#92: Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

I’d never heard of the writer who went by the pen name Novalis until I recently read about him in two quite different books.

The first book was Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf. The subtitle is The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Wulf’s magnificent rebels all lived in or near the university town of Jena, in Saxony, in the 1790s. Some of their names were familiar to me, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller; but most were not, including the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), Caroline Schlegel (August Wilhelm’s sometime wife and partner in translating Shakespeare), and Novalis. If you are German, or if you have studied German culture, these names would probably be as familiar to you as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley are to me.

In Wulf’s words,

Magnificent Rebels recounts one of these strangely magnified and exciting moments in history when a cluster of intellectuals, artists, poets, and writers come together at a particular time and place to change the world. In this, the Jena Set resemble other influential groups: the North American Transcendentalists, for instance, comprising Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century; similarly, the Bloomsbury Set that coalesced in early twentieth-century London and included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell and John Maynard Keynes; or the modernist circle of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris.

As a baby boomer, I might also want to nominate the Beat Generation of Kerouac and Ginsberg, or the British Invasion bands of the mid-1960s.

Romanticism is a slippery concept—it was the foremost creative trend during the early 19th century, but you can appreciate the paintings and the poems and symphonies that are labelled “romantic” without understanding what differentiated these works from what came before or after. But like the Renaissance three hundred years earlier, the Romantic movement caused a series of creative and philosophical detonations in Germany, France, and England.

One obvious spark was the French Revolution of 1789-1794. Wulf notes that “the French Revolution proved that ideas were stronger than the might of kings and queens.”

I’ve learned, partly from Wulf, that another, less obvious impetus was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who posited an absolute barrier between the objective world and our subjective perception and understanding of that world. This idea encouraged the young writers of the Jena set to see the world as their personal domain: information and experiences of all kinds were equally meaningful and valid, from dreams and infatuations on through to scientific facts.

At the crest of the Jena wave, in 1798, the Schlegel brothers began publishing a periodical they named Athenaeum. Novalis contributed hundreds of short pieces he called variously Pollen or Fragments to Athenaeum.

It was here, on the pages of the Athenaeum, that the term ‘romantic’ was coined and first used in print in its new literary and philosophical meaning. … When August Wilhelm [Schlegel] had asked his brother to send him an explanation of the word ‘romantic,’ Friedrich had replied that it was impossible because it was two thousand pages long. In the Athenaeum, he managed to summarise it in one, albeit long, fragment that spread over three pages:

“Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetical; poeticise wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor…”

Novalis was 26 when he began publishing in Athenaeum, and he had been living what can only be described as an accelerated life. Four years earlier, he had fallen in love, more or less on sight, with 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. Their respective families, not to mention Miss von Kühn herself, were initially taken aback by the strangeness and intensity of this passion, but it remained entirely chaste and proper, and eventually an engagement was agreed upon. Wulf sees Novalis’s headstrong passion as evidence of an almost supernatural precocity—even as he was courting Ms. von Kühn, Novalis was studying and writing at a demonic pace. Like Rimbaud, he was a kind of freak of nature. He had already learned Greek and Latin and “could absorb a book in a quarter of the time it took his friends, and then recite its contents months later.”

He regarded the ordinary with wonder, and the unusual with acceptance. He slept little and worked hard. Novalis claimed never to be bored and whatever he studied or learned, he did so with enthusiasm—be it studying philosophical books, reading poetry or clerking with a magistrate and tax collector to learn about administration and management in preparation for work at the family-run salt mines. Everybody agreed there was something magical, intense and almost hypnotic about him. Women and men alike fell for him. He ‘electrified me,’ one woman said, and another admirer admitted that ‘few people in my entire life have left such a deep impression.’

We can never know how grounded in reality Novalis’s passion for Sophie von Kühn was, because less than a year after they first met, she fell ill with tuberculosis and then died barely a year after that in 1797, two days after her 15th birthday, after undergoing a series of horrific surgeries.

Novalis himself succumbed to tuberculosis before his 30th birthday, after publishing a moderate amount and writing (but not publishing) two novels. It took the world a while to catch up to how much Novalis had accomplished in his short life.

It’s easy to understand Wulf’s interest in Novalis since he is one of the central characters in her story. What inspired Penelope Fitzgerald is not as obvious, though the astounding white-hot intensity of Novalis’s life is certainly a thing to marvel at. Her novel The Blue Flower presents episodes from Novalis’s life during the time he was courting Sophie von Kühn.

