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Magnificent Rebels

The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

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Magnificent Rebels

By: Andrea Wulf
Narrated by: Julie Teal
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About this listen

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award ©

From the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, Magnificent Rebels is a riveting, eye-opening biography of the first Romantics: a revolutionary group of friends based in the small German town of Jena whose modern ideas transformed society and the way we lead our lives today.

In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics.

Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being. We're still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

©2022 Andrea Wulf (P)2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited Europe Movements Philosophy Professionals & Academics Science & Technology Western Europe French Revolution Technology Middle Ages

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Critic reviews

Magnificent Rebels is - well - magnificent. This is how such books should be written, with clarity, passion and delight. A thrilling intellectual adventure (John Banville, Book of the Year)
Andrea Wulf is that rare historian who makes the past feel present and turns distant lives into gripping stories of the human heart. Magnificent Rebels is an absolute masterpiece: mesmerising, heartbreaking and incredibly timely, it is an important reminder that the desire to be true to oneself transcends time and borders (AMANDA FOREMAN)
This is a magnificent book, fascinating in its focus and breathtaking in its scope and sweep. It is a work of formidable scholarship worn lightly; of complex intellectual history told evocatively, absorbingly, compellingly. Wulf's superb prose draws us deeply into the lives and minds of this remarkable circle of people, who together explored the breathtaking possibilities - and tremendous risks - of free will, individual creativity and liberty (ROBERT MACFARLANE)
All stars
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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.

Utterly brilliant!

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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!

Wonderful and Magnificent Story

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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.

Great book!

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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.

Magnificent Book

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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.

Detailed but quite slow

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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!

Connection with our past ...

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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


A magnificent intellectual biography!

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

terrific

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

Fascinating and beautifully read

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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.

Interesting but way too much padding

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