a conversation with Andrea Wulf

Sometimes the world is reinvented and turned upside down not in a glittering metropolis, but in the provinces. This was the case in Jena, a tiny German town, at the end of the eighteenth century, as a gaggle of young and unconventional poets, scientists and philosophers descended on the university there. The result was the kernel of German Romanticism, Andrea Wulf tells me. She has written a stunning group biography on the German romantics, their ideas and their personal lives. In this episode, we discuss the importance of German Romanticism, its idea of the self and its new ways of relating to nature, a historical turning point that is still colouring our current debates and our thinking about ourselves, and the climate crisis.