Fitzgerald was a British writer of the late 20th century who wrote short, rather elliptical novels, initially about episodes from her own life but later about subjects seemingly plucked from the air—like Novalis. Another of her books, The Beginning of Spring, is set in 1913 (pre-revolution) Moscow and deals with an English print shop owner along with his staff and family.

If you are inclined to believe that a novel about Novalis’s peculiar and doomed love for Sophie von Kühn would be somber and heartbreaking—well, you would be right about the heartbreaking part, but Fitzgerald is essentially a comic writer, and she plunges into Novalis’s world and makes it seem simultaneously outlandish and convivial.

I first read The Blue Flower a couple of years ago before I had any idea who Novalis was; it was only after reading Wulf’s book that I went back and re-read it with a new understanding of how she tried to come to terms with the way his mind worked.

Fitzgerald portrays Novalis—at this point in his life still just Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, Fritz to his family and Hardenburch (for whatever reason) to Sophie—as a somewhat absurd figure. She recognizes that he is exceptional, but she also recognizes that he is 22 years old and that none of his friends or family really know what to make of him. His head is in the clouds and his feet are anywhere but on the ground. He is sensible of his responsibilities as the eldest son of a penniless noble family, and has no reservations about following in his father’s footsteps as a mine inspector for the local jurisdiction. (So, OK, maybe his feet were sort of on the ground.) But he is prone to rather strange spells of exaltation, or inspiration, or perhaps just mild insanity, as when, upon arriving at a house where he is to be a lodger, he conducts himself thusly:

Fritz arrived on foot, a day after he was expected, and at a time when Coelestin Just was at his office. ‘The Long-Expected is here,’ said Rahel [the mistress of the house] to Karoline [another resident]. She herself remembered him very well from Wittenberg, but was distressed to see him so dishevelled. ‘You find the exercise healthy, Hardenberg?’ she asked anxiously as she brought him into the house. Fritz looked at her vaguely, but with a radiant smile. ‘I don’t know, Frau Rahel. I hadn’t thought about it, but I will think about it.’ Once in the parlour, he looked round him as though at a revelation. ‘It is beautiful, beautiful.’

‘It’s not beautiful at all,’ said Rahel. ‘You are more than welcome here, I hope that you will learn a great deal and you are free, of course, to form whatever opinions you like, but this parlour is not beautiful.’

Fritz continued to gaze around him.

‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’

Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.

‘You are beautiful, gracious Fraulein,’ said Fritz.

‘We expected you yesterday,’ said Rahel, dryly, ‘but you see, we are patient people.’ When Karoline had gone out, as she very soon did, to the kitchen, she added, ‘I am going to take the privilege of someone who met you so often when you were a student, and welcomed you, you remember, to our Shakespeare evenings, and tell you that you ought not to speak to Karoline quite like that. You did not mean it, and she is not used to it.’

‘But I did mean it,’ said Fritz. ‘When I came into your home, everything, the wine-decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’

Of course, Hardenberg’s most consequential such flight is when he sees twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn standing at a window and decides immediately that she is to be the Beatrice to his Dante.

Fitzgerald had acquired a great deal of knowledge about how people lived in the German state of Saxony in the 1790s, and is continuously amazing us with the details. Who knew, for instance, that families only washed their linen once or twice a year (fortunately, they seemed to own quite a bit of linen)? Or that the way to preserve cabbages over the winter was by burying them in sand? And the menus! How about a selection of soups:

…one made of beer, sugar and eggs, one of rose-hips and onions, one of bread and cabbage-water, [and] one of cows’ udders flavoured with nutmeg.

The speciality of the annual Tennstedt fair was

Kesselfleisch—the ears, snout and strips of fat from the pig’s neck boiled with peppermint schnaps.

So we have Hardenberg/Novalis’s strange nature, the surprising details about life in 1790s Germany, and last but not least, the peculiar nature of the large Hardenberg family itself: Fritz was the eldest surviving, but as of the time of the events depicted, the Freifrau was still producing children—I’m not sure of the exact count, but there must have been at least eight living at this time.

