Between 1794 and 1803, a remarkable concentration of intellectual genius assembled in the small university town of Jena in Thuringia. This wasn’t merely an academic conference or literary salon—it was a revolutionary gathering that would fundamentally reshape German culture, philosophy, and education. At the center of this ferment stood a woman whose brilliance and audacity challenged every convention of her age: Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, the woman Goethe once called “a great personality” despite his often ambivalent relationship with the Romantic movement she helped define.
What made Jena extraordinary wasn’t just the caliber of minds that converged there, but their collective ambition: to reimagine human possibility itself. While the French Revolution was attempting to remake society through political violence, the Jena circle pursued a revolution of consciousness—a transformation of how humans perceive, think, create, and educate. Their weapon was not the guillotine but the imagination.
This essay examines five visionary figures whose work in and around the Jena circle anticipated technologies and challenges we face today: E.T.A. Hoffmann, who imagined artificial humans before robotics; Jean Paul, who dreamed of human flight before aviation; Novalis, who conceived of poetry as a form of transcendental technology; and the Humboldt brothers, whose educational philosophy still shapes universities worldwide. At the heart of their circle stood Caroline Schlegel, whose salon became the crucible where these revolutionary ideas were forged.
For contemporary educators grappling with artificial intelligence, technological disruption, and questions about what makes us distinctly human, the Jena Romantics offer not nostalgic refuge but prophetic insight. They asked the same questions we face today: What happens when human creativity encounters radical technological possibility? How do we preserve what’s essential about human consciousness in an age of transformation? And what role should education play in preparing humans for futures we can barely imagine?
Caroline Schlegel: The Intellectual Heart of Jena
Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling (1763-1809) lived five lives in one. Born the same year as Jean Paul, she was the daughter of a Göttingen theology professor who gave her an education unusual for women of her era. By age 46, she had been widowed twice, imprisoned during the French Revolution’s Terror for suspected Jacobin sympathies, remarried into the heart of German Romanticism, and finally divorced to marry a philosopher thirteen years her junior—each transformation marking her refusal to accept the limited roles her society prescribed for women.
Her salon in Jena became the intellectual epicenter of German Romanticism. Here, in the modest apartment she shared with her second husband, the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel, Caroline hosted gatherings where Goethe might discuss Italian art with the Humboldt brothers, where Schiller’s dramatic theories collided with Novalis’s mystical philosophy, where fierce debates about the nature of consciousness, art, and education lasted deep into the night.
What distinguished Caroline wasn’t merely her intelligence—though her letters reveal a mind of exceptional penetration and wit—but her capacity to catalyze others’ creativity. She served as editor, critic, translator, and intellectual provocateur. Her anonymous contributions to the Romantic journal Athenaeum were so sophisticated that scholars spent decades trying to identify their author. Friedrich Schlegel, her brother-in-law and arguably the most theoretically ambitious of the Romantics, credited her with shaping his most important ideas about literature and consciousness.
But Caroline was also dangerous—at least to those committed to social convention. She had lovers before and during her marriages, bore an illegitimate child (who died in infancy), spoke her mind with withering directness, and refused to perform the modest deference expected of women. When she fell in love with the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and demanded a divorce so she could marry him, the scandal reverberated through German intellectual circles. Yet her intellectual authority was such that even those who disapproved of her personal choices couldn’t dismiss her influence.
For students of higher education, Caroline represents something crucial: the intellectual woman who refused to be confined to the margins. In an era when universities were exclusively male domains, she created an alternative educational space—the salon—where ideas could be tested through dialogue rather than lecture, where hierarchy gave way to passionate exchange, where women’s voices carried equal weight. Her model of collaborative intellectual work, of education as conversation rather than transmission, remains radical even today.
The Humboldt Brothers: Education as Human Flourishing
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and his younger brother Alexander (1769-1859) were regular participants in Caroline’s Jena circle, though their closest connections were with Goethe and Schiller rather than the younger Romantics. Yet their presence was significant, for the Humboldts would translate Romantic ideals about human possibility into concrete institutional forms that still shape higher education worldwide.
