Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits

Philosopher and poet Neumann explores in this colorful intellectual history the roiling social milieu that gave rise to German Romanticism. Neumann sketches the movement’s political and cultural background, including the collapse of the French Revolution and the death of Pope Pius VI in captivity, but focuses on the turbulent personal relationships between a core group of friends and rivals in the university town of Jena who revolted against aristocratic conservatism and the stifling rationalism of the Enlightenment. These poets, artists, and philosophers included brothers Fritz and Wilhelm Schlegel, whose literary journal Athenaeum became famous for its republicanism, borderline atheism, and “rhapsodic meditations” on the sublimity of nature. Other members of the group were Wilhelm’s wife, Caroline, who divorced him for their friend Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, whose lectures on the “philosophy of nature” brought out big crowds, and the poet Novalis. Despite some convoluted constructions (“Instead of authenticating the written text by comparing it to reality, readers needed to recognize that the writing itself infused reality, thus becoming the reality in need of this infusion”), Neumann succeeds in capturing the heady atmosphere of this place and time. This invigorating aperitif will whet readers’ appetites for diving into the deep end of 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy. Illus. (Feb.)