The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

 

Arrival
 
Now at last we’ve overcome all the obstacles in our path, and left them behind us too, on rails as smooth as the ones you’ve been on for so long. And alongside yours, too. I’m unspeakably happy . . . and this valley is already a dear friend.
 
Caroline Schlegel to Luise Gotter, 11 July 1796
 
1
 
‘A happy event’
 
Summer 1794: Goethe and Schillers
 
On 20 July 1794 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe heaved himself into the saddle and rode from his house in the centre of Weimar to Jena, where he planned to attend a botanical meeting of the recently founded Natural History Society. It was a hot summer that would soon turn into a glorious autumn – long sunbaked months during which pears, apples, sweet melons and apricots ripened four weeks early and the vineyards produced one of the century’s greatest vintages.
 
On the fifteen-mile ride from Weimar to Jena, Goethe passed farmers scything wheat in golden fields and great haystacks awaiting storage as winter fodder in the barns. After a couple of hours of riding through flat farmland, the countryside began to change. Little villages and hamlets snuggled into gentle dips, and then the forest closed in and the fields disappeared. The land became more hilly. Shellbearing limestone cliffs rose to the left, exposing the geological memory of the region when this part of Germany had been a landlocked sea some 240 million years ago. Just before he reached Jena, Goethe crossed the so called Snail, the steep hill named after the serpentine road that wound up to its top.
 
Then, finally, he saw Jena beneath him, nestled in a wide valley and held in the elbow of the Saale River with the jagged outline of the forested mountains behind. These were more hills than mountains, perhaps, but the views were spectacular – and the reason why Swiss students in Jena lovingly called the surrounding area ‘little Switzerland’.
 
Goethe was the Zeus of Germany’s literary circles. Born in Frankfurt in 1749 to a wealthy family, he had grown up amidst comfort and privilege. His maternal grandfather had been the mayor of Frankfurt and his paternal grandfather had made his wealth as a merchant and tailor. Goethe’s father didn’t have to work and had instead managed his fortunes, collected books and art, and educated his children. Though a lively and bright child, Goethe had not shown any excep-tional talents. He loved to draw, was proud of his immaculate handwriting and enjoyed the theatre. When the French had occupied Frankfurt in 1759 during the Seven Years War and their commander had been billeted at the Goethes’ house, young Goethe had made the best of it by learning French from the occupying forces.
 
He had studied law in Leipzig and worked as a lawyer, but also began to write. In the mid-1770s he had been thrust into the public eye with the publication of his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther – the story of a forlorn lover who commits suicide. Goethe’s protagonist is irrational, emotional and free. ‘I withdraw into myself and find a world there,’ Werther declares. The novel captured the sentimentality of the time and became the book of a generation. A huge international bestseller, it was so popular that countless men, including Carl August, the ruler of the small Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed like Werther – wearing a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat with brass buttons, brown boots and a round grey felt hat. Chinese manufacturers even produced Werther porcelain for the European market.
 
It was said that Werther had caused a wave of suicides, and forty years after its publication the British poet Lord Byron joked with Goethe that his protagonist ‘has put more individuals out of this world than Napoleon himself ’. The Sorrows of Young Werther had been Goethe’s most vivid contribution to the so-called Sturm und Drang – the Storm and Stress movement – which had elevated feelings above the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In this period, which had celebrated emotion in all its extremes, from passionate love to dark melancholy, from suicidal longings to frenzied delight, Goethe had become a literary superstar.
 
The eighteen-year-old Duke Carl August had been so enraptured by the novel that he had invited Goethe to live and work in the duchy in 1775. Goethe was twenty-six when he moved to Weimar; and he knew how to make an entry, arriving dressed in his Werther uniform. During those early years the poet and the young duke had roistered through the streets and taverns of the town. They had played pranks on unsuspecting locals and flirted with peasant girls. The duke loved to gallop across the fields and to sleep in hay barns or camp in the forest. There had been drunken brawls, theatrical declarations of love, naked swimming and nightly tree climbing – but those wild years were long gone and Goethe had turned his back on his Sturm und Drang phase.
 
