Review
A New Yorker Essential Read • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The New Yorker • The Washington Post • The Chicago Tribune • The Times (UK) • Telegraph • Times Literary Supplement • The New Statesman • The Spectator • Financial Times • An Economist Best Book on Culture and Ideas
“An engrossing chronicle of the early German Romantics … Wulf, who has a novelistic eye for the telling detail, provides a riveting account of how raptures gave way to ruptures.” —New York Review of Books
“[Wulf] spins a lively yarn. . . . A century ago Anglophone intellectuals were more aware of German ideas than they are today. Ms Wulf is to be thanked for bringing some neglected thinkers vividly to life.” —The Economist
“Her real subjects are the relationships among these writers—their friendships and feuds, love affairs and professional rivalries, about which she writes vividly and well.” —New Republic
“Magnificent Rebels is a buoyant work of intellectual history. . . . Wulf’s story, as the movie ads used to say, has everything. . . . [A] fine and thorough book.” —The New Yorker
“Engaging and often profound. . . . [Magnificent Rebels] presents a thrilling picture of university life. . . . Wulf paints a moving collective portrait of these intellectuals as they struggled to embody their revolutionary ideals. . . . Wulf also shows how important were the women in this intellectual circle, who lived out their own experiments in liberation. . . . At its most ambitious, Magnificent Rebels concerns the relationships between philosophy and politics, thought and action. It explores the tension between the inwardness of Romantic philosophy and the ethical or political aspirations of its practitioners, nearly all of whom supported the French Revolution. . . . Despite the complex arguments developed by its main characters, the book vividly conveys the drama of ideas. It captures the unique pleasures of communal thinking … as well as the suffering and the sense of betrayal that mark a community’s dissolution.Thereis plenty of erotic drama here too, since the rebellion Wulf describes was sexual as much as anything. For the Romantics, as we see in detail, free thinking and free love were inseparable, and the personal consequences were often excruciating. . . . Magnificent Rebels shows with great lucidity how the Romantic desire to liberate the self still shapes our sense of who we are — or who we might strive to be.”
—The Washington Post
“[An] exuberant narrative. . . . This ‘Jena Set’ undoubtedly saw themselves as magnificent rebels — gloriously free spirits bent on centering the self, in all of its sublime subjectivity, and throwing off the shackles of a stultifying, mechanistic order. . . . There are a number of colorful characters in this book who compete for our attention. . . . Wulf offers vibrant portraits of them all. . . . As Wulf’s nimble storytelling vividly shows, part of what made the Romantics so fascinating and maddening was their refusal to be pinned down.”
—The New York Times
“[Wulf] finds kindred spirits in the proudly independent, unconventional prodigies of Jena. . . . A collective biography of talented and productive men and women who worked brilliantly together, apart, and in opposition.”
—The American Scholar
“This compelling account of ‘the first Romantics’ is very welcome, and long overdue. . . . The book is beautifully produced, with contemporary maps, engravings, and portraits of its stellar cast. . . . Andrea Wulf’s group biography of ‘the Jena Set’ is an impeccable piece of writing, putting the many lives into context both intellectually and in their personal relations, with an emphasis on the lives of the women. . . . Wulf’s narrative ends with a clear and cogent account of the influence of the work of these pioneering Romantics on American and European thought and literature. . . . Magnificent Rebels is one of those rare books that is truly an intellectual landmark, expanding the reader’s literary knowledge by introducing a fascinating new context.”
—Irish Obeserver (UK)
"Exhilarating. . . . 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."
—The Guardian (UK)
“A vivid portrait of the German coterie who launched Romanticism. . . . Ambitious, engaging, and effusive. . . . Wulf is excellent at this kind of descriptive prose, evoking the sights and sounds of the city with an almost classical enargia. We feel the excitement of living through the period alongside her vivid characters. . . . Wulf’s book reads as much like a novel as a novel as an intellectual biography. . . . [Magnificent Rebels] is a considerable achievement.”
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“Wonderful. . . . In a gripping account of what she calls the ‘Jena Set’ (which was intellectually and emotionally as complex as the Bloomsbury Group), Wulf brings the dramatis personae compellingly to life.”
—Financial Times (UK)
“With narrative verve buttressed by scrupulous research, Andrea Wulf has tracked this history [of the Jena Set] in unfailingly lucid fashion. . . . Avoiding metaphysical warrens and blind alleys, Wulf keeps a firm grasp on this broader historical context as well as the narrower intellectual controversies, but her primary interest is the personal interaction of a set of supremely intelligent men and women whose intense friendships and feuds, collaborations and affairs, can aptly be compared to that of the Bloomsbury Group or the Parisian modernists. . . . [Wulf’s] book has an irresistible panache marvelously appropriate to the story of these high-pitched personalities, and it is rich in telling anecdotes.”
—Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession.”
