The Rest Is History - 234. Germans Behaving Badly

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Why is modern society so self-obsessed? The answer may be found in a group of late 18th century German rebels, including the writer Goethe and playwright Friedrich Schiller. Andrea Wulf joins Dominic and Tom in today's episode to discuss the rebels' progressive (and often scandalous) lives and her new book, 'Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self'.  Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. We live in a world in which we tiptoe along a thin line between free will and selfishness, between self-determination and narcissism, between empathy and righteousness.

Underpinning everything are these crucial questions. Who am I as an individual? And who am I as a member of a group and society? When did we begin to be as selfish as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we think it was our right to take what we wanted? Where did this us, you, me, or our collective behavior all come from? And when did we first ask the question, how can I be free? So Tom Holland, these are questions that I imagine you ask yourself all the time. Every day I leap out of bed asking those questions.

They're the questions posed in a preface to a wonderful new book, which we'll come to in just a second. But people often say, don't they, that we live in an age of unparalleled narcissism and um people often like to trace this back to the ideals of philosophers and writers and people who argued about the self and the individual and the kind of romantic ideal of the the poet in his garret or staring out over a mountain i mean this is very, not only is it your kind of territory because you love Lord Byron, who you believe to have been a vampire, but also... I mean, that's very much doing what you want, isn't it?

You are very much this sort of person, aren't you? I see you as a rugged individual staring out over great mountain ranges, contemplating the... That is so kind. I mean this pejoratively. So that's poor behaviour by your reckoning. Well, I'm Samuel Johnson kicking a stone. You are. He kicked a stone and refuted

Bishop Barclay's theory of immaterialism. So you mentioned Byron, but of course, actually, I mean, this is very German behaviour. It is German. Because the idea of romanticism, the very word romantic in the way that we use it today, originates with a group of German philosophers in the university town of Jena, basically in the 1790s. And it's the argument of my dear friend, Andrea Wolff, who award-winning historian, and despite being German, writes brilliant, brilliant English. Despite being German. Tom, what an introduction. And her latest book is Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. And Andrea, when you told me about this, it must have been three, four years ago that you were planning to write a book about a bunch of philosophers in the university town of Jena, I thought that was a brave choice. Because Dominic, as a kind of philosophers in the university town of Jena, I thought that was a brave choice.

Because, Dominic, as a kind of John Bull figure, what is your attitude towards German idealist philosophers? Do you read them regularly? Are you a fan of them? Do you curl up with shelling of an evening? Yeah. I mean, when I'm on the train on the way to Molineux on a Saturday, Tom, I've often got a volume of Fichte with me, reading a bit of Hegel. Absolutely. No, I mean, I think what is absolutely fascinating, Tom, is that this is a world so unknown to English-speaking readers. So, in other words, we're in 18th century Germany.

So, Germany has not been unified yet. We are, as you say, in the era of the French Revolution. And we are talking about one of the most advanced, most civilized, most enlightened, as it were, parts of Europe. And all these people who, for many years, actually, in Britain, were seen as absolute paragons and models. Well, and direct influences on the Romantic movement here. Yeah. And since disappeared, haven't they? I think partly because of the World Wars, Tom,

they've sort of been airbrushed out. But anyway, tell me about Coleridge. Well, so Coleridge goes to study there and basically plagiarizes vast chunks of philosophy from Schelling in particular, this philosopher. And that has a huge influence on English romanticism. So the English romantics, the French romantics, American romantics, all absolutely in debt to this. And Andrea, in your introduction, you say, I mean, you express the significance of this decade, the 1790s in Jena, in very, very kind of vaunting terms, a mere blink in time, yet one of the most important decades for the shaping of the modern mind. And it has to be said that you conclusively, I think, make that case. And not only do you make that case, but you make it in an incredibly entertaining style. Because although,

you know, the philosophy is incredibly important, as you demonstrate, I mean, they are, they're such a bunch, they're endlessly marrying with each other, falling, falling out of each other's beds, having spats. I mean, you've written it almost as a kind of soap opera, verging at points into a sitcom. Yeah, well, you know, when if the thing is, if you write about philosophy, you need to kind of lighten it up a little bit. And, and, and I also think the problem is we see philosophy or philosophers through their works, but obviously they were people and their philosophy was a philosophy of the self. So they kind of used their own lives as a platform to try this all out. So they became quite egotistical also. So it's a book about big, big ideas about the beginning of the modern self.

But it is also a soap opera with lots of sex and rock and roll and fun. And, you know, because we have thousands and thousands of letters and these are all poets, so they write really well and really gossipy. So because we have these letters, you can actually, you can enter the rooms with them. You can enter the bedroom with them. I mean, one of them wrote an erotic autobiographical novel where he basically invites the readers to watch him and his lover make love in quite explicit erotic detail. So they're philosophers, but they're also

very flawed human beings. Well, you quote Novalis, who is the kind of the prototype of the doomed romantic poet, great poet who dies young, age of 29, I think think so the prototype for keats and jelly and all that kind of thing um and and you quote from his diary um in which he is endlessly recording his um sexual moods and his wanking and all kinds of stuff which he frames as um lewdness raged from morning into the afternoon so i know but then you if you go on, there's one where the lewd fantasy in the morning leads to an explosion in the afternoon. Oh, my word. Yes.

