Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits

by Peter Neumann, Shelley Frisch (Translator)

Overview

“An exhilarating account of a remarkable historical moment, in which characters known to many of us as immutable icons are rendered as vital, passionate, fallible beings . . . Lively, precise, and accessible.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a steady stream of young German poets and thinkers coursed to the town of Jena to make history. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had dealt a one-two punch to the dynastic system. Confidence in traditional social, political, and religious norms had been replaced by a profound uncertainty that was as terrifying for some as it was exhilarating for others. Nowhere was the excitement more palpable than among the extraordinary group of poets, philosophers, translators, and socialites who gathered in this Thuringian village of just four thousand residents.

Jena became the place for the young and intellectually curious, the site of a new departure, of philosophical disruption. Influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then an elder statesman and artistic eminence, the leading figures among the disruptors—the translator August Wilhelm Schlegel; the philosophers Friedrich "Fritz" Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling; the dazzling, controversial intellectual Caroline Schlegel, married to August; Dorothea Schlegel, a poet and translator, married to Fritz; and the poets Ludwig Tieck and Novalis—resolved to rethink the world, to establish a republic of free spirits. They didn’t just question inherited societal traditions; with their provocative views of the individual and of nature, they revolutionized our understanding of freedom and reality.

With wit and elegance, Peter Neumann brings this remarkable circle of friends and rivals to life in Jena 1800, a work of intellectual history that is colorful and passionate, informative and intimate—as fresh and full of surprises as its subjects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374178697
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/15/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,046,279
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Peter Neumann studied philosophy, political science, and economics in Jena and Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in philosophy and writes for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. He is the author of two collections of poetry, which have been awarded several prizes and scholarships.

Shelley Frisch’s translations from the German—which include biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka—have been awarded numerous translation prizes. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

The Morning After 3

Part I The Unfinished Revolution

A Philosophy Takes the Continent by Storm 7

Venturing into Freedom: Madame Böhmer Dips Her Toe into the Revolution 17

Best Regards, Your Outside World: Fichte, Schelling, and the I 29

Much Ado: The Era Onstage 39

The Dresden Pause for Artistic Effect: In the Arms of the Madonna 47

Part II The Gift of a Year

The Most Beautiful Chaos: Lucinde, or the Audacity of Love 59

The Imagined Subject: Fichte Before the Law 67

Helping Hands: To the Moon and Back 81

To Schlegel or to Be Schlegeled: Literary Devilries 93

The Old Man from the Mountain: In Paradise with Goethe 101

Intermezzo: A Century Deferred 109

History Is Made: Schiller and the Storming of the Salana 113

Vexing the Evangelists: Novalis and the Religion of the Future 121

Rulers Without a Realm: The Family of Glorious Outlaws 129

Part III Restless World Spirit

Gardeners and Scholars: Speculations over the Abyss 137

Leaden Times: Schelling Under Fire 149

Hegel and the Nutcrackers: Philosophy Is Not for Mindless Munching 157

Kant in Fifteen Minutes: Germaine de Staël Extends an Invitation 171

Clearing New Ground: In the Mine of Poetry 185

The Night Before 197

Life Paths: What Became of Them 205

Chronology 211

Notes 215

Bibliography 227

Index 231

Editorial Reviews

11/22/2021

Philosopher and poet Neumann explores in this colorful intellectual history the roiling social milieu that gave rise to German Romanticism. Neumann sketches the movement’s political and cultural background, including the collapse of the French Revolution and the death of Pope Pius VI in captivity, but focuses on the turbulent personal relationships between a core group of friends and rivals in the university town of Jena who revolted against aristocratic conservatism and the stifling rationalism of the Enlightenment. These poets, artists, and philosophers included brothers Fritz and Wilhelm Schlegel, whose literary journal Athenaeum became famous for its republicanism, borderline atheism, and “rhapsodic meditations” on the sublimity of nature. Other members of the group were Wilhelm’s wife, Caroline, who divorced him for their friend Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, whose lectures on the “philosophy of nature” brought out big crowds, and the poet Novalis. Despite some convoluted constructions (“Instead of authenticating the written text by comparing it to reality, readers needed to recognize that the writing itself infused reality, thus becoming the reality in need of this infusion”), Neumann succeeds in capturing the heady atmosphere of this place and time. This invigorating aperitif will whet readers’ appetites for diving into the deep end of 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy. Illus. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"This is the way the history of ideas ought to be written: it's colorful and clever. A wonderful pleasure to read." —Wolfram Eilenberger, author of Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

From the Publisher

2021-11-30
An exploration of a small German town that was a hothouse of art and thought until Napoleon’s army ended its few years as the epicenter of central European culture.

Looking back at 1799, Neumann accurately terms Jena “essentially the intellectual and cultural center of Germany.” (Think 18th-century Edinburgh, Vienna and Paris almost always, and Black Mountain College and Greenwich Village after World War II.) Neumann, a poet and philosopher who studied in Jena, focuses on the major figures who lived there in the few years before the battle that forced many of its residents to flee. They included poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, philosopher Friedrich Schelling, poet Novalis, philosopher Johann Fichte, and the multitalented brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Other transcendently important men, including Goethe and Hegel, played important subsidiary parts, and wives and lovers were never absent from the scene. Neumann paints a broad portrait of a group of luminaries at argument, work, play, and love until the French forces’ decisive rout of German arms to put an end to the city’s brief time in the sun. The author relates this intriguing human story in a kind of informal, novelistic style, an approach that doesn’t fit the subject. In a tale centered on a few people who made profound contributions to Western culture, Neumann offers little about the works they produced or the significance and influence of their thought, fiction, poetry, and plays. There’s nothing wrong with portraying such people’s lives. But if they’re shown principally as squabbling, striving, ego-threatened, love-needy—that is, normal—humans whose often epochal achievements remain in the background, we might as well read about fictional characters. Lost in the book’s pages is consideration of the relationship, if any, between what these men wrote and the lives they lived. Readers, told of the leading figures’ significance, need more direct acquaintance with what they’re significant for.

A prospectively important work that misses its mark.

Kirkus Reviews