereas in Jena, well: "'A person,' the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte shouted from the lectern during his first lecture in Jena, 'should be self-determined, never letting himself be defined by anything external'." Fichte, by this account, is the knot around which the rest of the group aggregates, and if you look at that statement and consider its implications inhumane, then you're not wrong. But compared to some of the nastier turns libertarianism has taken, or the witless celebrity philosophers of subsequent ages (and yes, I'm still laughing at Jordan Peterson's meat coma), it was at least a necessary corrective to a society where the default expectation was that you be a good little cog in the machine and – the big difference to now – not pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, some of Fichte's limitations were clear from the off; even his fans admitted the writing wasn't as good as the lectures, and it's not just the modern or British reader who might be inclined to take the piss; Goethe would begin letters "Dear non-Ich'. On top of which, because apparently the world only has one university story, Fichte had to contend with fratboy bullying and mean girls ignoring his unfashionable wife. Regarding whom, it's worth noting that the whole self-determined Ich bit was strictly for guys, with women still firmly in a helpmeet role as far as Fichte is concerned. Quelle surprise, you might say, especially since it's the 1790s, but one of the things Wulf is great at bringing out is the gradations in thinking within the set, the amount on which they disagreed, even during the period when they were palling around together. That might apply to ethics, as here with feminism, or with free love, where some were fine with it, some weren't, and of course some were up to a point but come on lads, a joke's a joke... It might apply to philosophy in its more abstruse reaches, Goethe the realist arguing with Schiller the idealist; or to personality, the former "easy going, intuitive and relaxed", the latter tense and given to overthinking. And crucially, these are not discrete categories; the beliefs and the manner and the ways of living their lives all bear on each other, all adding up to precisely that unconstrained selfhood which so fascinated them. No detail which might express that is too small, right down to the immaculate handwriting of August Wilhelm Schlegel versus the tumbling script of his brother Friedrich. Differences which, while times were good, helped all of them to firm up their thoughts and the expression thereof.

Speaking of the Schlegels, though; they were among several participants here where I knew the name, and that was about it. Possibly because it's one of the few to appear in Monty Python's song but not Bertrand Russell's History. So I hadn't even known there were two of them, or three if you count Caroline Bohmer-Schlegel-Schelling, sometime romantic interest of both brothers, and a key player here both intellectually (she didn't publish under her own name, but her contributions as writer and editor were invaluable) and, for better and worse, socially. Another is Novalis, and if Humboldt is the big star popping up here to give the franchise a boost, Novalis is very much the supporting character whose crazy antics prove so popular with the audience that they keep being brought back, always guaranteed to be having a normal one. We first meet him as his fiancee Sophie awaits medical attention from one Dr Stark, who would never tell people in advance when he was operating (lest they worry), had no idea about germs or disinfection (because who did?), and thought half a dozen leeches up the bum would generally do the trick. He was the best medic in the region. When Novalis met Sophie, she was 12, which even at the time was thought to be pushing it; and when Stark's ministrations unaccountably failed to save Sophie, Novalis took the obvious course of action and tried to top himself, except that he concluded guns, poison &c were for lightweights who didn't really mean it, so he was going to commit suicide using only the power of his mind. Despite that not working out, we subsequently find him attempting to concoct the chemical cure for physicality – which, charitably, probably didn't seem much madder at the time than some of Humboldt's electrical explorations; the difference is, Novalis still sounds just as bonkers now. At one point he plans on "spending his entire life working on one novel – never completed, forever being written, infinitely evolving", something a few writers have done, but seldom deliberately; instead he comes out with Faith And Love, by which "the Prussian king had been so confused that he couldn't work out whether to censor it." Here he talked about the Dark Ages as not in fact a dark age like you think, aaaaaah, but a time of light since lost, "a spiritual community 'which paid no attention to natural borders'. Certainly a take on mediaeval history, isn't it? And yet, like the proverbial stopped clock, it was Novalis who spotted the loneliness of Fichte's Ich, the way that he ignored love, which turned the Ich into a You (and yes, the mixed English/German there is a little inconsistent, but perhaps because Wulf is herself (at least) bilingual, in her telling it works).

