Exuberant ... What gives Wulf’s book its heft and intrigue is how such lofty ideals could run aground on the stubborn persistence of petty rivalry and self-regard ... There are a number of colorful characters in this book who compete for our attention ... Wulf offers vibrant portraits of them all, but there are two people whom she places at the center ... Magnificent Rebels isn’t the only book about the Jena Set to be published in English this year. Jena: 1800, by the German journalist Peter Neumann, is significantly shorter, focusing more on the roiling intellectual atmosphere than striving, as Wulf does, to make a case for the Romantic fixation on the self. But as Wulf’s nimble storytelling vividly shows, part of what made the Romantics so fascinating and maddening was their refusal to be pinned down.
Wulf’s delightful and invigorating book Magnificent Rebels — a worthy successor to her acclaimed study of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature — is attentive to Jena’s social as well as its intellectual glitter. It is as much a novelettish portrait of disappointing soups, foundering marriages and professorial concert going as it is a panorama of what the poet Novalis described as the set’s ambition 'to romanticise the entire world' ... tricked out with winning vignettes ... Wulf is a keener advocate of Fichte’s philosophy than previous cartographers of this rugged and chasmal intellectual terrain have been ... The journalistic efficiency of Wulf’s prose makes her a pleasingly downmarket chronicler of sexual adventure but also a sprightly exponent of, say, Kant’s categorical imperative...On literary matters . . . well, there is mention on one occasion of Goethe’s 'creative output' ... The secret of Wulf’s achievement is in the “notes” at the end of Magnificent Rebels, a great wedge of a section so thick it brings the reader to an unexpected halt two thirds of the way through the book’s bulk. 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 ... But above all the glitter of the parties, feuds and gossip that are so frequently inseparable from intellectual life. Ironically this book shows that philosophy is about more than the Ich, it is also about the 'we'.
... 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 ... The tension between 'classical' and 'romantic' aesthetics, central though it was to the period, is underarticulated in Wulf’s telling ... Such intellectual absences are a function of her concentration on group biography. The work that the Jena Set produced – the reason we remember them, after all – sometimes comes across as an afterthought, a brief addendum to the main business of living together and falling out ... Wulf’s book reads as much like a novel as an intellectual biography. She is an expert at compressing her sources – letters, diaries, journals – into the kind of prose we recognize from nineteenth- century realism, complete with free indirect discourse ... This is fair enough – the sources are meticulously documented – but it raises the question of whether Wulf retains sufficient critical distance. Perhaps, in the end, her subjectivity is only too apt. Novalis suggested to Caroline Schlegel that they should turn their lives into a novel, and Andrea Wulf has taken up the challenge – not in the sense that Magnificent Rebels is made up, but in the sense that she imagines the lives of the Jena Set from the inside out. It is a considerable achievement.
A protracted dip into heavy waters, where the myriad historical details and internecine intellectual wrangles are as thick as pebbles on the shore ... Wulf recounts the little-known story of a furiously erudite, endlessly fractious, and compulsively gossipy group she calls the 'Jena Set' ... Andrea Wulf’s breathless, sprawling narrative vividly illustrates what it was like to live in Jena at a time when Goethe wrote in the town’s Old Castle, 'propped up on pillows and wrapped in blankets to keep out the cold, dictating to his assistant' ... he book could have used some judicious editing—Wulf seems bent on using every morsel of her research (the notes and bibliography come to more than 100 pages), and the prose sometimes becomes cluttered—but Magnificent Rebels is, overall, a vaulting achievement.
... 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.
... engaging and often profound ... presents a thrilling picture of university life, one less and less familiar in our own moment of hypermediated education and continuing devaluation of the humanities ... 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. Thus, Caroline Schlegel, August Wilhelm’s wife, who was a translator and critic in her own right, plays a crucial role in the story, its biographical and emotional pivot ... 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. There is 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 ... When the book seeks to communicate its subjects’ ideas — some of which are notoriously obscure — it can fall into oversimplification. It sometimes unnecessarily avoids the language used by the Romantics themselves ... And important precursors such as Rousseau and Kant are mentioned only briefly. Still, 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.
