Roots of the Romantic era
“Magnificent Rebels”, by Andrea Wulf (Alfred A. Knopf, 495 pp, $35) by Bondo Wyszpolski I suppose not many people in this country have heard of Jena, which in the late 18th and early 19th centuries had a population of about 4,500. It was, however, a university town, and for some years an oasis of free thought that attracted a coterie of Germany’s finest minds. As Andrea Wulf writes in her account of these notable lives, “This group of writers, poets and thinkers changed the way we think about the world by placing the self at the centre of everything. In doing so, they liberated people’s minds from the corset of doctrines, rules and expectations.” The cover of “Magnificent Rebels,” by Andrea WulfThere’s a helpful “dramatis personae” at the start of the book, with names that are nothing if not stellar: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schelling, Novalis, Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, among others hardly less renowned. At the heart of this collective biography is Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling (hereafter, to keep this simple, Caroline Böhmer)…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com