If you’re looking for something light and escapist to keep that summer feeling from slipping away, a book like On Gin Lane or The Hotel Nantucket that will place you in high-end beachy enclaves, look elsewhere. The book I am proposing to tell you about is a protracted dip into heavy waters, where the myriad historical details and internecine intellectual wrangles are as thick as pebbles on the shore.
Germany at the turn of the 18th century was a nation of “fanatical readers,” Andrea Wulf writes in Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. “Craftsmen, maids and bakers were reading just as avidly as university professors and aristocrats.” The book is set just over one decade (1794–1804) when the small, medieval German university town of Jena (which housed “seven well-stocked bookstores” as well as a lending library) became the “Kingdom of Philosophy.”
