Few periods in European intellectual history have produced such an extraordinary concentration of philosophical, literary, and cultural innovation as the German-speaking lands between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within little more than half a century, thinkers including Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel transformed debates about reason, freedom, history, culture,

In the early years of the 19th century, as Napoleon's armies swept across Europe and the old feudal order crumbled , two young German...