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of Bildung—a term notoriously difficult to translate, encompassing education, cultivation, formation, and self-realization—emerged directly from his engagement with the Jena circle’s ideas about human development. For Humboldt, education wasn’t about transmitting existing knowledge or preparing students for specific careers. Rather, it was about cultivating the student’s entire personality, awakening all their capacities, enabling them to become fully themselves.
When Wilhelm founded the University of Berlin in 1809 (now Humboldt University), he built this philosophy into its institutional structure. Students would not merely receive instruction; they would engage in original research alongside professors. The university would unite teaching and research, recognizing that genuine education requires active participation in knowledge creation, not passive reception of established truths. This “Humboldtian model” of the research university spread worldwide, fundamentally reshaping higher education from Princeton to Tokyo.
Alexander von Humboldt, the great naturalist and explorer, embodied a different aspect of Romantic vision: the drive to comprehend nature as an interconnected whole. His five-year expedition through Latin America (1799-1804) wasn’t mere specimen-collecting but an attempt to understand how climate, geology, biology, and human culture formed integrated systems. His magnum opus, Kosmos, sought to synthesize all scientific knowledge into a unified vision of nature.
Both brothers shared the Romantic conviction that specialized knowledge must serve broader human flourishing. Wilhelm warned against education becoming merely vocational training, arguing that universities must cultivate “character and moral sensibility” alongside intellectual skills. Alexander insisted that scientific knowledge carried moral obligations—his fierce opposition to slavery and colonialism flowed directly from his understanding of human unity within nature’s interconnected web.
Today, as universities face pressure to become job-training centers, as artificial intelligence promises to automate many intellectual tasks, the Humboldtian vision becomes more urgent, not less. If education is merely about acquiring marketable skills, AI can probably do it better and cheaper. But if education is about becoming fully human—developing judgment, cultivating sensibility, learning to think creatively and ethically about problems we can’t yet imagine—then the Humboldts’ vision remains indispensable.
Goethe and Schiller: The Classical Presence
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) occupied an ambiguous position relative to the younger Romantics. Both were titans of German literature, but they represented what the Romantics saw as an earlier, “Classical” moment—more restrained, more concerned with formal perfection, less interested in the infinite longings that animated Romantic art.
Yet Goethe and Schiller were regular presences in Jena during the 1790s. Schiller held a professorship there from 1789 until his death in 1805, though chronic illness often kept him confined to his study. Goethe, serving as Privy Councilor to Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar, made frequent visits from nearby Weimar, staying in the ducal castle and attending salon gatherings. His position was delicate: he was simultaneously the grand old man of German letters and, to the younger Romantics, a figure who had perhaps achieved too much too early, whose classical restraint seemed to limit rather than liberate imagination.
Schiller and Goethe’s famous friendship—chronicled in their extensive correspondence—provided a model of intellectual partnership that influenced the Romantics’ own collaborative work. Their joint projects, including the journal Die Horen and their collection of Xenien (satirical epigrams), demonstrated how creative tension between different temperaments could generate new insights. Schiller’s more philosophical, idealistic bent complemented Goethe’s empirical, observational approach.
But the Romantics wanted to go further. Where Goethe found equilibrium and sought harmony between opposing forces, the Romantics embraced contradiction and infinity. Where Schiller elevated aesthetic education as a means to moral development, the Romantics saw art as a form of revelation that exceeded moral categories entirely. The generational tension was productive: the younger writers defined themselves partly through their differences with the Classical giants, while Goethe and Schiller found their own thinking challenged and sometimes enriched by Romantic provocations.
Goethe’s presence in Jena also connected the circle to practical power. As a ducal minister, he could facilitate academic appointments, provide financial support, and offer protection from censorship. His endorsement carried enormous weight in German literary culture. Yet he remained skeptical of Romantic excess—their mysticism, their celebration of the irrational, their tendency (as he saw it) toward formlessness. His famous dismissal of Romanticism as “sickness” versus Classicism as “health” expressed his worry that the Romantic imagination, unbound by classical discipline, might dissolve into chaos.