In time, both poet and ruler calmed down, and Goethe had become part of the duchy’s government. The small state had just over a hundred thousand inhabitants – tiny in comparison to the five million people of nearby Prussia, or other powerful states such as Saxony, Bavaria or Württemberg. With a mostly agrarian economy – grain, fruit, wine, vegetable gardens as well as sheep and cattle – the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar had little trade and manufacturing, yet it maintained a bloated court of two thousand courtiers, officials and soldiers, all of whom had to be paid. The town of Weimar itself had a provincial feel. Most of the seven hundred and fifty houses had only one storey and such small windows that they felt gloomy and cramped inside. The streets were dirty, and there were only two businesses in the market square that sold goods which could be classed as luxury items – a perfumery and a textile shop. There wasn’t even a stagecoach station.
 
Goethe became Carl August’s confidant and his privy councillor – so trusted that it was rumoured that the duke didn’t decide anything without the poet’s advice. In time, Goethe took charge of the royal theatre and of rebuilding the burned down castle in Weimar, in addition to several other well-paid administrative positions, including the control of the duchy’s mines. He also worked closely with his colleague in the Weimar administration, minister Christian Gottlob Voigt. A diligent worker, Goethe was never idle – ‘I never smoked tobacco, never played chess, in short, I never did anything that would have wasted my time.’

 
In 1794, Goethe was forty-four and no longer the dashing Apollo of his youth. He had put on so much weight that his once beautiful eyes had disappeared into the flesh of his cheeks and one visitor compared him to ‘a woman in the last stages of pregnancy’. His nose was aquiline, and like so many contemporaries, his teeth were yellowed and crooked. He had a penchant for stripy and flowery long waist-coats, which he buttoned tightly over his round belly. Unlike the younger generation, who often wore fashionable loose fitting trousers, Goethe preferred breeches. He wore boots with turned-down tops and always his tricorne. He kept his hair coiffed and powdered, with two carefully pomaded curls over his ears and a long, stiff ponytail. Knowing that everybody was watching him, he always made sure to be properly dressed and groomed when he went out. Ennobled by the duke in 1782, he was now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and lived in a large house in Weimar, where he often tried and failed to work amid a constant stream of strangers knocking on his door to gawp at the famous poet. He loathed these disruptions almost as much as he hated noise, in particular the rattling of his neighbour’s loom and the skittle alley in a nearby tavern.
 
Goethe might have turned his back on the Sturm und Drang era, but it seemed as if his creativity had done the same to him. For years he had failed to produce anything remarkable and his plays were no longer widely staged. He fussed over his writings for years. More than two decades earlier, he had begun to work on his drama Faust but only a few scenes had been published. He had rewritten and changed his tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris so many times – from prose to blank verse, back to prose, to its final version in classical iambic verse – that he called it his ‘problem child’. And though he was the director of the Weimar theatre, he preferred to stage popular plays by his contemporaries rather than his own.
 
Botany was now Goethe’s favourite subject, and the reason he often came to Jena. He was overseeing the construction of a new botanical garden and institute in Jena. Originally founded in 1548 as a medicinal garden, the university’s existing botanical garden had been used to train physicians, but Duke Carl August had asked Goethe to extend and move it to a new location, just north of the old town walls. Goethe enjoyed every aspect of the project because it united his deep love of nature and beauty with scientific rigour. He was looking forward to the meeting of the Natural History Society.
 
Excerpt from : Magnificent Rebels : The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

 

Penguin Random House

In the 1790s, an extraordinary group of friends led a revolution of the mind that still frames our way of being and living. This is their story.
 
Andrea Wulf’s unforgettable, Costa Prize winning The Invention of Nature transported us across the globe with one of the most extraordinary scientists who ever lived, Alexander Von Humboldt.
 
Now she is back with another story of German thinkers who changed the world – and whose ideas still matter profoundly to how we live today.
 
Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.
 
We’re still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
The first Romantics changed the world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

Video of lecture, The Conduit, London. 
 
 
The Conduit, September 2, 2022

An interview with acclaimed biographer Andrea Wulf on her thrilling, and timely, story of a group of friends who changed the world. Andrea is in conversation with broadcaster Kirsty Lang.
 
