The Romantics. Now also as a non-fiction soap

There is a specifically Anglo-American genre of historiography that has never really been understood in Germany: fictional historiography. Similar to academic history, its authors draw richly from patient study of sources, present a thesis and develop it on the basis of the material. But unlike history, which usually makes a precise and sometimes petty distinction between material and interpretation, fictional historians combine fantasy and empiricism, depiction and imagination. This gives her books clarity and readability, which in the German scientific community still has the reputation of being dubious.

The cultural historian Andrea Wulf, born in India, grew up in Germany and lives in London, follows this tradition with her books written in English and prefers to deal with topics of German intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries. The title of her most recent study on the circle of early romanticism in Jena makes it seem like a continuation of her book “Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature” published in 2016.

While this talked about what the achievements of an individual owe to the society around them, this time it is about a group in whose environment the modern idea of ​​individuality is said to have originated: the early Romantics. Because the intertwining of individuality and community is the subject of her book, it seems obvious that Wulf blurs the subjective and the historical in the depiction.

In the prologue, an autobiographical depiction of the "times when my irrepressible urge for independence became selfish" transitions into the depiction of the Jena district as a place where, in the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, the "idea of ​​the free I" had been born.

However, the four main chapters, in which Wulf traces the constitution and collapse of the Jena district between the summer of 1779 and the summer of 1800, take the distance to the epoch that is the subject of the presentation all too far back. Basically, Wulf tells her story like a friendship soap set in the early 19th century, which uses changing love affairs, literary collaboration and mutual help to illustrate the genesis of romantic concepts such as the ego, endless self-reflection, the fragment and friendship.

The four acts of this narrative are called "Arrival", "Experiments", "Connections" and "Fragmentation". The first describes Goethe's and Schiller's farewell to the Sturm und Drang as a prelude to the founding of the Jenaer Kreis. The second and third tell of the antipathetic effect of Johann Gottlieb Fichte on the Romantics, which is replaced by the importance of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's natural philosophy, as well as of the death-seeking aura of Novalis, who influenced the circle more strongly than through his writings through his von illness overshadowed biography shaped. The fourth act describes the initially biographical and later also the production-aesthetic disintegration of the circle.

Even the title choreography promotes an update that is inappropriate and suggests authenticity: a summer vacation that the Jena friends spent in Dresden is called "Auszeit", the chapters about the confused friendship and love relationships, in the depiction of which Wulf focuses in particular on Caroline Schlegel are called "divorce, women and sex" or "work and pleasure", and the Jena district is compared to the bohemian circles of the early 20th century and the communes of the 1960s.

The fact that Wulf never deals with research on romantic salon culture, which - starting with Hannah Arendt's studies on Rahel Varnhagen - has developed differences and similarities to later bohemian circles, may not be a problem in a book aimed at popularity. The fact that she describes the historical past as if she were right in the middle of it does not only damage the narrative style, but also the knowledge of the subject. When it is said of Fichte's lectures that "his powerful presence" could be "felt throughout the room", when it is said of Novalis' lover Sophie that she was "simply too young" "to be seductive" - ​​then act it is not an attempt at a sympathetic depiction of what has been historically handed down, but rather the schematic application of the narrative formats of trivial non-fiction literature to the romantic era.

That the philosophical and aesthetic forms created by the Romantics cannot be reduced to the local color that forms the background to their emergence - that the romantic "I", for example, which Wulf understands as the initial spark of modern ego infatuation and obsession, is something unstable for the Romantics on the contrary , Fluides, Inexhaustible was – this falls almost completely into oblivion. But such conceptual and factual imprecision is probably the necessary downside of a narrative liveliness, which tends to concede the difference between then and now.

Andrea Wulf: Fabulous rebels. Translated from the English by Andreas Wirthensohn. C. Bertelsmann, 528 pages, 30 euros