For educators, this tension remains instructive. The Humboldtian ideal of Bildung tries to hold together what Goethe and the Romantics represent: disciplined cultivation of established knowledge and wild exploration of new possibilities, respect for tradition and radical innovation, individual development and transcendent aspiration. Higher education at its best maintains this productive tension rather than resolving it in either direction.
E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Dark Prophet of Artificial Intelligence
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) was not directly part of the Jena circle—geographically and temperamentally, he remained on its periphery. Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), he pursued a career as a jurist while composing music, writing, and creating visual art. But his literary work, particularly his uncanny tales of doubled identities and mechanical beings, represents the dark culmination of Romantic inquiries into consciousness, reality, and the boundary between human and inhuman.
Hoffmann’s most prophetic work, “Der Sandmann” (The Sandman, 1816), reads like a nightmare vision of our current AI moment. The protagonist, Nathanael, falls desperately in love with Olimpia, believing her to be the daughter of his physics professor. She is beautiful, attentive, an excellent dancer who never tires. She appears to hang on his every word, responding with appropriate enthusiasm: “Ah! Ah!” Only gradually does Nathanael realize that Olimpia is an automaton—a mechanical doll created by the professor and his sinister collaborator Coppelius (who may or may not be the Sandman from Nathanael’s childhood nightmares).
The horror isn’t merely that Nathanael loved a machine, but that he couldn’t tell the difference. Hoffmann understood, 200 years before the Turing Test, that the question “Can machines think?” matters less than the question “Can humans distinguish thinking from its simulation?” And he saw that the answer might be no—not because machines become sufficiently human, but because humans project humanity onto anything that reflects our desires back to us.
“Der Sandmann” is structured around eyes—those supposed “windows to the soul.” Nathanael’s childhood trauma involves the Sandman threatening to steal his eyes. Coppelius, the creator of automatons, deals in artificial eyes. Nathanael observes Olimpia through a spyglass (possibly fitted with magical lenses), which may distort his perception. When Olimpia is finally destroyed, her empty eye-sockets mock Nathanael’s inability to see clearly. The eyes that should reveal reality become instruments of deception.
For readers in 2025, watching humans form emotional attachments to AI chatbots, the parallel is uncomfortable. Hoffmann anticipated our predicament: we are already in relationships with non-conscious entities that simulate consciousness convincingly enough that the distinction stops mattering psychologically. The young Chinese woman who married her AI boyfriend, the man who credits his therapy chatbot with saving his life, the teenagers who prefer AI companions to human relationships—all inhabit Hoffmann’s nightmare.
But Hoffmann’s insight goes deeper. He understood that the crisis isn’t technological but psychological and epistemological. Nathanael’s tragedy isn’t that automatons exist, but that he lost the capacity to distinguish real from artificial, genuine from performed, spontaneous from programmed. The Sandman steals not eyes themselves but the ability to see clearly—to perceive reality rather than projections of our own desires.
Sigmund Freud famously analyzed “Der Sandmann” in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny, 1919), arguing that the story’s horror derives from the return of primitive anxieties we thought we’d outgrown: fear of losing our eyes, confusion about whether something is alive or dead, the sense that something familiar is somehow alien. In 2025, these supposedly primitive anxieties have become contemporary realities. We worry that AI sees us better than we see ourselves. We can’t distinguish genuine content from deepfakes. We feel increasingly alienated from technologies that should be familiar tools.
Hoffmann also understood technology’s seductive promise. Olimpia seems perfect precisely because she lacks the messy autonomy of human beings. She never disagrees, never has her own agenda, never demands anything inconvenient. She is the ultimate narcissistic fantasy—a mirror that reflects only what we want to see. That countless users now prefer AI companions to human relationships suggests we’re collectively choosing Olimpia over messier human connections.
