Wulf's Pack of Romantics
Micro-review of Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (Knopf, 2022)
In a crowded field there is no need for any one book to cover every acre of fertile ground. Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels: The Invention of the Modern Self (Knopf, 2022) treads territory already covered by Peter Neumann's Die Republik Der Freien Geister (Siedler, 2018), although the two arrived in English almost simultaneously when the latter was published in 2022 in English in a translation by Shelley Frisch). (Like Neumann, Wulf is a native speaker of German, This manifests in how she appreciates German literature from the inside out in a way an American could hardly manage; unlike Neumann, she wrote this book in English.) Further back (2012), the properly philosophical furrows in Neumann and Wulf’s field had already been surveyed by Terry Pinkard's German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism. With Pinkard having analyzed in detail the conceptual technicalities of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, and Neumann having given this era its cultural-political context, Wulf was under no pressure to re-invent the complicated wheel that is the system of German idealism, nor of the poetry rolling on the other side of this mental axle. Wulf has used this freedom to focus on the relationships within this meeting of minds. As she makes clear, only a rather concerted effort to be, live, and work together fostered the intellectual greenhouse ambience needed for their concepts and creations to grow to viability in the first place.
Wulf’s focus on relationships is an important contribution in its own right, for the outburst of conceptual creativity that emanated from Jena at the turn of the 19th century cannot be analyzed without first analyzing the fleeting friendships or bitter enmities among Fichte, Novalis, Schelling, Goethe and Schiller, Goethe and the Humboldt brothers, the Schegel brothers (Friedrich and August Wilhelm), Schelling, and finally Hegel. The lynchpin for this network, in Wulf’s telling, is Caroline, sometimes Caroline Schlegel and later Caroline Schelling. who was not only the prerequisite for August Wilhelm’s resuscitation of Shakespeare but also the hidden spirit behind much of the brainstorming, editing, and theorizing of early German romanticism. In a word, Wulf’s narrative shows how interpersonal relationships constituted the conditions of co-creation and parameters of possibility for the German idealist poetry, plays, and philosophy.
Philosophically, Wulf offers little more than a recounting of how each of the above figures reacted Fichte’s basic binary of the Ich (the “modern self” of the subtitle) and the responses of various non-Ichs. Those interested in the development of Fichte’s thought in particular, and German idealism in general, developed out of the conceptual matrix of Spinoza, Wolff, and Kant will be better served by Pinkard; those interested in how German idealism emerged out of the Sturm und Drang’s Zeitgeist will be better served by Neumann; but those who want to know how the ways the Romantic poets and Idealist philosophers felt about each other influenced their thinking will be best served by Wulf.
P.S.
A reader who picks up Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels and starts from the beginning may think Wulf has omitted citation information, as the main text features neither footnotes nor parenthetical references. However, there is a citation apparatus, albeit a cumbersome that, by remaining hidden, keeps the prose pristinely novelistic. In the back, and sorted by page number, one finds a series of first phrases of sentences, with the source of that sentence’s information indicated.