by Andrea Wulf
First published 2022
Andrea Wulf examines the circle of young German intellectuals who invented Romanticism in a university town during the 1790s. She focuses on how poets like Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis joined philosophers including Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to place individual consciousness at the center of human experience. Caroline Schlegel emerges as the central figure who ignited their discussions about selfhood, nature, identity, and personal freedom. Wulf argues that these thinkers launched a mental transformation that rivals the political changes of the French Revolution. The author traces how their ideas about creative potential, artistic achievement, scientific discovery, and natural unity continue to shape modern life. She shows how we still navigate the same conflicts they identified between personal fulfillment and selfish excess, between individual rights and collective responsibility. The book reveals how this German movement established the tension between dangerous self-absorption and the exciting possibilities of autonomous choice that defines contemporary existence.
Genres: 20th-century, biography-memoir, 19th-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: Germany
Period: 1790s
512 pages · Hardcover · John Murray Publishers Ltd