NOVALIS

born May 2, 1772, Oberwiederstedt, Prussian Saxony died March 25, 1801, Weissenfels, Saxony pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Baron (Freiherr) Von Hardenberg early German Romantic poet and theorist who greatly influenced later Romantic thought. Novalis was born into a family of Protestant Lower Saxon nobility and took his pseudonym from de Novali, a name his family had formerly used. Young Novalis studied law at the University of Jena (1790), where he became acquainted with Friedrich von Schiller, and then at Leipzig, where he formed a friendship with Friedrich von Schlegel and was introduced to the philosophical ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He completed his studies at Wittenberg in 1793, and in 1796 he was appointed auditor to the Saxon government saltworks at Weissenfels. In 179495 Novalis fell in love with and was engaged to the 14-year-old Sophie von Khn. She died of tuberculosis in 1797, however, and Novalis expressed his grief in the beautiful Hymnen an die Nacht (1800; Hymns to the Night). In these six prose poems interspersed with verse, Novalis celebrates night, or death, as an entry into a higher life in the presence of God and anticipates a mystical and loving union with Sophie and with the universe as a whole after his own death. In 1797 he went to the Academy of Freiberg to study mining. In 1798 Novalis again became engaged (to Julie von Charpentier), and in 1799 he became a mine inspector at the saltworks at Weissenfels, but he died of tuberculosis in 1801 before he could marry. Novalis' last years were astonishingly creative, filled with encyclopaedic studies, the draft of a philosophical system based on idealism, and his real poetic work. Two collections of fragments that appeared during his lifetime, Bltenstaub (1798; Pollen) and Glauben und Liebe (1798; Faith and Love), indicate his attempt to unite poetry, philosophy, and science in an allegorical interpretation of the world. His celebrated mythical romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), set in an idealized vision of the European Middle Ages, describes the mystical and romantic searchings of a young poet. The central image of his visions, a blue flower, became a widely recognized symbol of Romantic longing among Novalis' fellow Romantics. In the essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799; Christendom or Europe), Novalis calls for a universal Christian church to restore, in a new age, a Europe whose medieval cultural, social, and intellectual unity had been destroyed by the Reformation and the Enlightenment.