Utterly brilliant!

Andrea Wulf’s incredible account of the lives, loves and thinking of the Jena set is mesmerizing, beautifully narrated and educative. Wulf manages to conjure up images of the characters and times so we feel as if we are back in the late 18th/early 19th century alongside these colourful folk. She has brought to life the German Romantics and in doing so, reminds us of their relevance and importance today.

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Connection with our past ...

after I loved every moment of Andrea's previous book "the invention of nature" this period of our history became very appealing to me not just on historical level and understanding some of the directions that western society has taken before me but also the links to a more spiritual nature shining through the ages... my suggestion is getting to the book listen to it and enjoy it. and if you do so right now you can even go to watch the Napoleon film which ties in perfectly with the period of time we're talking about!

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Wonderful and Magnificent Story

I loved this book and have thoroughly enjoyed all her other works
I now want to go to Jena and Weimar to see the places in her book come alive!

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Great book!

Such a good read!
I would've preferred a bit more depth on the philosophical ideas. I've taken a lot of curiosity about these ideas with me, but not a lot of substance.

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Magnificent Book

A wonderfully written (& wonderfully read) a book: fascinating subject matter brought to glorious, inspiring life with just the right mix of historical, intellectual and personal detail. The ideas shine but so do the starry cast of characters.

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Detailed but quite slow

as other reviewers have mentioned - there's a mass of social detail on who visited who and who was sleeping with who. I didnt know a huge amount about the subject and I'm left with a vague feeling of 'they were all sleeping with each other + all fell out'.

Entertaining enough, but I'd hoped to learn more about the philosophy and less about the bed fellows visiting regimes. well written though and read in a lovely patrician manner.

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A magnificent intellectual biography!

­
This is truly a magnificent intellectual biography of a group and the individuals within it! On 10/2/16 I reviewed The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf’s equally magnificent work on Alexander von Humboldt (who also plays a part in Magnificent Rebels), and was ready to be blown away by her newly published book. And so I have been – and 15 hours was not a moment too long.

Briefly, the Magnificent Rebels were a group of extraordinarily influential philosophers, thinkers, scientists, inspirational authors, poets, translators, lecturers and playwrights living in the small University town of Jena in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, making it the intellectual capital of Europe. The most prominent members were Goethe, brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Schiller ,Navalis, Fichte and, when he returned from his many exploratory travels, von Humboldt. Another key member was the fiercely intellectual thrice married Caroline Michaelis whose husbands included both Schlegel and Schelling, and whose translations of Shakespeare made with Schlegel continue to popularise the plays in Germany to this day,.

The ‘invention of self’, the book’s title and the intellectual core of the group’s debates is covered with great skill by Wulf who wears her considerable scholarship lightly allowing our understanding to build throughout. Fichte and Schelling were perhaps the strongest on the essential but untranslatable ‘ich’ or ‘self’. This inter-disciplinary philosophical concept which puts the self at the centre of every aspect of nature permeates the philosophies of the whole group. It was not ‘selfish’ in the modern sense of the word, for responsibility was an essential part. Union with ourselves (our ‘ich’) and with nature enables us to understand others and so make the world a better place.

This makes the Magnificent Rebels sound rather a tiresome, precious lot with their intellectual sparring lasting far into the early hours, but Wulf gives us so much more. The poet Navalis, for example, was trained in a range of disciplines including electricity and mineralogy as well as being Director of Salt Mines - elements which informed his philosophy. Wulf’s dextrous and extremely well written exploration of the group’s inter-relationships, quotations from and explanations of heir varied works and the social and political background of their time make for a tremendously energetic, vibrant work packed with fascinating detail.

There are some startlingly dramatic set pieces such as the unspeakable savagery of the Battle of Yena in 1806 with its background ‘gruesome orchestra’ of screams, or the recreation of the excruciating surgery carried out on Sophie, the 14 year-old wife of Novalis who had fallen in love with her when she was 12. Death came lamentably early to many of the protagonists: Caroline lost her first three young children and later her beloved surviving teenage daughter, whilst medical ‘cures’ hastened deaths from commonplace fevers and dysentery. Feuds and jealousies burned within the group as well as prodigiously strong bonds, whilst conventions of social class were absolute, the group calling Goethe’s mistress Christiana ‘a pig in a pearl necklace’ . Wulf also places the Magnificent Rebels in a European context allowing us to see the spread of the ideas and philosophy which informed Coleridge in particular and the English Romantic movement in general.

The narrator is an excellent companion – it’s a great pleasure to listen to a faultless performance!

I

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terrific

loved it, wonderful book about Jena and German romanticism. Well written, good audio presentation too.

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Fascinating and beautifully read

I enjoyed every moment of this books written in an engaging and utterly absorbing way. Jenna on the map!

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Interesting but way too much padding

A good introduction to the critical role played by the city of Jena and its original thinkers and writers. It tells the story of the lives and deaths, friendships, love affairs, publications, collaborations and fallings out of Fichte, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling and Goethe, with appearances by the Humboldt brothers. A special focus is made on the free-thinking, free-living and free-loving Caroline Schelling.
The book would gain enormously from pruning a great deal of lightweight information about everyday comings and goings which are monotonously detailed. I enjoyed the book but was relieved to get to the end.

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