Jena 1789–1819

Jena philosophy, historicism, and literature energized nineteenth-century European intellectual life. Their key concerns were time and meaning, quintessentiallyRomantic, but they seemed to come into particularly sharp focus in the historically oriented aspects of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies along with Schiller’s and the Schlegels’ aesthetic and intellectual histories which represent one of the fonts of German Historicism and the historical school. What went on in Jena in the two decades between 1789 and 1819 is ultimately ‘bigger’ than theJenaer Romantik. Philosophy, literature, and history inform each other to create a powerful new intellectual impetus. But politics, which looms so unavoidably large over everything that occurs after 1789, is never far from their thoughts and often prompts their ideas. A developing sense of a modern German identity was finding expression in a new philosophy, literary theory, and understanding of history as well as new political structures.