Jena The Republic of Free Spirits. The cult of individuality was born amid a melding of minds. Meldings must be preceded by meetings, of course, and the meetings took place in Jena, a university town in the German duchy of Saxe-Weimar with a population of 4, or so. If Jena was small, the minds that gathered there in the last years of the eighteenth century were large, and included the most consequential poets, critics, and philosophers of the era.
The sparks they threw out electrified the world. Why Jena? In Magnificent Rebels , an engrossing chronicle of the early German Romantics, Andrea Wulf tells us that its university fell under the governance of four different Saxon dukes, which impeded orderly, top-down rule and allowed its faculty a fair amount of freedom.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was deeply involved too. In the s he was no longer the slender, long-tressed author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Now in his forties, he had seen his worldly influence expand along with his girth.
Although based in Weimar, Goethe frequented Jena because of the intellectual companions he found there. When did things turn Romantic? In one version of the story, the crucial addition was the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, perhaps the greatest of the German idealists.
He came to Jena in , after Goethe got him a university appointment. We are this Ich. Jena gathered thinkers on the page as well as in person; influential publications were based there, including the daily Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, the leading German critical review, while Fichte started the Philosophisches Journal with his colleague Friedrich Niethammer.
