Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
(published in the UK, US, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Israel and later in Turkey, Hungary and Korea)
Spiegel Bestseller Nr.3
From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of rebels who changed the way we think about ourselves and the world. Forget Paris… the real Revolution in the 1790s happened in Jena, a quiet German university town where the unlikely revolutionaries were not soldiers or politicians but poets and playwrights (Goethe, Schiller and Novalis), philosophers (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), literary critics (the contentious Schlegel brothers) and scientists (Alexander von Humboldt). And at their heart was the formidable and free-spirited Caroline Schlegel. The Jena Set were the first Romantics. And their unconventional lives were laboratories for their radical ideas – about the creative power of the self, the aspirations of art and science, nature and the true meaning of freedom. In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf takes us on a vivid journey through their adventures and misadventures, passionate love affairs and epic quarrels, successes and heartbreak. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self today. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape, but these young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that shaped our modern world.
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Best Books 2022
The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 – Essential Reading: "A buoyant work of intellectual history"
New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2022: "Exuberant narrative"
The Times, Book of the Year: "This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. This witty, sparkling history ... fizzed with creative energy"
The Sunday Times, Best Books of 2022: "A rollicking romp ... enormous fun"
Financial Times, Best Books of 2022: "Wulf’s wonderful book brings to life the 'Jena Set' and a golden age of German culture"
Telegraph, Best Biographies of 2022: "In Wulf’s page-turner, the Germans are as badly behaved as the later Bloomsberries, and surprisingly likeable"
The Economist, Best Books of 2022: “Arresting … it reads as if Iris Murdoch had set a novel during an especially muddy phase of German metaphysics”
Washington Post, Best Books of 2022 – 50 Notable Works of Non–Fiction
New Zealand Listener, Best Books of 2022: “Wulf’s exuberant, vividly written book”
Prospect Magazine, Best Books of 2022: "Where do ideas come from? If Magnificent Rebels is anything to go by, the answer is groups of degenerates who spend most of their time carousing, gossiping, and dreaming up poetry"
Times Literary Supplement, Best Books of 2022 - picked twice: Sam Leith: “I was knocked out by Andrea Wulf’s "Magnificent Rebels” and Frances Wilson: "The brilliance of Wulf’s approach lies in her depiction of cock-of-the- walk egotism"
New Statesman, Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: "Andrea Wulf’s adroit and richly detailed study of the 'Jena set' shows how the thinkers who coalesced in a small university town in Germany at the end of the 18th century changed the world"
New Statesman, Best Books of 2022 - picked three times by their reviewers: Henry Marsh: “A pure joy to read” and Sue Prideaux: “A clever, enlightening and thoroughly entertaining book” and Jeremy Cliffe: "An utterly absorbing account ranging from high philosophical theory to mischievously profane stories of ideas, love and ambition in Napoleonic Europe"
The Times, Best Books of 2022: “This witty, gossipy, sparkling history shows how the German city of Jena in the 1790s fizzed with creative energy. It was there that the first Romantics, led by the mighty Goethe, rebelled against the dreary rationalism of the Enlightenment”
BBC History Magazine, Best Books of 2022
Chicago Tribune, Best Books of 2022: "Spirited"
The Spectator, Best Books of the Year 2022 (Peter Frankopan): "I also greatly admired Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, about the intellectual powerhouse of Jena that exploded like a firework in the late 1790s. History writing at its best"
Tom Holland: "A thrilling page-turner, by turns comical & tragic. My book of the year"
John Banville: "Magnificent Rebels is - well - magnificent. This is how such books should be written, with clarity, passion and delight. A thrilling intellectual adventure"
Reviews
"Wulf's sparkling group biography' - Telegraph
“Andrea Wulf’s engaging and often profound new group biography … a thrilling picture … At its most ambitious, Magnificent Rebels concerns the relationships between philosophy and politics, thought and action … Despite the complex arguments developed by its main characters, the book vividly conveys the drama of ideas … There is plenty of erotic drama here too, since the rebellion Wulf describes was sexual as much as anything … Magnificent Rebels shows with great lucidity how the Romantic desire to liberate the self still shapes our sense of who we are — or who we might strive to be” – Washington Post
“With the flair of a novelist, Andrea Wulf uses the high drama and adventurous spirits of her protagonists – including Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Alexander von Humboldt – to shed light on the philosophy that ignited this circle of radical thinkers. The result is a thrilling historical narrative” – Non–Fiction Pick of the Week, The Sydney Morning Herald
