62 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
passionate friendships shattered into
fierce feuds. There are writers who strug-
gle to write and others who struggle to
stop. A steady and ominous undertone
to all the cogitation and copulation is
the rise of Napoleon, a Romantic fig-
ure in his own way, from the ashes of
the 1789 revolution in France.
Such drama, such freedom—in so
small a town, and in so unfree an age.
How was it possible? Wulf believes that
the atmosphere of intellectual and (to a
point) political freedom was sustained by
the sheer difficulty of censorship in a
“splintered and inward-looking” Ger-
many, still a “patchwork of more than fif-
teen hundred states,” in the dying days
of the Holy Roman Empire. Thinkers
and writers of a progressive stripe were
drawn to Jena by what an older member
of Wulf ’s ensemble, Friedrich Schiller,
described as the unusual prospect of “com-
plete freedom to think, to teach and to
write.” And, of course, to read the books,
newspapers, and pamphlets pumped out
by a thriving publishing trade.
The background to the new Ich phi-
losophy was the revolutionary work of
Immanuel Kant. He was now entering
his eighth decade, but his writings were
still being discussed by readers in Jena,
Wulf tells us, “with the same passion as
others did popular novels.” “What is
Enlightenment?” Kant had asked, an-
swering—in a phrase that still retains
something of its original spine-tingling
power—that it was nothing more or
less than “man’s emergence from his
self-imposed immaturity.” More pith-
ily, he challenged his contemporaries,
“Dare to know.”
Kant had primed people to focus on
how their knowledge of the world was
conditioned by their minds; in Wulf ’s
précis, “We’ll always see it through the
prism of our thinking.” Even time and
space were not “actual entities” but,
rather, belonged to “the subjective con-
stitution of the mind.” They were, as
Wulf puts it, the “lens through which
we see nature.” We were to distinguish,
then, between a thing as we perceive it
and the “thing-in-itself.”
Ever since Fichte read Kant’s “Cri-
tique of Practical Reason” in 1790, an-
notating frenetically as he went, he had,
he declared, “been living in a new world.”
He was moved, it seems, by a grand
picture of the self as “a lawgiver of na-
ture,” a conception that encourages what
Wulf vaguely terms “a shift towards the
importance of the self.” Fichte wanted
to expand the role of the Ich still fur-
ther, removing its blindfold and abol-
ishing the idea of an inaccessible thing-
in-itself; the self after Kant became
“creative and free.”
The rhetoric of freedom and self-de-
termination must have appealed to the
young Fichte, the son of a ribbon-weaver
in Saxony. He had gained a spot at an
élite boarding school after a beneficent
visiting baron heard him recite, from
memory, a sermon that he had listened
to when he was looking after livestock
by a church. Fichte remade himself in
the time-honored way, unlearning his
rube’s accent and marrying a civil ser-
vant’s educated daughter. Yet amid his
dense metaphysical publications was a
pamphlet, circulated in 1793 (and pru-
dently unsigned), extolling the revolu-
tion in France. “Just as that nation has
torn away the external chains of man,”
he wrote later, “my system tears away
the chains of the thing-in-itself, or ex-
ternal causes, that still shackle him more
or less in other systems, even the Kant-
ian. My first principle establishes man
as an independent being.”
Arriving at the University of Jena in
1794, Fichte began to cultivate a messi-
anic persona. “Gentlemen, go into your-
selves,” he shouted from his lecturer’s
pulpit. (To judge by Wulf ’s verbs—“thun-
dered,” “roared,” “bellowed”—Fichte hadno indoor voice.) “Act! Act!” he exhorted.
“That’s what we are here for.” He left
the auditorium followed by a gaggle of
reverent students, “like a triumphant
Roman emperor.”
For long-suffering readers of his
treatises, the adulation that Fichte in-
spired is hard to understand. Perhaps
one needed to be there, to feel the force
of his presence, his prophet’s manner.
Little else could explain how people
kept a straight face at such pronounce-ments as “My will alone... shall float
audaciously and boldly over the wreck-
age of the universe.”W
hat’s easier to grasp is the human
appeal of the other figures who
populate the pages of this book. They
were, of course, the original Roman-
tics, at a time when the German word
for the sensibility (romantisch) hadn’t
yet acquired its modern significance.
One might call Wulf ’s telling novel-
istic, although only a nineteenth-cen-
tury Russian novelist would have a cast
of protagonists with such inconve-
niently similar names: Friedrich Schil-
ler, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schle-
gel. There is another Friedrich—von
Hardenberg—who wrote under the
name Novalis. There are two Johanns
and two Carolines. Wulf and her pub-
lishers have gone several extra miles to
help the reader keep them all straight:
informative chapter titles, a careful
index, and a dramatis personae with
minibiographies.
Looming over the young blood of
Jena was that national icon Goethe,
who, early in Wulf ’s book, rides pictur-
esquely from his home in Weimar to
his friends in Jena on a hot summer’s
day across wheat fields at harvest time.
His youthful novel “The Sorrows of
Young Werther” (1774) had captivated
a generation a couple of decades ear-
lier; in imitation of the title character,
readers dressed in yellow waistcoats and
breeches. Imitation didn’t stop there: so
many young men were said to have
taken Werther’s lovelorn example to
heart and killed themselves that, Lord
Byron jested, Goethe had claimed
more lives than Napoleon. By the sev-
enteen-nineties, Goethe was a senior
statesman, less a member of the Jena
Set than its “benevolent godfather.” But
it was his friend Friedrich Schiller, the
celebrated playwright, who persuaded
him to take thinkers like Fichte seri-
ously. Goethe had considered himself
a realist, dedicated to the observation
of nature; Schiller was inclined toward
idealism, and the inward-turned inter-
rogations of the soul.
By the mid-seventeen-nineties, the
brothers Schlegel—August Wilhelm
and Friedrich—were also in Jena. So
were the brothers Humboldt—Wilhelm
and, on regular sojourns, Alexander (the