And so the larger than life cast gather, their foibles (to Goethe's understandable dismay, Schiller kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his desk, finding the scent inspirational) magnified by the quiet, agrarian Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. The ultimate small-town scene, in other words, though one must remember this was a very different Germany, with Prussian, military Berlin considered "a cultural and intellectual wasteland" (Humboldt, a native, described it as a "dancing carnivalesque necropolis", which sounds awesome to me, though apparently was not intended as a compliment). In Saxe-Weimar things were very different, thanks in large part to Duke Carl August as mostly supportive overlord, not least in beginning as a fan of Goethe and going on to make him both a privy councillor and a mate. Goethe in turn serving as an elder statesman to the Schlegels, Schiller et al, not least in being the one who tried his best to remain on good terms with all sides when, as inevitably happens, the break-up begins. Because just as biographies only ever end one way, so too group biographies. OK, maybe one of two ways for the group ones, but neither is good, and in some ways death is less dispiriting. There are deaths here, which do much to seal the dissolution, but by that point the fellowship is already broken, the Schlegels and Schiller having spectacularly fallen out, not least over the periodical Horen, which first crystallised the group and then fractured it. Arguments grow more bitter, then multiply; things are said which can't be walked back. By the turn of the century everything is going wrong, in ways very reminiscent of the cocaine phase that afflicts the successful in more recent years, despite the fact cocaine wasn't really a thing in Europe yet. Fichte finally pushes the local spirit of toleration too far; Schelling demands to be allowed to review his own work, because who could be better placed to assess it? Friedrich Schlegel in particular becomes a monstrously fat, rude bullshitter, getting advances for work never delivered, sponging off long-suffering friends, even falling out with his brother over a borrowed house trashed by wild parties. The chapter covering events in the year from Spring 1801 is titled "When philosophers start eating one another like starving rats", if anything too kind a description of the increasingly abstruse and vicious rows between Fichte and Schelling, the only note of levity provided by the title of Fichte's A Report Clear As Daylight (which, spoiler, wasn't). By the time letters are insinuating that "as a friend it is my duty to warn against those who are not true friends", these supposedly great minds might as well be telling each other "Too many snakes out there hun". And of course, it echoes, because biographer's hindsight reminds the reader that we each have times, seldom noticed as they happen, that will be the last we speak to a dear friend, and who among us can't feel for Caroline, years later, when she writes "What I miss, and Schelling too, is how every night the door would open and we would see a couple of familiar faces."

But of course, just because a scene is over, doesn't mean people won't still be trying to get involved, and if Goethe was the forerunner, the hopeless latecomer here is Hegel, turning up in 1801 after the party is over. To some extent it's unclear why he even bothered; the others may have had their differences, but when Wulf says Hegel had decided it was "time to rid philosophy of enthusiasm, imagination and feeling", surely that's the opposite to what the Jena group were about? This is a man who, travelling through the Alps, wasn't interested in the grandeur of the landscape, only the mechanics of making Swiss cheese – and understand when I scorn this that I have been reading Magnificent Rebels in tandem with A Cheesemonger's History Of The British Isles. Hegel is also notable as giving us the most spectacular expression of a subplot which runs through the book for ages before finally seizing the foreground. Because as you may recall, there were a few other things happening in Europe as the 18th century gave way to the 19th. And indeed, the book trailed this early on with Caroline imprisoned on account of her dalliance with the French Revolution. A movement whose ideals many of the Jena thinkers supported, but of course it wasn't long before those ideals were a little dimmed by the torrents of blood, and as has been the case with intellectuals and revolution ever since, there was some difficulty in deciding how much that mattered. Similarly, just as purported friends of liberty frequently seem to find themselves wanking over murderous strongmen, so a lot of these people who should have known better seemed to celebrate Napoleon far too ardently for far too long. For some, he had brought back law and order after the anarchy into which the Revolution had descended; for others, he was an eleutheriarch. Few of them seemed to twig that in fact, he was just the bad old absolutism come round again in a slightly different outfit. Eventually, in scenes which I would have found heavy-handed in fiction, Jena is overwhelmed by more soldiers than the whole pre-war population of the province; the parks where the friends walked are denuded, the rooms in which they held their salons become field hospitals. Hegel barely saved the manuscript of his Phenomonology Of Spirit from the wanton destruction Napoleon's men unleashed in Jena, which preceded a new era of militarism and censorship. Despite all of which, said book hailed Bonaparte as ushering in a new epoch of liberty, an "end of history" which should surely see Hegel as permanently and universally mocked as his heir Fukuyama. But hey, Fukuyama still gets pundit gigs too, somehow, so what do I know?

Despite that ignominious ending, though, something survived. Not all of it good – Fichte promoting a German national Ich instead would have dire consequences over the next couple of centuries. But that central if sometimes hard to define notion of Romanticism, of perceiving the world as a whole, much as Humboldt was doing with ecology – those seeds would bear fruit. After centuries in which Shakespeare was often subject to Procrustean revisions because he breached supposed laws of drama, the Jena set provided crucial intellectual backing for the notion that his "victory of free nature over the rule" was the heart of his greatness, not a flaw in it. Coleridge, who had tried to visit Jena but mucked up his budget, would play a key role here, contenting himself with ripping off whole chunks of the group's writing instead, something of which Hawthorne and Poe were also guilty. After Friedrich and Schlegel had done some judicious tidying of Novalis' work and legacy, he would provide a template for the doomed young genius. Entertainingly, Wulf puts much of the responsibility for this dissemination with August Wilhelm who, after he finally split up with Caroline, demonstrated that some people never learn by once again getting himself into the orbit of someone impossibly demanding from whom he wasn't getting any, the glamorous, exhausting Mme de Stael. Whose writings about the group, despite Napoleon's attempts to destroy them (such a great liberator!), were key in bringing them to the attention of a world beyond the now-devastated small town where they once argued, loved and wrote.

(Netgalley ARC)