So this is very much a collection of people who are not just doing philosophy, I think it's fair to say. So let's put them, Andrew, in place and in time. So we are at the end of the 18th century and we are in a place called Jena. There was a battle of Jena, which we might come to later. But first of all, so where is Jena and why should we be interested in it? So maybe I should start with Germany, just to explain a little bit where Jena is, because Jena is in Germany. So as you said in

your introduction, Germany at the end of the 18th century is not a unified nation. It's a patchwork of 1500 states ranging from tiny principalities to big, you know, mighty states like Prussia and Austria. And Jena is in the Duchy of Sachse Weimar, which is in the middle of it. But the unintended advantage of this fragmentation is that censorship is basically very difficult to enforce in these little states because every state has a different set of rules. So very unlike century ruled countries like England or France. And France, England, Spain have also big, you know, their big global monarchies, powerful monarchies with a global reach through their colonies. And in Germany, everything is inward looking and splintered. So the German imagination really is fed by words and by books. And Germans

are fanatical readers. So the literacy rates in Germany are much higher than elsewhere. So Saxony and Prussia actually lead the world at the end of the 18th century. They're more universities. I was really startled to read, and a little bit embarrassed on behalf of England, I'm afraid to say, that the German book trade was four to five times larger than that in England, which isn't at all the impression that one would get from reading about Grub Street in London or something. Yeah, and everybody read in Germany. I mean, you cannot underestimate how many people read in Germany. And you have 50 universities compared to two universities in England. So ideas and arguments traveled quite easily through the German states. But then the question is, why Jena?

So Jena is this small town, four and a half thousand inhabitants. It's a university town. It's tiny, So it takes like less than 10 minutes to cross. It's headed by a pretty enlightened ruler who encourages a certain degree of openness and frankness. And but the real reason why there's more freedom in Jena and why it attracts more liberally minded people than anywhere else in Germany is the governance of the university, which once belonged to Saxony, but through complicated inheritance laws, basically nominally kind of controlled by four different Saxon dukes, no one is in charge. So what happens is every writer, every thinker who has problems with the authorities in their hometowns ends up in Jena.

So it becomes this very transient place of very revolutionary minds. And I mean, for me, one great example was that it's so transient that you have a staggering amount of 25 percent, a quarter of all children born in Jena at the time of the Jena set are born out of wedlock. So there's a lot of sex going on there. Right, right. And it's a very kind of small, intimate place, isn't it? Yes. And you say again and again throughout the book that it's a place that's too small for gossip. So essentially, when people start sleeping with one another or bitching about them behind their

backs, it always gets back to them. And so it's ideally suited to the swirl and drama of soap opera. Yeah, absolutely. And I think because it's so small, I mean, people walk from, you know, say from their house to the library and they cross the market town and they will meet everybody there. So there's no way you can hide that you're sleeping with someone. And then, I mean, the thing is actually they don't want to hide it. So there are quite a lot of open marriages. So you have, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt and his wife, who their lover lives, her lover lives with the Humboldts in their house

and goes very openly to all their kind of social activities. Or the Schlegel, Karoline Schlegel and or the the schlegel carolina schlegel and august wilhelm schlegel they have an open marriage um she she's quite a character we can talk about her later so so it's very open and no one really seems to mind and i think also we sometimes forget it's the victorians who made it all so kind of rigid the 18th century was quite um open-minded about stuff like that. So let's talk about the big figure.

So the big figure who is the sort of godfather, if you like. So he's from a slightly older generation. He is the one German writer, I would guess, that most of the listeners to this podcast will have heard of, that can be guaranteed to have heard of, even if you haven't read his stuff.

And that is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. So Goethe, whose book The Sorrows of Young Goethe had been the great kind of hit, I guess, of the 1770s. And he doesn't live in Jena, but he comes and visits and he is the sort of, he's the big man, isn't he? Yes. So Goethe is the literary superstar in Germany. I mean, he was catapulted to international fame through his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is a novel about a lovelorn man who commits suicide and who, talking about Byron, there's Byron later jokes to Goethe that Werther encouraged a kind of wave of suicides. And Byron later jokes to Goethe that Werther encouraged a kind of wave of suicides. And Byron said to Goethe that Werther has killed more young men than Napoleon.

So young men would run around in the Werther costume, in the Werther uniform. So Goethe writes this as a young man. And then in the 1790s, when theina set kind of happens he's he's older he's in his mid-40s and fatter yeah he has a very bulging belly which he buttons in with like stripy and flowery waist so not very young furter he's no he's like he reminds me of bilbo backins oddly tom yes yes the bulging fan of uh colored waistcoats. Anyway, that's a ludicrous excursion. Sorry, Andrea. No worries.

So by the time the Yen Eset arrives, he's very much part of the government of the small duchy of Saxo Weimar. He's the privy councillor. So that's where the von comes from. So he's been raised to the aristocracy. Exactly, exactly. And he's in charge of the mines and the theatre.