In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends from the small German town of Jena changed the world. They were the first Romantics, and their ideas transformed society and shaped the way we lead our lives today.
 
In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf, the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, tells the riveting story of this revolutionary band of poets, novelists and philosophers. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. And through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heart-breaking grief and radical ideas, they launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.
 
The lives of these Magnificent Rebels are as relevant today as ever as we, like they, walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community, and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
Andrea Wulf was born in India, moved to Germany as a child, and now lives in London. She is the award-winning author of five books. Her previous book, The Invention of Nature, was an international bestseller and won more than 10 awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016, Costa Biography Award 2015, the Inaugural James Wright Award for Nature Writing 2016 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016. Andrea has written for many newspapers including the Guardian, LA Times and New York Times. She was the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013 and a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She appears regularly on TV and radio.
 
Kirsty Lang is a writer, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent. A familiar voice on BBC Radio 4 Kirsty has been a presenter on Front Row, The World Tonight and Last Word. This year she took over as the first female host of the fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz, the longest running game show in Europe. She is also Chair of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Newcastle and a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Culture magazine.
 
5 x 15 Stories, September 6, 2022. 

Website Andrea Wulf

A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together.
 
Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. For a brief period, as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Jena had a claim to be the intellectual capital of Europe. The nation’s finest minds were gathered there.
 
It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls “the Jena set”, a group of mainly young writers and poets who came together in “this lovely crazy little corner of the world”, as Goethe described it.
 
At the core of the Jena set were the Schlegels, August Wilhelm and his wife, Caroline, who worked together on translating Shakespeare’s plays into German verse; Friedrich, August Wilhelm’s younger and more quarrelsome brother, also a writer and critic, who for a while was in love with Caroline; the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Novalis”), almost the personification of Goethe’s Young Werther in his melodramatic posturing and adoration of a sickly, pubescent girl; and the serious young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, whose naturphilosophie envisaged the self as at one with everything living, and who conceived of art as the expression of this union.
 
This group saw themselves with some justification as cleverer, wittier and more poetic than anyone else. In their own eyes they were “the chosen ones”. Like other young people of their generation across Europe, they were inspired by the upheaval of the French Revolution, a challenge to established authority and ideas everywhere. Their irreverence inevitably led to feuds, first between the upstart Schlegels and the venerable poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, and later between Schelling and Fichte. Caroline’s refusal to conform to convention earned her widespread disapproval, especially from other women. Eventually she would divorce August Wilhelm and marry Schelling, 12 years her junior. Despite this, the three remained on good terms.
 
One reason why Jena became such a magnet for independent thinkers was the unusual constitution of the university, which allowed its professors comparative freedom. The most prominent of these was Fichte, who declared that “the source of all reality is the Ich” – a word with no exact equivalent in English. Fichte’s concept of the Ich placed the self at the centre of everything, always an attractive idea to self-regarding young people.
 
Goethe had been attracted to Jena from his home in nearby Weimar by the presence of Schiller. While Goethe was staying in Jena he and Schiller would meet daily, since they lived only a few minutes’ walk from each other. They made an odd couple as they strolled around town together, the cadaverous playwright towering above the older and now corpulent poet. Like the young English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller collaborated closely, editing each other’s work and suggesting improvements and changes. After Schiller’s death, Goethe would strive unsuccessfully to complete his unfinished work.
 
Goethe and Schiller were father figures to the group of younger writers and thinkers who gravitated to Jena. Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man would become a founding document for this new generation of thinkers, who called themselves romantics.
 
Goethe was a true renaissance man, as interested in science as he was in literature. For him, another attraction of Jena was the company of the young scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The two formed “our little academy”, carrying out dissections and experiments together, including electrical experiments on animals – “galvanism”. To the romantics, electricity seemed the fuel of life. It was no coincidence that Frankenstein’s monster would be brought to life by a massive electrical charge. Electricity also provided a fresh, almost irresistible metaphor. In its incessant and impassioned debate the Jena set was “electrified by our intellectual friction”; while apart, one of their number lamented the absence of “the electricity I feel with them”.
 