The next youngest boy, Erasmus, is stunned when he learns of Fritz’s devotion to Sophie von Kühn, and makes the journey to her home to see for himself. He is initially not impressed:

‘Fritz, I have seen her, yes, I’ve been to Grüningen! I talked to your Sophie and to a friend of hers, and to the family.’

Fritz stood as if turned to ice, and Erasmus called out, ‘Best of brothers, she won’t do!’

He threw his arms round his so much taller brother. ‘She won’t do at all, my Fritz. She is good-natured, yes, but she is not your intellectual equal. Great Fritz, you are a philosopher, you are a poet.’

‘Who gave you permission to present yourself to Grüningen?’ asked Fritz, so far almost calm.

‘Fritz, Sophie is stupid!’

‘Mad, Erasmus!’

‘No, I’m not mad, best of all Fritzes!’

‘I said, who gave you permission—‘

‘Her mind is empty— ‘

‘Better silence’

‘Empty as a new jug, Fritz’

‘Silence’

Somehow Erasmus eventually comes around to an appreciation of Sophie’s charms, which we learn when he asks her older sister if she can procure for him a lock of Sophie’s hair:

‘A very small quantity, to put in my pocket book, close to my heart … You know, I did not understand her at first, but suddenly it came to me why my brother had the words “Sophie, be my spirit’s guide” engraved on his ring.’

It’s not clear whether Erasmus has actually fallen for Sophie or is just succumbing to the ‘electrifying’ force of his brother’s personality. In any case, Sophie greets his request with a laugh which Erasmus does not understand until he is later informed that her illness has rendered Sophie bald under the stylish cap she is wearing. The ring in question, by the way, can be viewed to this day at the Municipal Museum in Weissenfels, Germany.

Then there is the matter of one of the younger Hardenberg children, six-year-old Bernhard who, after overhearing news about the progress of the revolution in France while hiding under the table, emerges to predict the fate of the French king: ‘They will cut of his head, you will see.’

Like some of his siblings, and like most of Fritz’s friends in Jena, Bernhard (usually referred to as “the” Bernhard) is a supporter of the French Revolution, if a bit more sanguine than most.

It might seem at times that Novalis, the precocious intellectual of Wulf’s book and Fritz, the headstrong young scion of the Hardenberg clan in Fitzgerald’s, are almost two different people, but in fact both characters are present in both books. Here he is mediating alone in a churchyard in The Blue Flower:

The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. This leads inwards, always inwards.

The entire Hardenberg clan were destined to become shadows in a very short time. Fitzgerald gives us the detail in an afterward:

At the end of the 1790s the young Hardenbergs, in their turn, began to go down, almost without protest, with pulmonary tuberculosis. Erasmus, who had insisted that he coughed blood only because he laughed too much, died on Good Friday 1797. Sidonie lasted until the age of twenty-two. At the beginning of 1801 Fritz, who had been showing the same symptoms, went back to his parents’ house in Weissenfels. As he lay dying he asked Karl to play the piano for him.

...

The Bernhard was drowned in the Saale on the 28th of November 1800.

George was killed as First Lieutenant at the Battle of Smolensk in 1812.

#91: Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen

In The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 novel by Ray Bradbury, humans have settled Mars—not the airless rock we know from science, but a mythic place, complete with an Arizona-like climate, pink skies, and breathable air. The settlers are middle class Americans, as Bradbury chose to understand them in 1950: good-natured unassuming folks who want nothing more than a modest house and a garage with a car. There had been native Martians when the settlers arrived, but they were wispy, insubstantial beings, and they more or less dwindled away over the course of the book. No human dispossessed or committed any violence against the Martians, but by the end of the book there were only ghost Martians, along with a few scattered artifacts and ruins.

Even as a kid I understood the parallels with the settlement of the western United States—or at least the sanitized version of that process. We had tamed and settled a continent, and now we were ready to start colonizing space: the next frontier—as per Star Trek, the final frontier. What was central to this myth was the assumption that we had taken what was free for the taking. If you were planted in front of a TV in the 1960s, like I was (when you weren’t reading Ray Bradbury), Indians were as notional as Bradbury’s Martians.

