Andrea Wulf brings them back to life in “Magnificent Rebels”
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskTwo brothers and their partners were at the centre of this circle: August Schlegel, a translator, writer and critic, and his wife, Caroline; and August’s younger brother, Friedrich, also a writer and critic, and his partner, Dorothea, who was a daughter of the so-called “Jewish Socrates”, Moses Mendelssohn. The women were more than helpmates; they wrote some of what appeared under the brothers’ names.
The Jena Set’s favourite themes included the unity of man and nature, the value of imagination and the need to “poeticise” the sciences, as Novalis put it. Schelling told his students that the works of artists and poets, not scientific treatises, provided the best way to comprehend nature. According to Ms Wulf, the mainspring of the Jena Set’s ideas was a concept of the “Ich”, or self, developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a philosopher who taught in Jena from 1794 to 1799.
Keeping track of this cast and their ideas can be a challenge. Not only does it include the Schlegels, a Schelling, a Schiller and a Schleiermacher, but nearly half the male characters are called Friedrich. Yet from this ungainly material Ms Wulf somehow spins a lively yarn—as if Iris Murdoch had set a novel during an especially muddy phase of German metaphysics.
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