“When did we begin to be as selfish as we are today?” asks historian Andrea Wulf in her new book Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. “At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we think it was our right to take what we wanted? . . . When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?”
Wulf locates the historical moment in the small German university town of Jena, in the years between the onset of the French Revolution and the town’s devastation by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. During the research for her 2015 biography of Alexander von Humboldt, Wulf found herself fascinated by the “Jena Set” with whom Humboldt socialized and collaborated during extended visits to the town during the 1790s. Between 1789, when Friedrich Schiller arrived in Jena to lecture on history and aesthetics at the university, and 1807, when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a latecomer, finally left the nearly ruined town, a remarkable group of thinkers and authors lived there: as well as Schiller and Hegel, there were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Alexander von Humboldt and his brother Wilhelm; the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August Wilhelm; Friedrich Hölderlin; Novalis (pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg); Ludwig Tieck; Friedrich Schelling. And then there was Caroline Michaelis Böhmer, whom Wulf sees as the heart of the group, an intellectual widow who had given birth to a child out of wedlock and then married first August Wilhelm Schlegel and then, after divorcing him, Schelling. All these people worked side by side, collaborated, competed, fought. By the turn of the nineteenth century, they had mostly fallen out with one another, but their proximity during the key Revolutionary years had a great deal to do, as Wulf demonstrates, with the birth of Romanticism and what it was eventually to become.
The story of the Guerrero is little known but among the most dramatic of the transatlantic slave trade. Captained by the infamous pirate José Gomez, the ship was carrying 561 enslaved Africans to Cuba when HMS Nimble, a British anti-slaver patrolling the Keys, opened fire. During the ensuing gunfight and chase, the Guerrero slammed into a reef, shearing in two and plunging forty-one terrified Africans to their watery deaths (and leaving the survivors to an uncertain fate). As Brenda Altmeier, the maritime heritage coordinator for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, puts it, “It’s not just a wreck site; it’s a graveyard.”
But thanks to DWP and its ragtag team of citizen scientists and marine archaeologists, the Guerrero’s story is no longer resigned to the past. After nearly two centuries lost at sea, the remains of the ship, and whatever is left of the Africans who died inside it, are lost no more. “Look, I’ll say it,” Corey Malcom, a marine archaeologist in Key West who has been working with DWP, tells me, “we found the Guerrero. I’m convinced of it.”
How, the book proposes, do we disinfect the more toxic kinds of masculinity? How do we recognise the work, sacrifice and grief of women? These are large questions for a relatively slim book, but my, it raises them.
What is actually revealed by the book, and especially by the decision to organise it chronologically, is the process by which Sontag approached, assimilated, dominated and expelled disquieting material.