“Exhilarating book illuminates a group of extraordinary thinkers … this is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas. Wulf writes clear, flowing prose, which is a pleasure to read. It’s informed by scholarship without being bogged down by jargon” – The Observer
“In Magnificent Rebels, her new history of the Jena Set, the German-British historian Andrea Wulf advances the argument that the very birth of modern individuality . . . took place in those houses and narrow streets, in those taverns and university lecture halls. It is a bold claim. The remarkable thing about the book is that Wulf not only stands it up but in the process weaves a thrilling page-turner of a story . . . Wulf brings her account to life with a phenomenal eye for visceral detail in letters and other accounts from the time, recalling her 2015 masterpiece The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt” – New Statesman
“Exuberant … vibrant … Magnificent Rebels paints a vivid portrait of the 18th-century German Romantics” – New York Times
“Magnificent Rebels is a buoyant work of intellectual history … a fine and thorough book” –The New Yorker
“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 … For a few short years, though, the little town of Jena blazed with a youthful, daring and intellectual creativity rarely matched elsewhere and Magnificent Rebels captures this brilliantly” – Sunday Times
“Wulf’s wonderful new book … Magnificent Rebels recreates the shining moment, between roughly 1794 and 1806, when these figures congregated in Jena … 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” – Financial Times
“Magnificent Rebels is one of those rare books that is truly an intellectual landmark” – Irish Examiner
“Wulf has written a compelling collective biography of what may well have been the greatest of all such groups ever to have formed - which is to say, at once the most numerous and most influential” - The Canberra Times
"Andrea Wulf is an exceptional writer, one able to make complex, historical moments both absorbing and clear. She makes the past feel present and turns historical figures into gripping —human — stories. This book is mesmerizing and timely as it reminds us that the desire to be true to oneself — and to be free to be that — is a desire that transcends time and borders" - Iowa Public Radio
“An engrossing chronicle of the early German Romantics … Wulf, who has a novelistic eye for the telling detail, provides a riveting account of how raptures gave way to ruptures” – New York Review of Books
“Drawn from meticulously detailed research in diaries, correspondence and literary works, Wulf weaves the stories of these individuals together, showing (sometimes exactly – there are maps) where their paths crossed and how these individuals rubbed off on each other … Magnificent Rebels is an engaging introduction to the historical background, philosophical novelties and dramatis personae of the early Romantic movement, yet it also offers something new to those more familiar with it … It is details such as this that bring Wulf’s story of the ‘Jena Set’ – their lives and legacy – so vividly to life” – History Today
“With narrative verve buttressed by scrupulous research, Andrea Wulf has tracked this history in unfailingly lucid fashion … Avoiding metaphysical warrens and blind alleys, Wulf keeps a firm grasp on this broader historical context as well as the narrower intellectual controversies, but her primary interest is the personal interaction of a set of supremely intelligent men and women whose intense friendships and feuds, collaborations and affairs, can aptly be compared to that of the Bloomsbury Group or the Parisian modernists. … [Wulf’s] book has an irresistible panache marvellously appropriate to the story of these high-pitched personalities, and it is rich in telling anecdotes” – Daily Telegraph
“[Wulf] spins a lively yarn … A century ago Anglophone intellectuals were more aware of German ideas than they are today. Ms Wulf is to be thanked for bringing some neglected thinkers vividly to life” – The Economist
“A vivid portrait of the German coterie who launched Romanticism… Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels is an ambitious, engaging and effusive account … Wulf is excellent at this kind of descriptive prose, evoking the sights and smells of the city with an almost classical enargia. We feel the excitement of living through the period alongside her vivid characters … Wulf’s book reads as much like a novel as an intellectual biography … It is a considerable achievement” – Times Literary Supplement
“Engrossing new book … Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession. Jena was a prototype of Silicon Valley, a factory in which a handful of geeks open up our skulls and rewire our brains. The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all; we now think with their thoughts and feel with their emotions.” – The Spectator
“Andrea Wulf’s delightful and invigorating book Magnificent Rebels — a worthy successor to her acclaimed study of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature ... Magnificent Rebels is a triumph of unseen toil, hardly suspected by the reader, in the midst of the sociable whirl of the main narrative ... This delightful history captures the "vibe" of 1790s Jena where parties, feuds and gossip fuelled a great intellectual flowering” – Book of the Week, The Times
