Book Review: Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self recounts the history of the “Jena Circle,” a group of highly influential German writers, poets, and philosophers who were instrumental in birthing the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As author Andrea Wulf points out, people today often forget that this movement inspired later Romantics such as the English poets Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Keats as well as the American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau. While the latter are now considered more characteristic of the Romantics (at least among many English and American readers), Wulf convincingly recounts how the Germans of the Jena set actually laid the foundations for the movement.

Magnificent Rebels is a broad and ambitious book that spans several decades and covers the poets Goethe (probably the best-remembered of the group today) and Novalis the philosophers Fichte and Schelling, the playwright Schiller, and the Schlegal brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm. Also central to the group was Caroline Schlegel-Schelling who was married three times, including to the aforementioned Schelling and Schlegel. Wulf emphasizes Carolines role as muse to many of the men as well as someone with formidable writing and translating abilities of her own (though, as was typical at that time, many of her writings were published under the names of…