So he's very much part of the establishment. But he's also failed to produce anything remarkable for quite a few years. He's very depressed about the political situation, about the French wars. And he focuses on scientific experiments. He's really into botany and comparative anatomy. So he dissects like frogs and caterpillars and everything.

So he's feeling not great in the mid-1790s. And then in 1794, he bumps, after a botanical lecture, he bumps into Jena's most famous inhabitant, Friedrich Schiller, who is Germany's most famous playwright. He became famous through his revolutionary play, The Robbers. So they start talking with each other and it becomes really the most extraordinary literary friendship in Germany. These two are very, very different. So Schiller, for example, is this tall, gaunt, perpetually ill man who can only write when he has a drawer full of rotten apples in his desk. Yeah, that's such an odd behavior. It is, isn't it? He keeps very erratic

hours, work hours, because he is an insomniac, he's ill. And so he's this very tense person. And Goethe is this kind of rosy cheek, kind of, you know, Bill by Baggins. Tom, did you not read this section, Finding Uncanny? The tall, gaunt, hypochondriac Schiller. Tall, thin, almost gaunt with reddish long hair and pale, blotchy skin. His face was dominated by a large nose and protruding cheekbones he looked as ill as he felt and he's always wittering on about cricket he can't sleep in the middle of the night because where the words for his next book are going to come and then girter in many ways the greater man girter who is the man who's sold out who's taken the uh sort of a stouter figure admittedly and shorter but i mean did you not

find that uncanny i think that is that yes very weird very weird um parking dominic's ludicrous comparison on one side um schiller also has uh behaved quite badly hasn't he romantically because while he's courting his wife he's also courting uh her sister so very byronic behavior tom very just a little bit but then they have a quite conventional marriage actually um when he when he when he finally decides who of the sisters he's getting married to but so they're so they're very very different so one is like a you know goethe describes himself as like a hard-headed realist and yes who likes his experiments and his observations loves his science dominic okay, I don't like science.

And then you have Schiller who describes himself as an idealist, who's someone who believes that ideas and the mind constitute reality, not matter. So those two men come together and they begin to work together. So they edit each other's work. They encourage each other. And they both enter one of their most productive phases in their lives. And they both of them produced some of their greatest work at this time. So I've kind of cast them, because they're older, I've cast them as almost like a frame to the story. Because then the younger generation, the kind of hot-headed, crazy younger generation arrives.

And amazingly, Goethe is absolutely invigorated by their kind of radical and mad ideas. And they, in turn, just put him on a pedestal. He becomes like their demigod. So like their kind of stern and benevolent godfather. So whenever they're in trouble, he tries to mediate. So they fall out eventually with Schiller. And he again and again tries to keep everybody happy, basically. So there's this sense of youth arriving in Jena.

And this kind of old man, 44, not very old in our days, but then old man feels completely rejuvenated and begins because Weimar is only 15 miles away from Jena, and he begins to spend more and more time in Jena. Sometimes, I mean, weeks and months on end, sometimes he spends more time in Jena than he's actually in Weimar, because he's away from the court, he's away from, you know, his court duties, so he can be free in Jena. It's very, very different to Weimar. And do you think he feels invigorated, reinvigorated by being surrounded by all these

young people having brilliant novel ideas? Yeah, I think his most famous work is Faust. And he had completely got, I mean, he was stuck. He didn't write, he hadn't, he'd stopped writing it. And then this kind of gang arrives, and he feels so kind of alive again, and he unpacks Faust again, and he kind of writes it. And you know, the Faust we see today is the Faust he wrote, or large parts, large chunk he wrote during the time of the Jena set. You talk about the arrival of this kind of gang of young guns. Could we look at some of them? So who would you say is the most significant in terms of kind of lighting the touch paper with this?

It would be Fichte. I'm sorry to say we're going to have to talk about philosopher now. Well, he's quite a character though, isn't he? So he's Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that's his name? Yeah, he's Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and he was quite a character. So you have to imagine this guy. So he's more bull than a race horse he's quite kind of sturdily built and muscular and he gives his lectures um in his

riding boots with spurs and whip in hand and he's feared for his volatile temperament and does he use the whip i mean is using it as a prop or is he kind of you know people fall asleep he lashes them or what's going on i have going on? I have not read anything. So I think it was just like he would just come in. Yeah, a prop. But he's, so there's nothing gentle about Fichte at all. So he thunders, he shouts, he insults, he stomps rather than walks. He eats his snuff tobacco rather than inhaling it.

I mean, he's just like this. That is another weird, very weird detail. So he's, and he's so popular. His students call him the Bonaparte of philosophy because he revolutionized the way we think about us. And he's so popular that his auditorium is packed. The students are standing on ladders, looking through the window.