—The Spectator (UK)
“Delightful and invigorating . . . a worthy successor to [Wulf’s] acclaimed study of [Alexander] Von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature. . . . Magnificent Rebels is a triumph of unseen toil, hardly suspected by the reader, in the midst of the sociable whirl of the main narrative. But all the time you realise Wulf has been sweating away out of sight, in the dim caverns of archives and the flickering, unvisited galleries of notes and appendices. Triumphantly, the book is not touched with one speck of archival dust, nor does it sag with any sign of exhaustion in the academic salt mines. The reader is simply presented with bright jewels of anecdote.”
—The Times (UK)
“Magnificent Rebels is a thrilling intellectual history that reads more like a racy but intelligent novel or even a very superior soap opera where the characters are almost all oddballs, but geniuses. . . . The little town of Jena blazed with a youthful, daring and intellectual creativity rarely matched elsewhere and Magnificent Rebels captures this brilliantly.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“An extensively researched, gorgeously written, vibrant, multifaceted, and richly elucidative portrait of a group that ‘changed our world.’”
—Booklist *starred review*
"A spirited re-creation of the world of the German founders of the post-Enlightenment movement. . . . An illuminating exploration of the life of the mind and the sometimes-fraught production of art."
—Kirkus Reviews *starred review*
"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. . . . [Wulf] explains heady philosophical concepts in clear prose. . . . The result is a colorful and page-turning intellectual history."
—Publishers Weekly
“The Jena Set was a late-eighteenth-century group of philosophers, artists, and thinkers so earthquakingly brilliant that we feel the tremors their ideas set off under our feet today. Nobody but Andrea Wulf, with her exquisite grasp of ideas and personalities, with her meticulous, sensitive, and acutely observed prose, could make the reader feel as if they were in the room with the great personalities of the age, bearing witness to their insights and their vanities and rages. Her storytelling had me immediately in her thrall.”
—Lauren Groff, New York Times best-selling author of Matrix
"Magnificent Rebels thrums with all the redhot frenzy, wild passion, and radical ideas of a free new world created out of poetry, sex, music, and romanticism! Wulf's superb group biography of the German Romantics is elegantly written, deeply researched, and totally gripping."
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs
"Truly extraordinary ... An intellectual history, group portrait, and elegy to Romanticism, which at points reads like a prizewinning novel. You feel you’re there in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Germany, experiencing the debates, disputations, and deep emotional interconnections between the most profound philosophers and greatest writers of the era as they grapple with the birth of the modern."
—Andrew Roberts, New York Times best-selling author of Napoleon: A Life
“A magnificent book, fascinating in its focus and breathtaking in its scope and sweep. . . . Magnificent Rebels is a work of formidable scholarship worn lightly; of complex intellectual history told evocatively, absorbingly, compellingly. Wulf’s superb prose draws us deeply into the lives and minds of this remarkable circle of people, who together explored the breathtaking possibilities — and tremendous risks — of free will, individual creativity and liberty."
—Robert Macfarlane, New York Times best-selling author of Underland
“Andrea Wulf is that rare historian who makes the past feel present and turns distant lives into gripping stories of the human heart. Without doubt, Magnificent Rebels is the best book I’ve read all year. It is an absolute masterpiece: mesmerizing, heartbreaking and incredibly timely, it is an important reminder that the desire to be true to oneself transcends time and borders.”
—Amanda Foreman, New York Times best-selling author of A World on Fire
“After her triumphant open-air biography of the explorer Alexander Humboldt who traversed half the globe, Andrea Wulf brings that same passionate gaze to bear upon a single, tiny, late-eighteenth-century university town in Germany. The result is a big, thrilling and constantly surprising book – an extraordinarily intimate and down to earth group biography. Wulf’s astonishingly vivid and bustling narrative, moves swiftly from lecture halls and libraries to kitchens and bedrooms, producing an amazing polyphony of youthful ideas and impassioned voices. . . . Brilliantly orchestrating a mass of original letters, diaries, and archival documents, Wulf revives a whole world of intense friendships, shifting intellectual alliances, furious philosophical arguments, inspirational suppers (including the cooking), theatrical first nights, seductive carriage journeys, hypnotic candlelit lectures and, of course, non-stop love affairs and betrayals (including the ecstatic love-making and equally ecstatic rows) ... It is a glorious piece of work, both thought-provoking and magical, and I loved it.” —Richard Holmes, New York Times best-selling author of The Age of Wonder
"Magnificent Rebels is a beautiful group biography, celebrating the lives and loves of Germany’s most brilliant minds: Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Hegel. At the centre of their group in the small university town of Jena was a free-spirited, thrice married, single-mother named Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. She carried her father’s and husbands’ names but her life was entirely her own. Caroline is Andrea Wulf’s soulmate. This is a perfect pairing of author and subject – a joyful, life-affirming, freedom-loving tour de force."
—Ruth Scurr, author of Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows
About the Author
ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She is the author of Founding Gardeners, Brother Gardeners, and the New York Times best seller The Invention of Nature, which has been published in twenty-seven languages and won fifteen international literary awards. Wulf has written for many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. She is a member of PEN America and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PART I
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 busi-nesses 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.
