Magnificent Rebels
The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
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Magnificent Rebels
Narrated by:
Julie Teal
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Julie Teal
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By:
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Andrea Wulf
About this listen
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.
(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited©2022 Andrea Wulf
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Critic reviews
This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. This witty, gossipy, sparkling history . . . fizzed with creative energy
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)
This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas
A witty, gossipy, sparkling history, full of bright jewels of anecdote . . . Magnificent Rebels is a triumph
In a gripping account of what she calls the "Jena Set" (which was intellectually and emotionally as complex as the Bloomsbury Group), Wulf brings the dramatis personae compellingly to life
An ambitious, engaging and effusive account . . . a considerable achievement
Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession
Magnificent Rebels is a thrilling intellectual history that reads more like a racy but intelligent novel or even a very superior soap opera where the characters are almost all oddballs, but geniuses
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)
The Jena Set was a group of philosophers, artists, and thinkers so earthquakingly brilliant that we feel the tremors that their ideas set off under our feet today. Nobody but Andrea Wulf, with her exquisite grasp of ideas and personalities, with her meticulous, sensitive and acutely observed prose, could make the reader feel as if they were in the room with them, bearing personal witness to their insights and their vanities and rages. Her storytelling had me immediately in her thrall (LAUREN GROFF, bestselling author of Matrix)
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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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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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!
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A magnificent intellectual biography!
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Magnificent Book
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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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