... a buoyant work of intellectual history written as what was once termed the 'higher gossip.' Wulf’s story, as the movie ads used to say, has everything. There’s the handsome young poet in love with a sickly pubescent girl; the brilliant woman whose literary work was credited to the men in her life; the passionate friendships shattered into fierce feuds. There are writers who struggle to write and others who struggle to stop. A steady and ominous undertone to all the cogitation and copulation is the rise of Napoleon, a Romantic figure in his own way, from the ashes of the 1789 revolution in France.
... engrossing ... Wulf, who has a novelistic eye for the telling detail, provides a riveting account of how raptures gave way to ruptures ... Wulf makes excellent use of the vast correspondence of her principals.
Fortunately, her good sense saves her; in these pages, she sticks Goethe (who only visited Jena, after all, but never actually signed a lease in town) firmly in the midst of a big cast — and because no other member of that cast is as obdurately monumental as Goethe (the only one who comes close is the poet Novalis), the larger narrative of Magnificent Rebels is saved ... In fact, the larger narrative of Magnificent Rebels is downright terrific, every bit as thoroughly researched as The Invention of Nature but even livelier and more evocative in its human details ... Wulf is succinct and interesting on the various forces that crafted the moment she’s brought to life ... She’s also interesting, if a touch less convincing, on the seminal impact of all that Jena squabbling on the course of Western thought ... There’s an undeniable fascination to reading the daily goings-on of these passionate, brilliant people, especially when their outsized personalities are so wonderfully captured.
Wulf anchors every evolving aspect of this new paradigm to exceptionally well-informed and vital profiles of the 'First Romantics' ... Wulf is particularly attuned to Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling ... An extensively researched, gorgeously written, vibrant, multifaceted, and richly elucidative portrait of a group that 'changed our world'.
Such incidents are fascinating only when they can be understood as symbolic—when they stand for developments in the history of spirit. Wulf is certain that the Jena set possesses this kind of importance, crediting them in her subtitle with nothing less than 'the invention of the self' ... This kind of enormous, unprovable claim has become a genre convention in popular intellectual history, but what Magnificent Rebels actually offers is more modest. Wulf explains the ideas behind Romanticism only in broad strokes, and describes the books written in Jena in a paragraph or two, with minimal quotation. 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. This focus is practically inevitable, since we can approach Goethe and company on the human-interest side much more easily than we can through their thought and writing. Still, familiarity sets its own limits. The complicated adulteries and hatreds of one group of intellectuals are much like that of another; Jena starts to sound like Bloomsbury or Brooklyn ... The contrast between the divine strivings of the Jena set and their all-too-human foibles has the potential for deflationary comedy, though Wulf has too much respect for her subjects to satirize them ... The interesting question, which Magnificent Rebels raises but doesn’t go far toward answering, is how this garden-variety egotism is connected with the sublime egotism of Romantic poetry and thought.
Wulf’s Romantics are erudite, prolific, original, courageously revolutionary — but they are also narcissistic, self-serving, vain, entitled, reckless, and feckless ... Wulf loves the rush of rushing in when things are happening, but when the matter itself lies before her — the real lives of real people in all their mysterious depths — she is somewhat at a loss ... Magnificent Rebels revels in minutiae. But it also has a grander point to make. It 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.
... engrossing ... Wulf pays particular attention to the cohort’s oft-overlooked female members, including Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a free-spirited intellectual with a 'core of steel' whose “refus[al] to be restricted by the role that society had intended for women” landed her in prison, among other controversies. Wulf also delves into the influence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars on the group and explains heady philosophical concepts in clear prose ... The result is a colorful and page-turning intellectual history.