I mean, half of the students of Jena come to his lectures, because what he does is, so at a time when Europe is held, most of Europe is held in the einfest of absolutism, Fichte imbues the self with the most thrilling of all powers, with free will and self-determination. So that might not sound so exciting for us because we are so used to kind of seeing the world through the prism of our own self, but it was such a revolutionary idea then. And so he says, basically, there are no God-given truth. You know, everything that we know, the only certainty is that the world is experienced through the self. And he says, the self posits its own being, which means the self basically brings itself into existence. And not only that, through this initial powerful act, it also brings the external world into

existence, at least in our mind. So it doesn't bring the world, it doesn't create the world, but it creates our knowledge of the external world and that changes everything that is the beginning of the modern self because what he does is his ideas as simple as it is radical it says that the self is the supreme ruler of the world so the self not kings or queens or gods rule this world. It's us. It's our mind. And that is just, I mean, that's an explosive idea, which is really difficult to understand now, but it was mind-blowing. I mean, students from all over Europe

came to Jena to study under Fichte. I mean, there's a kind of unrepentant individualism, absolutely unrepentant individualism to it, isn't there? My will alone shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe so i mean if you were being harsh is fichte the kind of father of modern narcissism is that too am i being too too daily male about it well yes or no so it it has been used like this but it was never he never intended a narcissistic celebration of the self at all, quite the opposite. So what Fichte said was that freedom is always closely interwoven with our moral obligations.

So for him, it was this idea that freedom gives us the choice in how to act and behave. It elevates us over our base instincts of greed and hunger and fear. Freedom always comes with its twin, which is moral duty. And there's a great example very recently in the pandemic about this. So we have to make this decision. How can I live a meaningful life, where I pursue my dreams, which is the, you know, free will, and be morally a good person. So in the pandemic, millions of us gave up their basic rights and freedoms, because they believe these draconian rules of not seeing our friends and family, that was for the greater good. But some of us didn't't because they said our personal

liberties are more important. And I think it's this balancing act, this tension between the breathtaking possibilities of free will and the pitfalls of selfishness, which is a balancing act we still continue to this day. So Andrea, it's the ich philosophy, the I philosophy, the me philosophy. I mean, inevitably, I would have thought going to appeal more to extroverts. If you're being told it's your own individual, it's your own self that creates reality. That I would have thought is a philosophy that would appeal more to someone who, as Victor was, was stomping around with his riding crop and boots. Would you say that's fair? I don't't agree with that I think surely aren't you more likely to be if you're an introvert Tom and you

spend a lot of time on your own thinking about yourself aren't you more likely to be drawn to that philosophy I would have said than if you're an other centered person well so that ties in with another question which is that this is a time of titanic deeds, particularly in France. And it's the age of Napoleon. Napoleon kind of, in a sense, is the exemplification of the ick philosophy, creating reality through the realization of his own self. But Germany is fragmented. And Jena, as you said, the freedom in a way is also the index of its impotence. And isn't there also a sense in which it's important to someone like Fichte and then to the other philosophers who gather around him to make great claims for this philosophy? Because in a sense, they, you know,

they're not sailing to Egypt or storming across Europe or doing anything they are, sitting in lecture halls. And in a sense, the stereotype of the German in the late 18th century is almost the opposite of the one that is given birth to as a result of the Prussians and then the Nazis, that the Germans in the 18th century are dreamers. And in a way, this is an attempt to to kind of dignify that dreaming couldn't you say that if you're being very very harsh very unsympathetic if you if you want to see it like this i would actually go back to the french revolution because what happened in france the french revolution is such a massive pivotal um event that it affects almost everybody in europe but when the french revolutionaries declare that all men are equal,

they promise a social order that is built on the power of ideas and freedom. And I think that is the moment when philosophy leaves the ivory tower of rarefied thought and arrives in the minds of ordinary people. So this is a revolution that proves that ideas are stronger than any weapon or mites of kings and queens. And I think that gives the mind such a great power that I think we tend today, and I think it's the wrong way of seeing romanticism, we think of these kind of like forlorn, dreamy, broody kind of type of people. That's not what the first romantics were about at all. For them, this was a very, very complex, unwieldy and dynamic concept that has nothing to do with the kind of the lone figure

standing in a moonlit kind of forest kind of, you know, looking over the clouds or something like that. This was something where they said, romantic poetry is a living organism and it transcended disciplines and they put poetry in the ancient Greek meaning at its center, which meant productive and creative. So they wanted to romanticize the whole world and that meant bringing together the arts and the sciences, humankind and nature. So it's something much more complicated. And what they do is they elevate imagination as the highest faculty of the mind. So imagination had been seen, you know, had been kind of given a subordinate role in philosophy for centuries. It was kind of regarded with suspicion. It kind of like hit the, it kind of obscured the truth. It was unreliable. Samuel

Johnson called it a licentious faculty. And they came along and said, no, no, no, no, no. Imagination is how we understand the world. But that didn't mean that they turned against reason. They just added it. So what they said is like, we want to poeticize the sciences. Or Friedrich Schlieger said, I want to make Euclid singable. So there's this sense of creating something much bigger.