This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas. Wulf writes clear, flowing prose, which is a pleasure to read. It’s informed by scholarship without being bogged down by jargon. Her book begins with an autobiographical prologue, explaining how, as the impulsive child of progressive parents, she chose to leave school early, rather than going to university, and became a single mother at a young age, learning in the process to balance free-spiritedness and responsibility. This introduction is appropriate, because her experience mirrors that of the woman at the heart of the story, Caroline Schlegel.
 
The Jena set broke up in 1803, dispersing across Germany and beyond in a general exodus. Magnificent Rebels ends with a dramatic set-piece chapter as French troops arrive in Jena in 1806, plundering the town and setting fire to buildings, before the battle that ends in devastating defeat for the Prussian army. The victorious emperor slept that night in Goethe’s bed. For the Jena set, Napoleon was not an enemy but a hero. They admired him as a force of nature. Ominously, Fichte began to talk about the “Ich” of a nation.
 
In her epilogue Wulf traces the influence of the Jena thinkers on subsequent generations: through the English romantic poets, especially Coleridge, and via him the American transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman), on to the thoughts of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce, and into the present. We have so far “internalised the Ich”, the author argues, that we no longer recognise it. What was revolutionary is now standard: we are all romantics now. And all this began in a small town in Germany more than 200 years ago.
 
 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf review – big ideas from a small town. By Adam Sisman. The Guardian, September 11, 2022. 

For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of the leading German thinkers of the time—Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived 14 miles away in Weimar, was a frequent visitor and collaborator.
 
Andrea Wulf, born in India and raised in Germany, impulsively moved to England in her late teens and adopted the English language as her professional medium. She finds kindred spirits in the proudly independent, unconventional prodigies of Jena. They inspire in her the extravagant boast that “the last decade of the eighteenth century saw more famous poets, writers, philosophers and thinkers living in Jena in proportion to its population than in any other town before or since.” The Athens of Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, Protagoras, Sophocles, and Thucydides, like the Princeton of Freeman J. Dyson, Albert Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky, might, per capita, have outshone even Jena. However, Wulf’s central assertion is indisputable: “The Jena Set changed our world. They did so irrevocably. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and way of understanding the world without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.”
 
Wulf titled her 2015 study of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt (who often visited his older brother, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Jena) The Invention of Nature. Like recent popular books that make broad historical claims—for example, that the Scots invented the modern world or that the Irish saved civilization—Magnificent Rebels credits the Jena Set for “the invention of the self.” Its members initiated the Romantic movement and redefined romanticism to mean an emphasis on subjectivity, a preference for emotion over reason, an exaltation of the imagination, a reverence for the natural world, and a yearning to poeticize science. Fichte was not the first philosopher to take the Ich as his starting point (René Descartes’s cogito ergo sum did that 150 years earlier), but a preoccupation with the self would be inherited from Jena by thinkers as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ayn Rand, and Martin Buber, and it would manifest itself in the institutionalized cravings of consumer society. The German Romantics predated and inspired poets and philosophers in Britain, France, and the United States. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was so enthralled by the Jena thinkers that much of his Biographia Literaria is plagiarized from Schelling.
 
Members of the Jena Set are not strangers to anyone conversant with German cultural history. Much has been written in German about the subject, including Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, published in 2018 and translated into English earlier this year. And though English-language readers surely have heard of Goethe, they might be unfamiliar with his contemporaries and confused by the profusion of Friedrichs—Schelling, Schiller, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. Wulf begins with a list of dramatis personae and, relying on letters, journals, and published texts, proceeds to recount the stories of distinct personalities during troubled times. Her book is a collective biography of talented and productive men and women who worked brilliantly together, apart, and in opposition.
 
