Magnificent Rebels The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

Meet the first Romantics... [in this] witty, gossipy, sparkling history, full of bright jewels of anecdote: Goethe lowering a piece of cake on a string from his study window to children playing below; Hegel dodging Napoleon's invading soldiers to get the manuscript of The Phenomenology of the Spirit out of town. But above all the glitter of the parties, feuds and gossip that are so inseparable from intellectual life... Delightful and invigorating... Magnificent Rebels is a triumph.' THE TIMES, Book of the Week 'Extraordinary... A thrilling intellectual history that reads like a racy, intelligent novel, with a cast of unforgettable characters...Jena blazed with a youthful daring and intellectual creativity rarely matched elsewhere and Wulf captures this brilliantly.' SUNDAY TIMES '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.' SPECTATOR '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 'Elegantly written, deeply researched and totally gripping' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.We're still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.