But we knew there had to be more to the story. Like many of my peers, I’ve always been fascinated by Native Americans, and about their interactions with Europeans. Spanish, French, and English invaders and settlers all went about occupying the new hemisphere in different ways: the Spanish conquered, the French traded (and tried to convert), and the English plowed their way westward. But always, and especially in the case of the English (as they morphed into Americans), the standard histories and stories assumed something called “manifest destiny”: the imperative of pushing the Indians out of the way. Ours was the superior civilization, and the weak always vanquish the strong. How could we share the continent with Indians as partners when they had no organized governments, no towns or cities, no industries or currencies to oppose to our well-defined culture?

Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent is history-from-the-other-side that attempts to scrape off centuries of prejudice and presumption from the history of North America. What we think we know, even after decades of revisionism, is still contaminated by ignorance and chauvinism.

The Indians understood exactly what was at stake. They were not easily or quickly vanquished. As late as the 1870s, 380 years after Columbus and just 150 years before today, there were viable Indian nations—the Lakotas in the northern plains and the Cheyenne in the southern plains—who maintained a working economy and sufficient military capability to keep Europeans at bay. But centuries of realignment, negotiation, and adaptation finally failed these nations as railroads, the telegraph, and successive waves of settlers broke the resistance once and for all. What’s hard for us to understand is that this result was obvious to absolutely nobody until it happened. Once it did happen, the preceding 380 years were recast as prologue, part of an inevitable process. Nobody in 1650, 1750, or even 1850 made any such assumption.

Hämäläinen emphasizes the word Indigenous, with a capital I, to assert the potency of native societies as they confronted the various European empires. Here is an early example, describing events in the American southwest in the 17th century:

Spain had a momentous head start in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, but North American Indians had brought Spanish expansion to a halt: in the late sixteenth century, there were no significant Spanish settlements on the continent—only petty plunder regimes. North America was still essentially Indigenous. The contrast to the stunning Spanish successes in Middle and South American was striking: how could relatively small Native groups defy Spanish colonialism in the north when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and Maya Empires had fallen so easily? The answer was right in front of the Spanish—the decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas—but they kept missing it because the Indigenous nations were so different from Europe’s hierarchical societies. They also missed a fundamental fact of Indigenous warfare: fighting on their homelands, the Indians did not need to win battles and wars; they just needed not to lose them.

Hämäläinen’s concedes nothing to assumptions of European superiority.

From the 16th century to the latter part of the 18th century, there were never just two sides to any conflict. The English and the French, and to a lesser extent the Spanish, were at least as concerned with vanquishing each other as with vanquishing Indians, and they negotiated and traded with Indian nations to create necessary alliances. This is how the Indians were able to obtain the guns and other tools they needed to remain viable.

Spanish and French strategists had envisioned their colonies as imperial launchpads that would facilitate further expansion, but that goal proved elusive for both empires. Colonists could do very little in North America without Native support and consent—a constraint that drove them to radically recalibrate their ambitions. The early-eighteenth-century lower midcontinent became a world of flexible alliances, malleable identities, and imperial failures. Colonies founded as imperial power centers morphed into Indigenous resource domains. As in the pays d’en haut decades earlier, imperial ambitions were diverging from reality in the lower Mississippi Valley.

The Indians, in turn, allied or warred with each other as their priorities dictated. The Iroquois, based in what is now upstate New York but with dominion over an empire stretching from Quebec in the north to Illinois in the West and the Carolinas in the South, were particularly formidable. The Iroquois established their confederacy of five tribes in the decades just before the appearance of the Europeans and remained a power until the late 1700s—quite a run. (I’ve been fascinated by the Iroquois ever since my seventh-grade class spent a semester learning about them from a book titled The Great Tree and the Longhouse. The nuns seemed to relish the gory details of Jesuit martyrdom.)

The X factor was disease—a topic often backgrounded in triumphalist narratives. Throughout Indigenous Continent are passages describing how one tribe or another would lose 50 or 80 percent of its population due to a smallpox epidemic. Colonists suffered too, but there was an inexhaustible supply of new immigrants to restock their settlements.

The Iroquois met mass death by waging “mourning” wars on neighboring tribes:

The Iroquois had driven thousands of people into the west, gaining a vast domain in their wake. It was the first large-scale western expansion in early American history. But this did not put an end to the warfare, which only seemed to escalate as the Iroquois’s enemies dispersed. The explanation was at once simple and unique: the Iroquois needed people more than they needed territory. They needed captives to replenish disease-ravaged populations, mend fractured lineages, alleviate pain through vengeance, and restore the spiritual vitality of their communities.