The story begins with Schiller, the first of the major figures to reside in Jena. Already famous for his 1781 play The Robbers, he founded the journal Die Horen, which drew many of its contributors to the town. The polymath Goethe came to Jena to supervise its botanical garden. His was an inductive mind, working from the specific to the general, but he developed a close friendship with Schiller, who worked from the general to the specific. Yet it was the house at Leutragasse 5, shared by poet August Wilhelm Schlegel, his free-spirited wife, Caroline, plus August’s younger brother, Friedrich, and Friedrich’s lover, Dorothea, daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, that became the cradle of German Romanticism. There, August and Caroline translated Shakespeare’s plays into versions that turned the Bard into the quintessential Romantic. Many German speakers consider the couple’s translations superior to the original. The philosopher Fichte and the poet Novalis spent many hours in the Schlegel household in conversations that fertilized their own work. During one dazzling four-day session, writes Wulf, “they composed poems, drafted philosophical treatises, edited essays, set up scientific experiments and translated passages from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare.”
 
But these were high-strung, competitive, and libidinous people, and their idyllic creative community was doomed to dissolve. Dependent on income from teaching, some members of the Jena Set resented it when the charismatic speakers Fichte and Schelling drew students away from their own lectures. After Friedrich Schlegel attacked Schiller in print, neither spoke to the other. Soon, other enmities developed. For a while, August Schlegel seemed complaisant about the openly adulterous relationship between Schelling and his own wife, Caroline, but numerous sexual transgressions and rivalries also fractured the group. The translator Tieck dismissed the Leutragasse coterie as being “like a big farm full of pigs.” Dysentery ended the promising life of Caroline Schlegel’s 15-year-old daughter, Auguste, in 1800, months before tuberculosis killed 28-year-old Novalis. Increasingly, disease and death took a toll on the Jena Set.
 
Germany would not become a state until 1871, and in its 1,500 jurisdictions, no central authority could enforce censorship. The Jena Set, then, was relatively unshackled by convention. Inspired by the spirit of the French Revolution, its members saw their own revolution founder in spasms of freedom. By 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived to “liberate” Jena, most of its authors had already left. The invading French army, which many had welcomed as a force for liberté, égalité, et fraternité, left the town in ruins
 
Jena-Gadda-Da-Vida : The brief flowering of an intellectual mecca in 1790s Germany. By  Steven G. Kellman. The American Scholar, September 1, 2022

Today, the German city of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, is the world centre of the optical and precision industry; but in the 1790s it spawned an even more marketable commodity. It was then a small medieval town on the banks of the river Saale with crumbling walls, 800 half-timbered houses, a market square and an unruly university. Here, in the philosophy department, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a young professor inspired by Immanuel Kant and the French Revolution, proclaimed from the pulpit his theory of the ‘Ich’. ‘A person,’ he roared, ‘should be self-determined.’ In an age of absolute power and the divine right of kings, the idea of free will was an incendiary device and Fichte freewheeled his way through each lecture. ‘Attend to yourself,’ he instructed his mesmerised followers; ‘turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self.’ Fichte’s lectures, says Andrea Wulf in her engrossing new book, re-centred the way we understand the world. It’s little wonder that intellectuals flocked to Jena.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a group biography about the decade between 1794 and 1804 when a cohort of writers, philosophers and translators, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. The book is also a beginner’s guide to German idealism. It’s no mean feat to explain such hefty theories in layman’s terms, and Wulf does so without, as Byron said of Coleridge, needing to explain her explanation.
 
The grandfather of what she calls ‘the Jena set’ was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther turned suicide into an art, or group-think. Goethe, who lived with his mistress and son in nearby Weimar, was first invited to Jena by the playwright Friedrich Schiller, who began lecturing at the university in 1789. Their friendship initiated what Goethe described as a ‘new era’ in his writing. The effect of Jena turned Goethe into a ‘demi-god’ for a new generation of readers.
 
The town muse was Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a ‘politico-erotic’ fire-ball who, together with her young daughter Auguste, had spent six months in prison in Königstein in 1793. Caroline and her second husband, the poet, critic and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel, came to Jena in 1796, where the couple translated, for the first time, Shakespeare into German verse. Their translations are still the standard edition in Germany. It was August Wilhelm who coined the term ‘Romantic’ to describe the new sensibility whose impact was also being felt in the English Lake District. ‘Speak nothing but German,’ Coleridge (unsuccessfully) counselled Wordsworth: ‘Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
 
August Wilhelm was joined by his younger brother, the writer Friedrich Schlegel, who was himself in love with Caroline. (‘One look is all it takes’, Friedrich said of her.) Friedrich brought along his best friend, the poet and mining inspector Friedrich von Hardenberg, who used the pen name Novalis. ‘My whole self,’ said Novalis, ‘is a system of fragments’, and together with Schlegel, he invented the Romantic fragment. Schiller and the Schlegels were then joined by the young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who taught at the university between 1798 and 1803. The similarity of names makes this a difficult book to follow after a glass or two of wine, but keeping up with the Jena set is challenging in other ways too.
 