And it's the later romantics who just messed it all up, basically. Okay. Well, you talk about romanticism. I think we should take a break now. And then when we come back, we should look at the man who first coins the word romantic in the sense that we use it today, his wife, his brother, and all kinds of shenanigans. So we will look at that after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news,

reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the origins of Romanticism and specifically the German Romantics for the town of Jena. And before the break, Andrea, Tom was promising that we would get into the origins of the term Romanticism. And it begins, I believe, with a poet and translator, August Wilhelm Schlegel.

So would you like to tell us a bit about him? So it's August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel. So they're two brothers um one August Wilhelm Schlegel was always perfectly dressed and perfectly groomed bit pedantic and his brother was this kind of like crazy hothead who called himself a dictator critic which is a literary critic with a pen as sharp as the french guillotines and they set out um to attack the literary establishment and they did that with a magazine a literary magazine called the athenaeum um a magazine which they said they wanted to be of sublime impertinence so that was like the most important thing and it is in the in the pages of the a the Athenaeum that they first used the term romantic

in its new literary meaning. So forget Coleridge and the English romantics. The first time romantic has been used in this way was actually in Germany. Yeah, we acknowledge that. They launched romanticism as an international movement. And they were, so that's their kind of intellectual intention. And August Wilhelm Schlegel was also a brilliant translator who together with his wife translated 16 Shakespeare plays, the first German verse translation, which to this day is the standard edition. And amazingly, his published lectures on Shakespeare,

which were very much informed by his discussion with his wife, then resurrected Shakespeare in England, believe it or not. Well, thank you, Germany. William Wordsworth said that a German critic taught us correctly how to think correctly about Shakespeare. So they are actually quite an important bunch of people. Because that's the joke, isn't it? That the German version is very good and the English translation of it isn't bad as well. Well, I have to say, I mean, I really like, I mean, I live in England. I have lived here for almost 30 years. I always read English stuff.

But German Shakespeare performances are pretty good. I think I almost prefer them to the English ones. Oh, I'm hanging myself out of the window. That's absolutely fine. So, Andrea, you mentioned Schlegel's wife, who is the co-translator on this. And she is an extraordinary woman. And in a way, she seems to be the beating heart of the soap opera, the sitcom, however you want to frame it. I mean, she's a remarkable figure, isn't she?

So just tell us about her. So let me introduce her properly with all her names. She's Karoline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel Schelling. So she carries the name of her father and her three husbands. And she is, as you said, she's at the heart of this story. She was born in 1763. She was the daughter of a very famous German scholar. She was raised on a diet on literature, poetry and politics. She was the daughter of a very famous German scholar. She was raised on a diet on literature, poetry, and politics. She was beautiful, educated, fiercely independently minded. She married young, was a widow by the age of 24, then hung out with the German revolutionaries, was then imprisoned by the Prussians for being a sympathizer with the French Revolution.

And then not only that, imprisoned, she discovered that she was pregnant after a one-night stand with an 18-year-old French soldier. So quite something at a time when it was scandalous behavior if you were just on your own in the room with a man. Then after her imprisonment, she kind of zigzagged through Germany, was treated as an outcast. And then August Wilhelm Schlegel came along. I mean, men just fell for her. So he was in love with her. He married her, gave her a new name. And with that, a new beginning

and took her to Jena in 1796, where she really became the heart of the Jena set and not the muse. She's not just the muse. She's much, much more important. Participant. Yeah, so she does the kind of more traditional thing where she creates the physical space for them where they all meet

and work together and party but she's also a razor sharp critic who dissects poetry and plays and essays with deep deep knowledge and her husband and her friends begin to rely on her literary and analytical mind she She is the editor of the Athenaeum. So she takes the role of the editor. She writes reviews under her husband's name. I mean, many, many, many. And she translates together with her husband, the 16 Shakespeare plays, which of course was never acknowledged. So her name is not on any of these. Yeah, I just wanted to ask about that. So what are the possibilities for a highly educated, highly intelligent woman in Jena at the end of the 18th century? Does she have to do it all through

sort of, as it were, using her husband as a vehicle? I mean, what do people think of such an articulate, emboldened woman? So it was difficult. So most women published either anonymously or under that name of their of their husbands. There were a few who did not. But I think Carolina chose purposefully not to put her name on there because she was really famous in German for being this revolutionary whore. So it would have been not a good, you know, strategy financially to do that. But it, I mean, Schiller, for example, he had another magazine, and he published quite a lot of female writers, but all of them anonymously. So most women would not put their name on there. It changed. I mean, it changes. There are a few who later do this. but it is, I mean, if there is a place in Germany, then it was Jena that you could do that.

So Friedrich Schlegel, for example, his lover is the divorced Dorothea Veidt. And she's a writer and she writes a novel, but she also publishes it under the name of her husband. It's a very, very common thing to do. So Friedrich Schlegel, younger brother of August Wilhelm Schlegel, and this is why the sitcom element starts to come in. So inevitably, he meets Caroline and he, I mean, he quite fancies her, doesn't he? Yeah. So he's younger. I mean, she really has a thing for younger men. There's a moment when she has an affair with the 12-year-old younger Friedrich Schelling. I'm sorry that everybody's called Friedrich and then Sch at the end.

