This month we will be reading

Magnificent Rebels is “an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of rebels who
changed the way we think about ourselves and the world. Forget Paris… the
real Revolution in the 1790s happened in Jena, a quiet German university town where
the unlikely revolutionaries were not soldiers or politicians but poets and playwrights
(Goethe, Schiller and Novalis), philosophers (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), literary critics
(the contentious Schlegel brothers) and scientists (Alexander von Humboldt). And
at their heart was the formidable and free-spirited Caroline Schlegel. The Jena Set were
the first Romantics. And their unconventional lives were laboratories for their
radical ideas – about the creative power of the self, the aspirations of art and science,
nature and the true meaning of freedom. In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf takes us on
a vivid journey through their adventures and misadventures, passionate love affairs and
epic quarrels, successes and heartbreak. We are still empowered by their daring leap
into the self today. The French revolutionaries may have changed the
political landscape, but these young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that
shaped our modern world.”  (https://www.andreawulf.com/about-magnificent-rebels.html)

Knopf Doubleday Publishing, September 2022, 512 pp

We hope you will join us to discuss this remarkable book and to consider an excursion to
the historical cities of Jena and Weimar!