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.