“Her real subjects are the relationships among these writers—their friendships and feuds, love affairs and professional rivalries, about which she writes vividly and well” – New Republic
“A very readable, stimulating and entertaining survey of a group of writers who deserve to be better known in the Anglophone world” – Literary Review
“Andrea Wulf ’s breathless, sprawling narrative vividly illustrates what it was like to live in Jena … a vaulting achievement” – Air Mail
“An extensively researched, gorgeously written, vibrant, multifaceted, and richly elucidative portrait of a group that "changed our world." – starred review in Booklist
"Their intellectual fireworks were matched by a tangle of literary feuds and hair-raising sexual complications. Here's a piece of the jigsaw of intellectual history that most British people will only vaguely know of if at all – and it's fascinating" – Book Club, The Spectator
“A scintillating group biography’ – The Bookseller
“A spirited re-creation of the world of the German founders of the post-Enlightenment movement … An illuminating exploration of the life of the mind and the sometimes-fraught production of art” – Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing group biography … a colorful and page-turning intellectual history” - Publishers Weekly
"A thrilling page-turner, by turns comical & tragic… brilliant studies of titanic personalities & epoch-shaping ideas. My book of the year so far" – Tom Holland
Pre–publication praise for Magnificent Rebels:
“A magnificent book, fascinating in its focus and breathtaking in its scope and sweep. Magnificent Rebels 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 enormous possibilities — and tremendous risks — of free will, individual creativity and liberty." – Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
“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 witness to their insights and their vanities and rages. Her storytelling had me immediately in her thrall.” – Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
"Magnificent Rebels thrums with all the redhot frenzy, wild passion and radical ideas of a free new world created out of poetry, sex, and Romanticism! Wulf's superb group biography of the German Romantics is elegantly written, deeply researched and totally gripping." – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Catherine the Great and Potemkin
“Andrea Wulf is that rare historian who makes the past feel present and turns distant lives into gripping stories of the human heart. Without doubt, Magnificent Rebels is the best book I’ve read all year. It is an absolute masterpiece: mesmerizing, heartbreaking and incredibly timely, it is an important reminder that the desire to be true to oneself transcends time and borders.” – Amanda Foreman, author of Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire
“Magnificent Rebels is a beautiful group biography, celebrating the lives and loves of Germany’s most brilliant minds: Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Hegel. At the centre of their group in the small university town of Jena was a free-spirited, thrice married, single-mother named Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. She carried her father’s and husbands’ names but her life was entirely her own. Caroline is Andrea Wulf’s soulmate. This is a perfect pairing of author and subject – a joyful, life-affirming, freedom-loving tour de force.” – Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey
“Truly extraordinary… an intellectual history, group portrait, and elegy to Romanticism, which reads at times like a prizewinning novel. You feel you’re there in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Germany, experiencing the debates, disputations, and deep emotional interconnections between the most profound philosophers and greatest writers of the era, as they grapple with the birth of the modern.” – Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great
“After her triumphant open-air biography of the explorer Alexander Humboldt who traversed half the globe, Andrea Wulf brings that same passionate gaze to bear upon a single, tiny late 18th century university town in Germany. The result is a big, thrilling and constantly surprising book – an extraordinarily intimate and down to earth group biography. Wulf’s astonishingly vivid and bustling narrative, moves swiftly from lecture halls and libraries to kitchens and bedrooms, producing an amazing polyphony of youthful ideas and impassioned voices ... Brilliantly orchestrating a mass of original letters, diaries, and archival documents, Wulf revives a whole world of intense friendships, shifting intellectual alliances, furious philosophical arguments, inspirational suppers (including the cooking), theatrical first nights, seductive carriage journeys, hypnotic candlelit lectures and, of course, non-stop love affairs and betrayals (including the ecstatic love-making and equally ecstatic rows) . . . It is a glorious piece of work, both thought-provoking and magical, and I loved it.” – Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder