Review: 'Jena 1800,' by Peter Neumann

As most intellectuals today write about superficial matters such as race, class and gender, it's hard to imagine a time when thinkers focused on deeper matters of the mind, exploring how truth could be perceived through imagination, intuition and the creation of art. Of course I'm referring to the Romantics.

Though the Romantic Movement flourished in England and America, it's the German Romantics who originated ways of thinking that still dominate so much of our culture, from our idealization of nature and art to our (mis)understanding of Buddhism.

In "Jena 1800," German poet and philosophy professor Peter Neumann beautifully captures the special moment when, guided by Goethe and inspired by Kant, the young philosophers Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, poets Schiller and Novalis, brothers Fritz and Wilhelm Schlegel and their wives Dorothea and Caroline all lived in the same small university town, Jena, at the same time, and tried to remake the world.

In many ways, Romanticism was an intellectual counter-revolution to the Enlightenment. By 1790, the pure reason promoted by French philosophers led to the bloody Terror, and when Napoleon ended the revolution, the center of European thought moved into the Germanic states of the Holy Roman Empire, and to Jena in particular.

Fichte arrived there in 1794 and students flocked to hear him build on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" by declaring that, now that "we can know nothing about how things in themselves actually are," as Neumann writes, because "the scope of our knowledge is limited," no individual should obey any law that they themselves did not find rational.

Schiller was already known for lectures proclaiming that "art liberated man from the rule of mere conceptualized thinking," and Schelling focused on nature, which "functioned as a medium for the mind to recognize itself." Novalis' spiritual poetry and prose promoted a re-enchantment of the world, with his blue flower symbolizing the ineffable search for the infinite, and the Schlegel brothers put everyone's ideas together in the short-lived but immensely influential journal Athenaeum, which made the German Romantics what they are.

Being a literary artist himself, Neumann tells this story so much like a novel that I often forgot it wasn't. With a sweeping style, he charmingly animates the atmosphere of Jena, with its lecture halls, living rooms and Saale River. Yet he focuses on relationships, the alliances and rivalries of friends and lovers. And like most biographers, Neumann plays with the hypothetical.

For instance, after Fichte's unabashed atheism gets him ousted from Jena and he unsuccessfully suggests that all the Schlegels come live with him in Berlin, Neumann gets in Fichte's mind: "Fine, he thought — let them figure it out for themselves."

But if you're going to put words in your subjects' heads, why not actually write a novel? Indeed, "Jena 1800" would have been much better as fiction. For despite Neumann's knowledge, everyone blurs together; to me, only Novalis is distinct. And this is perhaps because I adore Penelope Fitzgerald's novel about him, "The Blue Flower."

As Polish author Olga Tokarczuk asked in the New Yorker, isn't it often the case "that we remember characters better from novels than we do real people?" Alas, though Peter Neumann seems the ideal person to write a novel about the German Romantics, he's left that opportunity to someone else.

Randy Rosenthal teaches writing for Harvard University. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Scholar and many other publications.

Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits

By: Peter Neumann, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 244 pages, $27.