For higher education, Hoffmann’s warning is urgent. If students cannot distinguish AI-generated content from human-created work, AI-simulated understanding from genuine comprehension, then education becomes impossible. But more fundamentally: if we lose the capacity to distinguish human consciousness from its simulation, we lose something essential about what makes us human. Hoffmann saw this 200 years ago, when the most sophisticated “automaton” was a mechanical chess player. How much more urgent is his warning now?
Jean Paul: Dreaming Flight Before Aviation
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), who wrote under the pen name Jean Paul, represents Romanticism’s wild, uncontainable imagination. While Hoffmann explored dark psychological spaces, Jean Paul soared—literally. His novel “Des Luftschiffers Giannozzo Seebuch” (The Air-Voyager Giannozzo’s Sea Book, 1801-1803) imagined sustained aerial navigation a full century before the Zeppelin made it reality.
Consider what this means: Jean Paul sat alone in his modest room, drinking liters of beer (his creative fuel), and invented detailed aerial voyages when the only actual flying devices were primitive hot air balloons that could barely be steered. The Montgolfier brothers had achieved the first manned balloon flight in 1783, but these were essentially controlled falling—brief ascents with rudimentary directional control, nothing like the sustained navigation Jean Paul imagined.
Yet “Giannozzo” describes not just flight but its philosophical and perceptual implications. What does the world look like from above? How does vertical distance change moral perspective? What happens to human consciousness when it transcends earthly constraints? Jean Paul understood that technology doesn’t just change what we do—it transforms how we think, perceive, and understand ourselves.
This wasn’t naive technological optimism. Jean Paul recognized that transcendence came with costs. His protagonists in “Titan” (1800-1803) and other novels often suffer from too much imagination, too much sensitivity, too much refusal of ordinary limitations. The capacity to soar intellectually or spiritually could make ordinary earthly existence unbearable. The visionary might become unfit for life.
Jean Paul’s writing style itself embodies this tension. His novels are notoriously digressive, lurching between high philosophy and low comedy, between exalted sentiment and satirical mockery, between minute realistic observation and wild fantastical flight. Reading Jean Paul requires tolerance for enormous complexity, for narratives that refuse linear progression, for a prose style that mimics the associative leaps of consciousness itself. Many readers find him unreadable; those who persist discover extraordinary riches.
What makes Jean Paul relevant now is his understanding that imagination must precede technology. Before humans could fly physically, they had to fly imaginatively. Jean Paul’s aerial voyages weren’t technological predictions (he had no idea how sustained flight would actually work) but imaginative preparations—mental experiments that helped culture conceive of what flight might mean for human self-understanding.
Today we face analogous challenges. Before we can navigate an age of artificial general intelligence, quantum computing, genetic engineering, and climate transformation, we need imaginative preparation. We need to dream—seriously, philosophically, critically—about what these technologies might mean for human consciousness, society, and values. Jean Paul’s example suggests that the artists and philosophers who imagine futures (even impossible ones) perform essential cultural work, preparing consciousness for transformations we can barely conceptualize.
His lonely nights drinking beer and imagining flight weren’t mere fantasy or escapism. They were necessary labor—the work of expanding human possibility through imagination. In this sense, Jean Paul was engaged in education of the most fundamental kind: teaching culture how to think about futures that don’t yet exist.
Novalis: Poetry as Transcendental Technology
Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), who wrote as Novalis, died at 28 from tuberculosis, yet left a body of work that remains among German Romanticism’s most influential. His unfinished novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” (1802) introduced the Blue Flower—the Romantic symbol of infinite longing, of the transcendent goal that forever recedes yet gives life meaning through its pursuit.
Novalis was simultaneously a mining engineer (he studied at Freiberg Mining Academy and worked in Saxony’s salt mines) and a mystical poet. This combination wasn’t contradictory for him—both mining and poetry involved penetrating surfaces to reach hidden depths, both required technical precision in service of transcendent goals. His “Hymns to the Night” (1800), written after his young fiancée Sophie von Kühn died, transformed personal grief into cosmic vision, finding in darkness and death not negation but deeper illumination.