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ said Wordsworth of the French Revolution, ‘but to be young was very heaven.’ Jena, now the centre of this heaven, was actually very hell. Caroline Schlegel described it as a ‘den of murderers’, and she wasn’t far wrong. Jena reduced the whole world to a town which could be crossed in ten minutes flat; no one read the newspapers and nothing was discussed beyond gossip and the new philosophy. Everyone hated everyone else and did all they could to stymie each other’s careers with bad reviews. One of Schiller’s poems, wrote Friedrich Schlegel, was so bad it was best read backwards.
 
Schiller and the Schlegels were thereafter mortal enemies, as were Schiller and Alexander von Humboldt, Schiller and Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling. While Schiller, who never left his house, hated everyone except Goethe, Fichte was not only hated by all his colleagues but those students who didn’t buy into his philosophy threw bricks through his windows. These attacks – which took place night after night for five months and once nearly killed his father-in-law – must have been, said Goethe, ‘a most disagreeable way’ for Fichte ‘to have the existence of a non-Ich proven to him’.
 
Everyone equally hated Friedrich Schlegel. One look, apparently, was all it took: ‘People prefer to observe me from a distance,’ he said, ‘like a rare and dangerous beast.’ They similarly hated his wife Dorothea, who in turn hated Caroline Schlegel, who hated Schiller’s wife Charlotte. ‘The minute she’s out of the house,’ Caroline said of Charlotte, ‘you should fire up two pounds of incense to purify the air.’ When Friedrich Schlegel’s friend, the poet and translator Ludwig Tieck, moved to Jena in 1799, everyone hated Frau Tieck too: ‘Oh, that wife! That wife!’, Friedrich complained to Caroline Schlegel.
 
Caroline is the heroine of the story, not least because she internalised the Ich-philosophy which, Fichte stressed, applied only to men. A woman, Fichte insisted, had to submit her own Ich to that of her husband. Caroline, accordingly, changed husbands three times, divorcing August Wilhelm in 1803 in order to marry Friedrich Schelling, who was, she said, ‘the kind of man who bursts through barriers’.
 
One reason the Jena set idealised the mind is because their bodies were so imperfect. The illnesses they suffered – gout, tapeworm, ‘nervous fevers’, infections, coughs and tumours – were treated by the local quack Dr Stark with the usual leeches, poultices, enemas and blood-lettings. When Caroline was given a mustard plaster made of horseradish to cure her sleeplessness, it inflamed her leg and led to cramps. Her daughter Auguste died after being prescribed laxatives, of all things, to stop her dysentery. Schiller, who experienced such ill health in Jena that his major organs were destroyed, was discovered after his death to have had a ‘hard, petrified sponge’ instead of a heart, which made Friedrich Schlegel laugh. One of the book’s finest chapters is an account of Novalis’s 14-year-old fiancée undergoing an operation on her liver without anaesthetic. The doctor who killed her was, of course, the wretched Stark.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession. Wulf does not draw the analogy, but Jena was a prototype of Silicon Valley, a factory in which a handful of geeks open up our skulls and rewire our brains. The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all; we now think with their thoughts and feel with their emotions. They paved the way for Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself’, Freudian psychoanalysis and Hitler’s fascism, the ‘Ich’ of a nation. Jena was the birthplace of self-consciousness, self-obsession, selfishness and selfies – the whole business of me, me, me and me too.
 
How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler : A group of warring 18th-century intellectuals, devoted to the theory of the ‘Ich’, left a dangerous legacy. By Frances Wilson. The Spectator, August 27, 2022.