Jena had only about five thousand inhabitants at the time, but for a while in the early nineteenth century it was the center of German intellectual life. In one house (Leutragasse 5) you had living, at the same time, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Novalis”), and Ludwig Tieck.
Fichte, Goethe, and Hegel show up as well!
The title is Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits by Peter Neumann.
A remarkable assemblage of talent.