Fabelhafte Rebellen

Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, Novalis, the Humboldts, the Schlegels, etc. all hung out and had a very Real Housewives of Jena-like social life. That's a great fact. But the challenge is that a great fact isn't a great story in itself. The challenge turns into a problem when none of the things your protagonists did together had any bearing on what they thought, even though your central thesis is that there was a creative cross-pollination between these people that only happened because they were living in close proximity to each other. It really seems like they could have just as easily read each other's work from a distance and the Romantic movement would have happened more or less the same way.

Still, I always like this way of getting a feeling for history: zooming in on a very specific context and time, and simply hanging out with a cast of fun characters. On that front, the book definitely delivered.

Also, this was a way more elegant way of building on Wulf's past success with “The Invention of Nature” than most non-fiction authors manage once they land a hit. This is no “What if [thesis of the last book], but it's about the future this time!?” kind of Frankopan- or Harari-style phone-in.

—

4/5 as an audiobook. Even though there are many names—some even duplicates—it was never very hard to keep track of what was going on. And if it was, it helped that most things weren't very integral to what followed anyway.