Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
By Andrea Wulf
John Murray, UK
ISBN: 978-1529392746
494pp.

Intellectual movements shape the way we make sense of the world. Romanticism is one such movement that has continued to maintain its sway on our intellectual discourse.

Although Romanticism is widely accepted to have come to popular awareness through English poets such as Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, with her new book Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, German-British historian Andrea Wulf takes us back to the basics, to the movement’s original roots in Germany.

Wulf’s book is a riveting account of the poets, writers, playwrights and philosophers who came to the German town of Jena between 1790 and the early 1800s. They ran the gamut of the who’s who in German literature and philosophy: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Friedrich Schiller, Georg “Novalis” von Hardenberg, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte and the Schlegel brothers, August and Friedrich. Some names may have faded from the radar of the wider world today, but they remain intellectual titans in Germany.

Together, these remarkable people exercised an outsized influence on the modern Romantic movement. Wulf calls them “the Jena Set” and why the small town — population not more than 4,000 — came to house such a galaxy of stars was largely because of its relaxed censorship laws and the relative freedom of expression allowed to the local university and its staff, which the Jena Set amply represented.

Andrea Wulf traces the birth of Romanticism to a small town in Germany and explains complex ideas in simple and seductive prose

Constituting the heart, the “unchallenged centre of the group”, was the remarkable Caroline, an independent and spirited writer and critic. She was successively wife to two key figures of the Jena Set — August Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling — and, by knitting the group together through her charm and brilliant mind, she played an influential role in every member’s fortunes.

Johann Fichte was a star lecturer who could pack the classrooms — in those days, university lecturers were paid by the students on a per lecture basis. He set the tone of the group by elucidating the theory of Ich, or the self, and this became the motto of the age, running deeply through the charmed circle.

Fichte’s ideas were discussed not only in the fevered intellectual hothouse of the university where he and most of the Jena Set taught, but were adopted and improved upon by other group members such as Novalis and Schelling.

Wulf explains how this deep thinking spread further outwards, marking the Englishmen Coleridge and Wordsworth and, by extension, the greater environment of Romantic poetry. In fact, Coleridge was so impressed that he went so far as to learn the German language. He came close to visiting Jena in person, but unfortunately ran out of funds.

Goethe, the best known of the Jena Set, actually lived in the nearby city of Weimar. He made frequent trips across, though, and bonded strongly with Schiller, the playwright. They spent a great deal of time discussing and editing each other’s work and Schiller was instrumental in catalysing Goethe’s creative juices when the latter felt stalled in his literary output.

Literature was everywhere. In addition to the university library, there was a lending library with more than 100 German and international periodicals, as well as seven well-stocked bookshelves. Walking through the cobbled streets on a warm summer evening, one would hear snatches of discussions on poetry and philosophy as well as the sound of violins and pianos. — Excerpt from the book

Goethe was widely respected by the group for his elder and established literary status and became their éminence grise. Very skilled in the art of remaining part of the fray, while staying above the fray, he presided as the mediating genius on the volcanic personalities’ intellectual and personal feuds, as they obsessed over shaping a brave new intellectual world order.

Despite their strong belief in the idea of the self and individuality, the Jena Set took immense delight in working together and playing together — one chapter in Magnificent Rebels tells of the group’s excursion to Dresden in 1798, where they explored, discussed and tested connections between the self, nature and art.

There was much bed-hopping amongst the intellectuals, love triangles forming and dissolving even as the wider attachment to ideas remained red-hot. As Wulf tells us, the women broke ordered bounds and chose to live independent, self-determined lives — choices quite contrary to prevalent social norms.

Very few members of the group were privileged financially, yet even they preferred to live on shoestring budgets while producing works of non-confirming brilliance and dazzling originality.

A strong influence on the direction of the Romantic ideas espoused by the group was the French revolution. Most of the Jena Set were greatly taken by the radical ideas it ushered in, and Caroline even spent time in jail for advocating the revolution’s ideals.

Goethe, however, did not get swept away. Like the English philosopher Edmund Burke, Goethe believed in evolutionary approaches to political change, rather than the revolutionary impulses unleashed by the French uprising.

Incidentally, the Jena Set, so heavily shaped by the French revolution, was driven out of town in 1806 by the French army, led by Napoleon Bonaparte. Georg Hegel, the only one of the group remaining in the town on the eve of battle, praised Napoleon as an incarnation of the spirit and the soul of the world.

After the set splintered, the members dispersed on to separate paths. Some took up Indology as a subject for further enquiries (August Schlegel), others faded into oblivion (Schiller) and yet others rose higher in fame and influence (Hegel). Some, in sharp contrast to long-held beliefs, converted to Catholicism (Friedrich Schlegel).

Author Wulf’s own biography mirrors the wider story of the invention of the self. Born in India to progressive parents, she married early and dropped out of university to explore an unconventional life, follow her instincts and discover herself. In her personal story, we can see glimpses of Caroline who, like Wulf, was strong-willed and self-determined from an early age.

Coming on the heels of Wulf’s award-winning, bestselling biography of Prussian naturalist, explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt — who also appears fleetingly in her new book to stress the connection between science and Romanticism — Magnificent Rebels, too, has made numerous bestseller lists since its release.

Its brilliance lies in the fact that the single flame of the self, from which many rays emanated, glimmers undimmed throughout. Wulf wears her scholarship lightly and, despite her great erudition, explains complex ideas in simple and seductive prose which folds you in.

The reviewer is author of the essay collection Thinkers, Dreamers and Doers. He tweets @arifazad5

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 19th, 2023