Review by Booklist Review
Philosophers and poets congregate in a university town, kindling both interpersonal intrigues and revolutionary ideas about freedom and self-understanding that would influence European thought for decades. A bastion of free-thinking amidst the Thuringian hills, Jena was a magnet for German-speaking intellectuals of the late eighteenth century. Idealists including Hegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher engaged in "symphilosophieren" (collaborative philosophical conversations) with Romantics including Novalis and the Schlegel brothers. Germaine de Staël, forbidden by Napoleon to come within 40 leagues of Paris, found sanctuary in Jena. Goethe visited frequently, famously befriending literary polymath Friedrich Schiller. Intellectually, most were in one way or another wrestling with the legacy of Kant. But they were also laying the groundwork for a modern philosophy of nature and trying out increasingly sophisticated ideas about individual freedom and societal responsibility. Neumann adeptly narrates the philosophical advances that quickened in this heady environment. But his true fascination is Jena's social milieu, the feuds, romantic dalliances, and chance encounters that undergirded the "republic of free spirits." The result is a quirky, fleet-footed intellectual history that foregrounds the human beings behind the ideas.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
