Magnificent Rebels

The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

By: Andrea Wulf

Narrated by: Julie Teal

A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels—poets, novelists, philosophers—who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heartbreaking grief, and radical ideas launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The Washington Post

"Make[s] the reader feel as if they were in the room with the great personalities of the age, bearing witness to their insights and their vanities and rages.”—Lauren Groff, New York Times best-selling author of Matrix

When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s, when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom.

The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self, and by their radical notions of the creative potential of the individual, the highest aspirations of art and science, the unity of nature, and the true meaning of freedom. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfillment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our responsibilities toward our community and future generations. At the heart of this inspiring book is the extremely modern tension between the dangers of selfishness and the thrilling possibilities of free will.

©2022 Andrea Wulf (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

A New Yorker Essential Read • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The New Yorker • The Washington Post • The Chicago Tribune • The Times (UK) • Telegraph • Times Literary Supplement • The New Statesman • The Spectator • Financial Times • An Economist Best Book on Culture and Ideas

“An engrossing chronicle of the early German Romantics … Wulf, who has a novelistic eye for the telling detail, provides a riveting account of how raptures gave way to ruptures.”—New York Review of Books

“[Wulf] spins a lively yarn. . . . A century ago Anglophone intellectuals were more aware of German ideas than they are today. Ms Wulf is to be thanked for bringing some neglected thinkers vividly to life.”—The Economist

“Her real subjects are the relationships among these writers—their friendships and feuds, love affairs and professional rivalries, about which she writes vividly and well.”—New Republic

Remarkable book

A new history of why Germany was 'the land of the poets and thinkers,' and the profound influence a group of these poets and thinkers in the late 18th century have had on us today. They gave us the concept of the importance of the self and the modern idea of humanity being part of and responsible for the natural world - not its 'conqueror.' But these poets and thinkers are also all too human. Very lively, very well written. Narration is also excellent.

Finest Narration I’ve Heard

I really enjoyed this reading. The narrator has a lovely voice and the writing is so intimate you’d think you were there and these famous people were your friends. Highly recommended!

Please hire this narrator more

The book itself is very good and fascinating. The reader is amazing and I strongly wish they’d ask her to do more titles on here

Fascinating!

Loved the book! It is extremely well written and narrated, and the subject is fascinating. I liked this book as much as “The invention of Nature”, also by Andrea Wulf.

Excellent

An excellent thought-provoking audiobook. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The narration was spot-on, and I appreciated the pauses she made that allowed the sentences to sink in. Totally recommended audiobook.

meet the philosophers and writer's you studied in college

this book is a fascinating biography of an Era and the geniuses who shaped our thinking. an exciting look at Goethe, Shilling, Hegel, and all the other German thinkers. such drama!

History of thought illuminated by analysis of friendships

Andrea Wulf immersed herself in the extraordinarily rich correspondence among members of a gifted group of intellectuals who lived close to each other in the University town of Jena in the 1790s and earliest years of the 19th century, and she possesses — as she had to, to undertake this work — deep knowledge of the large body of their published writing. Her account of their interconnections and contributions to each other’s thinking is vivid, astonishing in its range from personal and emotional details to philosophical, literary, and scientific matters, from daily material concerns in their mostly quite unconventional lives to the ways in which they responded to the political and social circumstances in a Europe transformed by the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. Julie Teal’s performance as reader is masterful.

An intellectual and emotional feast!

Wonderfully narrated, this remarkable book by Andrea Wulf is non-fiction that reads like a splendid and moving novel. A feast for both mind and heart, it’s an intellectual yet emotionally rich immersion into the birthplace of some of our (western culture’s) most taken-for-granted and generative ideas. Magnificent indeed!

Brilliant Opening Devolving Into Gossip

I lived the first quarter of the work, but the balance Wulf strikes so brilliantly in that start, between personalities involved and the ideas they wrestled with, becomes skewed towards an exhaustive accounting of every affair, real and perceived slight, and financial struggle. If Wulf had cut half of that and instead wrestled much more with the ideas being generated by the “Jena set” her turn back to the importance of those ideas at the end of the work would have carried more weight.

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