THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 63
subject of Wulf ’s previous book). Schel-
ling had survived his early years as a
child prodigy and, later, enrollment at
a forbiddingly austere Protestant sem-
inary to publish work in which he ar-
gued that the Ich was identical with na-
ture. The dashing Novalis visited when
he could, sharing his hopeless love for
a dying girl with his friends, along with
the poetic-philosophical fragments that
made him famous. His may be the most
resonant formulation of the Romantic
essence: “By giving the commonplace a
higher meaning, by making the ordi-
nary look mysterious, by granting to
what is known the dignity of the un-
known and imparting to the finite a
shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.”
So much for the men. The women
are equally remarkable, none more so
than Caroline Böhmer Schlegel Schell-
ing. (She was married to August Wil-
helm Schlegel for seven years and then
to Friedrich Schelling for six.) She was
essential to, although never properly
credited for, what have become canon-
ical German translations of Shakespeare.
“She ticked syllables, tapping her fin-
gers on the table as she transformed
August Wilhelm’s text into melody and
poetry,” Wulf writes. Her marriage to
Schlegel, in 1796, was her second, and
came after many years of her rejecting
him. “Schlegel and me! No, nothing is
going to happen between us,” she said,
like a rom-com heroine resisting the in-
evitable. She eventually decided that he
might be just the thing after all, but not
before several rumored affairs, a preg-
nancy that resulted from a one-night
stand after a ball, and a stint in prison
for suspected revolutionary sympathies.
The Jena Set could be prolific, pub-
lishing a constant stream of treatises,
essays, and reviews, often of one anoth-
er’s work. Their love lives and their mar-
riages typically moved along separate
tracks. And they had a habit of making
trouble for themselves. When Friedrich
Schlegel wrote that one of Schiller’s
poems was “best read backwards,” Schil-
ler—who had a notable sideline as a
journal editor—decided to blacklist both
brothers. And so things went, setting
the pattern for other literary sets since:
reading, writing, reviewing, feuding,
spouse-swapping. All this until Napo-
leon Bonaparte appeared astride his
noble steed, pulling off a crushing de-
feat of the Prussian Army at the deci-
sive Battle of Jena. A marginal member
of the set, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, then completing his “Phenom-
enology of Spirit,” the summation of
the German idealist tradition, watched
the conqueror with awe, “an individual
who, concentrated here at a single point,
seated on a horse, reaches out across the
world and dominates it.”W
ulf ’s affecting coda shows us the
scene on the eve of the battle:
people hiding their valuables in antici-
pation of looters; drunk soldiers smash-
ing windows and furniture. The French
troops emptied Jena of bread and soon
had slaughtered the last edible animal;
after firewood stores were exhausted, they
looked elsewhere for fuel—to the furni-
ture and the books and manuscripts that
belonged to the university’s professors.
Most of the Jena Set had long since made
themselves scarce. Caroline Schelling, for
one, was philosophical: “What can last
no longer must perish.” It was the end of
one bright and shining moment.
Still, retrospection has a way of mak-
ing such moments even brighter and
shinier, and Jena Romanticism survived
in the continuing influence of the think-ers who briefly lived there. English writ-
ers of the period were much taken with
August Wilhelm Schlegel’s thoughts
about Shakespeare, which credited him
with being a true Romantic. Shelley,
Hazlitt, and Carlyle agreed. Coleridge
freely lifted passages from the Schle-
gels’ work for his own literary lectures.
Emerson discovered German Roman-
ticism through Coleridge; his fellow
American transcendentalists taught
themselves German so that they could
read the German idealists. Walt Whit-
man found the “great System of Ideal-
istic Philosophy in Germany,” in par-
ticular the “theory that the human mind
and external nature are essentially one,”
to be so compelling that he took to re-
moving all his clothes in order to com-
mune with nature. The spirit of Jena
endured not only on Walden Pond and
in the English Lake District but per-
haps also on Freud’s infamous couch.
Wulf notes that the Viennese doctor
regularly referred to the Jena Set’s work;
indeed, his “das Ich” was what his En-
glish readers know as “the ego.”
The Romanticism of the original
Romantics was complex enough to speak
to the events of the past two centuries.
It stood for self-determination and“Dad, you’re fired. And, obviously, I’ll understand if you have to stop
paying my phone bill till you get back on your feet.”