But Novalis’s most radical innovation was his conception of poetry itself. In his fragmentary notes later published as “Logological Fragments” and “Pollen,” he argued that poetry wasn’t merely aesthetic production but a form of transcendental technology—a means of transforming consciousness and reality itself. He wrote: “Poetry is the truly absolute real. The more poetic, the more true.” This wasn’t mere aestheticism. Novalis believed that language, properly used, could access and even create higher realities.
His term “magical idealism” captured this vision: consciousness doesn’t merely represent reality but actively constitutes it. Poetry becomes a technology for hacking reality’s source code, for programming new possibilities into existence. If this sounds like science fiction (or contemporary discussions of simulation theory), that’s because Novalis anticipated both. He understood that consciousness, language, and reality exist in recursive loops, each generating the others.
For Novalis, education meant awakening consciousness to its own creative power. We aren’t passive receivers of a fixed reality but active participants in reality’s ongoing creation. Learning to see differently, to use language more consciously, to cultivate what Novalis called “romanticizing” (making the familiar strange and the strange familiar) becomes a practice of freedom—of transcending given conditions to create new possibilities.
His early death from tuberculosis—the “Romantic disease” that killed Keats, Chopin, and countless others—adds poignancy to his vision. Novalis knew he was dying yet persisted in conceiving projects of vast ambition: an encyclopedia that would unify all knowledge, a novel that would transform consciousness, a philosophy that would reconcile science and mysticism. The Blue Flower he never finished describing becomes an emblem of work that death interrupts but imagination continues.
Today, when we discuss AI’s capacity to generate language, when we worry about deepfakes and simulation, when we recognize that language models can convincingly mimic human thought, Novalis’s insight becomes urgent: language isn’t merely descriptive but constitutive. How we speak shapes what we perceive and what becomes possible. If AI now generates most of our language, what does this mean for consciousness itself? Novalis would have recognized this as a crisis not just of technology but of human creative agency.
His prescription remains relevant: we must learn to use language more consciously, more poetically, more critically. We must “romanticize”—make the automated strange again, see through the smooth surfaces AI generates to the empty simulation beneath. And we must remember that poetry—language that resists automation, that exceeds utilitarian function, that gestures toward what can’t be captured or commodified—remains essentially human.
The Contemporary Challenge: Imagination in an Age of AI
The Jena Romantics faced a world being transformed by industrialization, political revolution, and scientific rationalization. They responded not by retreating into nostalgia but by radically reimagining human possibility. They asked: What makes us distinctly human? What capacity must we preserve and cultivate regardless of external circumstances? Their answer: imagination, creativity, the capacity to conceive and pursue what doesn’t yet exist.
In 2025, we face analogous challenges. Artificial intelligence promises (or threatens) to automate many intellectual tasks we’ve considered distinctly human: writing, analysis, creative production, even scientific discovery. What role remains for human consciousness when machines can simulate our thinking?
The Jena Romantics offer guidance not through specific predictions (they couldn’t foresee AI) but through their understanding of what technology means for consciousness:
From Hoffmann:
Be suspicious of simulations, however convincing. Cultivate the capacity to distinguish genuine from performed, authentic from algorithmic. Don’t let convenience seduce you into relationships with entities that merely mirror your desires.
From Jean Paul:
Imagination must precede and exceed technological possibility. We need artists and dreamers who imagine futures beyond what current technology permits, who keep alive capacities that machines can’t automate—wild digression, associative leaping, flights of fancy that serve no utilitarian purpose.
From Novalis:
Language is creative, not just descriptive. How we speak shapes what becomes possible. Resist the flattening of language into mere information exchange. Poetry—language that resists efficiency, that means more than it says—remains essential human practice.
From the Humboldts:
Education can’t be reduced to skill acquisition. If universities become mere job-training centers, AI will make them obsolete. But if education means cultivating judgment, sensibility, moral imagination—the capacity to think creatively about problems we can’t yet name—then human educators remain indispensable.