Yeah. It's really confusing. Two Schlegels. No, three Schlegels. And then there's Friedrich Schiller and a Schelling. Schiller and a Schelling. Yes. It's very complicated.

So Friedrich Schlegel falls in love with Karoline, but then kind of steps back because his brother had first fallen in love. Yeah, so it's all these kind of siblings falling in love with, you know, the same person and stuff. There seems to be a running theme. Well, I would say, I mean, so the Schlegel brothers and Karoline and Dorothea Veit, who's the lover of Friedrich Schlegel, they all live together in one house. And I would really call that the first German commune. I mean, that's where it all started, basically. Right. Because they all, youel, they all lived together in one house. And I would really call that the first German commune. I mean, that's where it all started, basically. Right.

Because they all, you know, they all lived together. And Friedrich Schlegel, he writes these fragments where he says, like, you know, how could anyone have anything against, like, a marriage, a cadre? So it's a very, I mean, I've not found any letters that indicate that they had, like, a foursome or something like that. But you have August Wilhelm and Karoline being married in their open marriage. And then a few years in, she falls in love with the 12 year old, 12 year younger Friedrich Schelling.

I was gonna say he's not 12 years old. That would be very precocious. He was 12 years younger. Well, you know, Novalis fell in love with a 12 year old. Well, we'll come to Novalis in a minute. And then and then August Wilhelm doesn't really mind because he has lovers also. So it's all, you know, very open and very casual. Right. So let's just come to Novalis, who is the archetype of the romantic poet, because he dies young. He's a friend of Friedrich Schlegel. In fact, he dies. Friedrich Schlegel is by his bedside and he becomes the archetype of the, you know, the beautiful angel, that kind of stuff.

But actually, in some ways, he's a more conventional figure than any of these kind of philosophers hanging out in their commune, isn't he? Because he's he's basically running a load of mines. Yeah, well, he's the only one who's an aristocrat. So he comes from a privileged background, but the family doesn't have a lot of money. They just have basically their lineage. And so he runs the mines together with his father, the salt mines. So he is the only one actually who has a proper job compared to the others.

And so he studies in Jena and then in Leipzig, where he meets Friedrich Schlegel. They become like best friends. And then Novalis is pretty obsessed with Fichte's philosophy of the self. Yes, because you say that he wanted to make his body disappear and become spirit alone. So, I mean, what exactly does he mean by that?

No one really knows. He wants to basically transcend the kind of boundaries between the body and the mind. But what is interesting is, so he falls in love with the 12-year-old Sophie von Kuhn, which kind of makes for slightly uncomfortable reading now and then she dies after some terrible you know surgery when she's 15 and Novalis then takes Fichte's philosophy and gives it his very kind of own twist because he says well if the ich if the self can basically create the external world world and can control everything I'm going to kill myself because i want to be reunited with sophie but i'm not going to do it with a gun or rope i'm going to do it with sheer willpower um just in he believes that you know if our mind can move our body surely you know our mind should be able to like regrow an amputated arm and kill us so he is it's a little bit bonkers. But it leads him to write, I think,

some of the most exquisite poetry that the young romantics have produced, which is Hymns to the Night. I mean, it's a cycle of six poems, and it's just absolutely stunning. And he plays with darkness and with death in a completely new way. So darkness becomes something positive. You know, before, darkness has always been something kind of scary. But I think he uses also his experiences from the minds, because in the minds you go into the bowels of the earth. And so the darkness becomes this metaphor for going into yourself, which, you know, is to this day a metaphor we use to us.

But also he, I mean, it's interesting because he, presumably in the minds, I mean, he's seeing wheels turn and all this kind of stuff. But he has this complaint that nature, basically by Enlightenment philosophy, has been reduced to a monotonous machine, turning the eternally creative music of the universe into the monotonous clatter of a gigantic mill wheel. And that is a theme that is so important to the Romantics, isn't it? This rejection of the Enlightenment idea that everything is just cogs and wheels turning. Exactly. So they basically turn against these kind of mechanical models of the world. So you have, for example, Descartes, who declares all animals to be machines.

And then obviously you have an increasing productivity. You have the enlightenment, you have steam engines, you have scientists who kind of peer through microscopes to understand the minutiae of life. You have them looking into the heavens to understand our place in the universe. You have physicians inoculating against smallpox. So the world becomes this measurable, repeatable, classifiable kind of machine. And that's what the romantics turn against. They don't turn against reason, but what they want is they want to poeticize the sciences. They want to stop this, what they say, this mill wheel, which kind of grounds itself to dust,

because they believe that the Enlightenment has stripped the reality of the awe and wonder for nature. So what they really believe is that the external world has become something that has to be observed from a so-called objective perspective. And they say, and this is where Friedrich Schelling comes in with his philosophy, they basically say the self and nature is one. It's a unity. Everything is one big living organism. So if we are part of nature, if the system of nature and the system of the mind is the same thing, it means that when we walk through nature, when we walk through a forest or scramble up a mountain. It's always a journey of self-discovery. So this philosophy of oneness, that becomes the heartbeat of romanticism. That is the kind of the neck at the nexus of everything.

And that is what then becomes so important for the English romantics and for the American transcendentalists. The irony, though, is that, of course, they're talking all the time about unity, but they are incredibly divided among themselves, aren't they? I mean, you call them the Jaina set up with inflated egos, self-absorption and fight. And it's exactly what happens. They end up in what Dorothea Veidt calls a republic of despots. That's what they become. Right.

But it's also, I mean, the arguments that they have are not merely arguments on the page, are they? So there's a scene in which students are throwing bricks through Fichte's windows because they despise his ideas so much. And Goethe says, you know, this is a very disagreeable way for Fichte to have the existence of a non-ich proven to him. So these are things that people are actually, I mean, maybe physically fighting is too strong an expression, but they are prepared to at least, if not to take up arms, then to take up bricks about. Yes. So, I mean, in the beginning, they kind of agree,

but they're obviously fighting their literary establishment. And the literary establishment hates them. I mean, like hates them. They write satires about them. They write really, really savage reviews about them so but they it's almost like they're just fired up by this they just love it because and there's a wonderful quote where where august williams kind of says like they hate us great they curse us even better they you know they want to call us blasphemers even more fabulous so they quite like the fight. But then, in the end, they turn against each other.

Yeah, it starts to kind of break up, doesn't it? Because Victor flounces off. I mean, he basically says, back me or I'm leaving. And they reduce the back him. The beginning of the breakup is really when Friedrich Schlegel very stupidly writes a savage or several savage reviews about Schiller's works, including criticizing Schiller's magazine Horen for having too many translations in there. But his brother himself wrote these, you know, these translations. So Schiller in the end just goes like, oh, my gosh, can't deal with these guys anymore. And he basically breaks off all contact.

And this is really when it starts because Schiller had originally brought them to Yale. So this is, and then you have Schiller who calls Caroline Madame Lucifer and Wilhelm von Homburg's wife calls her a snake. And it just goes on and on and on. And then they begin to- Well, women tend to be less keen on Caroline than men.

Would it be fair to say that's definitely fair to say and i think that that was because she never she was never willing to play the kind of demure domestic housewife she's you know she's always like i'm gonna hang out with a with a man here i'm gonna hang out yeah um one of my favorite bits in the whole book was when um and as you say they're always kind of flancing out and having bust-ups and writing negative reviews of each other in magazines and things and um schlegel announces that he's leaving one of them uh because dominic it was simply too embarrassing to write alongside so many inferior contributors oh my word tom so there's a there's something perhaps

for you to bear in mind um what with my podcast co-presenter are you serious i was thinking more of uh your many uh media you're thinking about other media outlets i am so but what about hold on what what about what about shelling when he gets a bad review suggesting to the editors that the only person who could write a review about his own book is himself. We all think that though, don't we? So Schiller has broken up with the kind of younger set. Fichte storms off and has to go off to Berlin. And then you mentioned Schelling and Schelling ends up married to Carolina.

So that presumably also isn't, I mean, it's not hugely helpful to the group harmonies, is it? No, no. That is one of the other reasons why it kind of all breaks apart, but not so much, not because of August Wilhelm, who's married to Karoline, it's more because of Friedrich Schlegel, who used to be in love with Karoline, then gave her up for his brother. And then she just, you know, flounces off with the next one. So that's the moment when he, I think, gets so pissed off that he just, you know, all guards go down. And he and Dorothea just write so badly about Carolina, especially Dorothea, actually. Dorothea was, you know, she was not very beautiful.

And she's the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, right? Yeah, one of the greatest German Enlightenment philosophers. But she feels always a little bit, I think, overshadowed by Carolina because everybody just adored her. So the moment her lover turns against Carolina, Dorothea just writes an avalanche of horrible letters. I mean, when you read them, you think, oh, my God. And Carolina doesn't know that at the time.

She lives together with her and she's perfectly nice and friendly to her. So there's a lot of backstabbing going on at the end. And there's one other figure that we haven't mentioned. Again, I guess a household name, and that is Hegel, the philosopher Hegel. So he's not really part of the set, but he arrives towards the end, doesn't he? I suppose when they're in their falling out phase and when the glory days are slightly past. So do you see Hegel?

I mean, so in many ways, I suppose you could say the ancestor of Marx and of so many kind of modern ideas. Do you see Hegel as part of this world as well? Well, Hegel is basically, he comes in, as you said, quite towards the end. And it's like, you know, he is, now he's this kind of towering figure. But then he's very much, so he had studied together with Schelling. And Schelling is the superstar. I mean, Schelling is made the youngest professor at the age of 23 in Jena.

And when Hegel arrives, it takes him like two or three years to make the decision to arrive. He ponders over everything. So as fast and restless as the others are, he's like very slow, kind of plodding along. And by the time he finally decides to come to Jena, the kind of whirlwind is kind of always blown out. But he comes to Jena to be with Schelling because, you know, Schelling is the kind of superstar. And then what happens is as he is in Jena, he moves away bit by bit from Schelling. So Schelling leaves in 1803.