When Iroquois warriors returned with captives, the clan mothers would sort them:

Those chosen for literal adoption went through a “quickening” ceremony in which they received the name and social role of a deceased Iroquois. These people—known as we-hait-wat-sha—or “a body cut into parts and scattered around”—were adopted into clans, became full-fledged members of the Iroquois League, and were obliged to defend it in battle, even against former kin. The ritual adoptees [a second category] were slotted into Iroquois families as “uncles” or “nephews.” Their faces were painted red and black, and they were allowed to give a feast and recite their war honors before being executed. Condemned captives were tied to a stake, and their new relatives took turns to “caress” them with firebrands. Women cut up the corpses and boiled the pieces in kettles so that the Iroquois could absorb the prisoners’ spiritual power. The Iroquois aimed to dismantle “their nationality,” to prop up their own.

I found myself rooting for and admiring the Iroquois despite the astonishing violence that they perpetrated. If you’ve never read much history, you might think we live in violent times, but in fact what we would call genocide was business as usual for most of human history. The Iroquois, like most Indian nations, were moral people who played by a certain set of rules. But torture and death were part of their world, and if we insist on imposing our standards on them, or on any historical group sufficiently different from us, we become blind to what their lives were like. It was never senseless violence. It was … appropriate violence? Appropriate for them, anyway.

Slavery was another component of life in early North America. But as originally practiced, it was not based on racism. In the 17th century there was all sorts of variations: Indians enslaving other Indians, whites enslaving Indians, Indians enslaving Africans, Africans enslaving other Africans. It was an economic strategy: people were a resource. In a not untypical passage, we read how the Comanches raided down into Mexico for the specific purpose of capturing people to tend their horses:

The horse herds of the four allies had exceeded Comancheria’s carrying capacity, forcing a difficult choice: either reduce their herds or expand again. The Comanches did not seek war, but they could not accept smaller herds; the Comanches’ individual and collective power hinged on horse wealth. The Comanches turned south and went to war with Mexico for horses, grass, and captives. Raiding, already a major enterprise, was about to become an industry. The Comanches carried scores of Mexican captives into Comancheria to tend to their growing horse herds. Slavery became a substantial institution within the Comanche world, but it was not rigidly structured or managed. A large number of slaves were eventually adopted into Comanche households. They were called kwuhupus, “my captives.”

That sounds like a practical strategy; it almost sounds charming. No doubt it was generally not very charming for the kwuhupus, but nor was it tainted with hatred or racism. It’s interesting to consider the progression of events in North America: first slavery without racism, then slavery with racism, and finally racism without slavery.

No event so devastated the prospects for Indian nations in North America as much as the American Revolution—or rather the outcome of that war. After 1776, it was no longer possible for the Indians to play one empire off against another. The Americans were not restrained by any grand strategy, or by a monarch in Europe who could set limits on what was permissible. Over time, the Americans grew ever more confident of their strength, and ever less willing to negotiate or share the land they coveted. Thus began the years of Indian “removals,” of treaties torn up before the ink dried, and ultimately of mass slaughter.

The last-ditch effort of the Indians was to become as much like the invaders as possible:

Facing a program of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, the southern Indians knew that retreating from U.S. aggression spelled dispossession and defeat. Americans recognized only one kind of civilization—their own—which meant that the Indians needed to embrace a version of that civilization if they were to survive as independent nations. The result was not only newspapers and plantations, but revised racial thinking. The Cherokee leader Guwisguwi already lived in a two-story home, had an estate of several orchards, and owned nineteen Black slaves and a ferry.

But it was all for naught:

The Cherokees were ready to engage in nation-to-nation talks with the U.S. representatives but their cause proved futile. The Georgia assembly demanded that John Quincy Adams remove the Cherokees, and when he refused, the assembly denied Cherokee sovereignty.

These days, public gatherings in Seattle, where I live, are often preceded by a statement like the following:

We acknowledge that we are on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Nisqually people, or “Squally-Absch.” Squally-Absch means “People of the River, People of the Grass.” Nisqually people have inhabited and stewarded these lands Since Time Immemorial.

These declarations tend to make me uncomfortable, not because they aren’t true, but because they change nothing. If alien settlers ever do arrive from outer space, we shouldn’t expect to be treated any better than we treated the Indians. They might be willing to acknowledge that we were here first, though.