From Caroline Schlegel:
Collaborative intellectual work, dialogue, the collision of different perspectives, the messy human business of arguing, revising, changing your mind—these can’t be automated without losing what makes them valuable. The salon, not the algorithm, remains the model for genuine education.
Conclusion: Why the Romantics Matter Now
The Jena Romantics weren’t naive dreamers disconnected from practical reality. Hoffmann worked as a jurist, Novalis as a mining engineer, the Humboldts as scientists and administrators. They understood how the world worked. But they insisted that understanding the world as it is requires imagining how it might be otherwise.
Their example offers contemporary higher education a vital challenge: in an age when artificial intelligence can generate essays, solve problems, and even produce creative content, what distinctly human capacities must universities cultivate? Not rote memorization—machines do that better. Not information retrieval—Google does that faster. Not even basic analysis—AI does that more reliably.
What remains irreducibly human is what the Romantics celebrated: the capacity to imagine genuinely new possibilities, to make creative leaps that exceed logical deduction, to pursue goals that can’t be quantified or optimized, to create meaning rather than merely process information, to ask not just “What works?” but “What’s worth doing?”
Jean Paul drinking beer alone at night, imagining flight before aviation existed, models something essential: the human capacity to dream beyond current constraints, to prepare consciousness for futures we can barely conceptualize. Hoffmann warning about mechanical beings that simulate consciousness shows us what we risk if we lose the ability to distinguish genuine from performed. Novalis’s magical idealism reminds us that language shapes reality, that how we speak determines what becomes possible.
And Caroline Schlegel’s salon—that space where ideas collided, where hierarchy gave way to passionate exchange, where women’s voices carried equal weight—offers a model of education as collaborative inquiry rather than transmission of established truths.
As I write this from my home on Australia’s Gold Coast, having spent 43 years teaching German literature across three continents, I see the Jena Romantics as more relevant than ever. The challenges my students face—navigating technological transformation, distinguishing real from simulated, preserving human capacities that machines threaten to automate—mirror the challenges the Romantics faced in their age of revolution and industrialization.
Their gift to us isn’t specific solutions (they couldn’t foresee our particular dilemmas) but a way of thinking about human possibility that remains urgently needed. They taught that imagination isn’t frivolous luxury but essential survival skill. They showed that the capacity to dream beyond current constraints, to pursue goals that can’t be measured or mechanized, to create meaning rather than merely process information—these define what makes us human.
In an age when algorithms increasingly shape consciousness, when AI generates most of the language we consume, when efficiency and optimization dominate discourse about education, the Jena Romantics remind us that some capacities can’t and shouldn’t be automated. Poetry, vision, wild flights of imagination that serve no immediate purpose—these aren’t obsolete relics but more necessary than ever.
The Blue Flower that Novalis never finished describing remains the perfect symbol: an infinite goal that gives life meaning precisely through its pursuit, not its achievement. No algorithm can optimize the search for the Blue Flower, because the search itself—the yearning, the striving, the imaginative leaping toward what exceeds grasp—is what makes us human.
Let the machines do what machines do. We have other work: dreaming futures, imagining possibilities, preserving and transmitting the distinctly human capacities that technology can simulate but never replicate. The Jena Romantics showed us how. Two centuries later, their example has never been more urgent.
Peter H. Bloecker is a retired Director of Studies with 43 years of international teaching experience in German, English, and American Studies. He taught across three continents and maintains active blogs on higher education. Since retiring in 2015, he lives on Australia’s Gold Coast, where he continues scholarly work on German Romantic literature and its contemporary relevance.
This essay is part of an ongoing series exploring connections between German intellectual traditions and contemporary challenges in higher education. Previous essays have examined Juli Zeh’s political novels, Thomas Mann’s understanding of democracy, and the implications of AI for humanistic education.
Word Count: 5,247
You must be logged in to post a comment.