And after that, Hegel really begins his own journey. And he turns against, in his philosophy, he really turns against all this kind of craziness and kind of philosophy, which loves art and imagination. And he says like, no, no, no. And he hates nature, doesn't he? Yeah, yeah. He goes to Switzerland and everybody's like in awe of the Alps.

And he's like more interested in the technique of Swiss cheesemaking. But what he says, he basically says, hold on. Philosophy is a serious business. So let's strip all that kind of art and imagination out of it again. So he is, he kind of ends it really. And there's this amazing scene, you know, where you sometimes think, you know, facts are just so much better than fiction, you couldn't invent it. So there's the Battle of Jena when Napoleon arrives with his 150,000 French soldiers and they descend onto Jena

and they destroy the kind of almighty Prussian army. And the day before the battle, you have Hegel with the manuscript of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It's his only copy. And he puts it on the stagecoach out of Jena. And then he sees Napoleon on a horse and calls him the world's soul.

So it's this extraordinary moment, which is really, that's the end of Jena. Because after the battle, Jena is completely destroyed. The students all leave. But Hegel is there at the very last moment, like handing over his manuscript. So it's almost like a sort of harbinger of the herald of the 19th century at the end of the 18th, I guess, isn't he? I mean, sort of pointing ahead to the great ideologies

that will dominate the future. It's an amazing moment actually because napoleon himself is a figure like that isn't he so napoleon himself is a sort of enlightenment figure who is anticipating but also a romantic figure that yeah but it's anticipating the dictators and the the you know the the the monstrous ambitions of the 20th century but he sees him as you, this is basically where this progression from like feudal system to democracies and freedom. He's basically the end of history for Hegel that when he sees him, he, you know, that because we think, oh, the French are, you know,

in Jena, the Germans don't really want this. But there are quite a lot of Germans who want the French to come because they want to be liberated. They want to live in a republic and not in, you know, in absolutism. So Hegel, although his life is threatened, he wants the French to win. But Andrea, so the Jena set basically ends with that they all have bust ups.

They all run off and marry with one another and end up hating each other. And then Napoleon comes up and basically kind of trashes the whole thing. But one other thing that I picked up from the book is that a lot of these figures end up veering quite sharply to the right. So they tend to become Catholic, they tend to become quite politically reactionary. And do you think that that kind of parabola of kind of burning radicalism fading out, veering back into reaction? Do you think that that is that setting a kind of parabola of kind of burning radicalism fading out, veering back into reaction. Do you think that that is that setting a kind of prototype that will be followed through the 19th, 20th

century? I don't know. I think it is something that happens all the time, like the big revolutionaries often become, you know, dictators and, you know, nationalistic and stuff like that. So I don't know if they're the prototype. I think it's maybe it's in human nature yeah maybe maybe i fear just just to sum up give us a sense of of just how significant this is because we've about half the podcast has been on on the philosophy but the other half i'm afraid it's entirely my fault has been all about the you can see where tom's interests lie yeah so just just just for people listeners who may not um be absolutely au fait with idealist philosophy, just give us a sense of how important this is, not just for philosophy, but for the whole sweep of European history. I think basically they changed our world. It's as simple as that. They put the self at center stage and it has stayed there for the better of the worst forever.

And we have from the moment they put the self at the center, we had or people had to deal with the with the perils of this kind of newly emboldened self. And it is. It is the same kind of tiptoeing we still have to do today. And I think it is it has made us who we are. I mean, it starts with the Enlightenment, but this is the moment where this is why we are a selfish society today. Full stop. I think that in a way, like right now, in this moment, where we live today, you know, we have for long thought that we are free to think, to form our opinions, to control our lives. But right now, all of that, this very core of our society is very much under threat, be it through Russia's cyber interference in democratic elections, be it through the, you know, fake tsunami, the tsunami of fake news on social media or the kind of right-wing populist political movements. Our democracies are hollowed out right now through

liars and through despots. So I think right now is such an important moment to remind ourselves why, you know, when did we become free? Where does this hard-won self-determination came from? So in a way, the Jena set has given us our mind wings, but how we use them, that's entirely up for us. And I'm interested in history. And I mean, you will probably definitely agree with me. It's not like a dusty old pile of ideas. It's, you know, I'm interested in history because I want to know why we are who we are. So with my Humboldt book, for example, I looked at the relationship between humankind and nature to understand why we're destroying our planet. And with this book, I really wanted to know now,

why are we such a selfish society? Where does this come from? Where did it go wrong? And but also to remind myself that, you know, to be selfish in, you know, in the Yenaset meaning is something good. You know, it means that you are trying to make this, you know, to make society a better society. It doesn't mean to be a narcissistic asshole. Well, well, you definitely won't have people like that on our show. Andrea, thanks so much um magnificent rebels this is my very last sentence on this podcast if you want more about narcissistic assholes you can read andrea's book magnificent rebels the first romantics and the invention of the self and they're not just narcissistic assholes are they they are not at all very much more than are they? They are. Not at all. Very much more than that.

And it's a fantastically entertaining book. And I completely take back all the reservations that I expressed when you first said that this is what you were writing. It's an absolute triumph. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody for listening. Bye-bye.

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