How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler

Today, the German city of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, is the world centre of the optical and precision industry; but in the 1790s it spawned an even more marketable commodity. It was then a small medieval town on the banks of the river Saale with crumbling walls, 800 half-timbered houses, a market square and an unruly university. Here, in the philosophy department, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a young professor inspired by Immanuel Kant and the French Revolution, proclaimed from the pulpit his theory of the ‘Ich’. ‘A person,’ he roared, ‘should be self-determined.’ In an age of absolute power and the divine right of kings, the idea of free will was an incendiary device and Fichte freewheeled his way through each lecture. ‘Attend to yourself,’ he instructed his mesmerised followers; ‘turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self.’ Fichte’s lectures, says Andrea Wulf in her engrossing new book, re-centred the way we understand the world. It’s little wonder that intellectuals flocked to Jena.

Magnificent Rebels is a group biography about the decade between 1794 and 1804 when a cohort of writers, philosophers and translators, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. The book is also a beginner’s guide to German idealism. It’s no mean feat to explain such hefty theories in layman’s terms, and Wulf does so without, as Byron said of Coleridge, needing to explain her explanation.

The grandfather of what she calls ‘the Jena set’ was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther turned suicide into an art, or group-think. Goethe, who lived with his mistress and son in nearby Weimar, was first invited to Jena by the playwright Friedrich Schiller, who began lecturing at the university in 1789.