[A] novelistic group biography...admirably translated by Shelley Frisch. It’s an exhilarating account of a remarkable historical moment, in which characters known to many of us as immutable icons are rendered as vital, passionate, fallible being.

A group biography, the book offers scenes and episodes illustrative of a period of extraordinary intellectual ferment. Alongside ideas, it narrates war, romance, university politics, professional rivalries and domestic tragedies.

This vivid group biography captures the moment, at the end of the eighteenth century, when Jena, a small university town, suddenly emerged as the 'intellectual and cultural center of Germany'.

... captures the epic year in which a group of free thinkers set up house in the history of ideas.

German poet and philosophy professor Peter Neumann beautifully captures the special moment when, guided by Goethe and inspired by Kant, the young philosophers Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, poets Schiller and Novalis, brothers Fritz and Wilhelm Schlegel and their wives Dorothea and Caroline all lived in the same small university town, Jena, at the same time, and tried to remake the world.

To the extent that the kind of life envisioned and practiced in this small circle in Jena from 1798 to 1800 continues to figure in the contemporary cultural imaginary (at least among those in educated circles who have the time, means, and taste for bohemianism), it would be good to have a serious book on it. Unfortunately, Jena 1800 is not that book. Partly, this is a matter of structure. The book is written in short sections (five to eight pages) that jump chaotically across time, place, and character.

Neumann has written a compelling tale that focuses on the tumultuous concatenation of a number of imaginative and dynamic thinkers.

Walking freely into the minds of his characters, Neumann takes us through this shift in a series of scenes in which the group’s members attempt to control or steer their careers, their love affairs and other relationships.

[A] colorful intellectual history.

Neumann adeptly narrates the philosophical advances that quickened in this heady environment. But his true fascination is Jena’s social milieu, the feuds, romantic dalliances, and chance encounters that undergirded the 'republic of free spirits.' The result is a quirky, fleet-footed intellectual history that foregrounds the human beings behind the ideas..

Neumann paints a broad portrait of a group of luminaries at argument, work, play, and love.