If unredeemable longing is the driving force of all romantic literature, the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” can formally be described as the paradigmatic text of this epoch: the first part, completed by the author, bears the title “The Expectation”; the second, “The Fulfillment”, breaks off after almost 20 pages. Friedrich von Hardenberg, who called himself Novalis (“der Neuland Rodende”) since his first literary publication, died in 1801 at the age of 28.
Since then, Novalis, whose 250th birthday is on May 2nd, has been considered an emblematic figure of early Romanticism. There is only one contemporary portrait of him, showing a pale young man with a foreboding gaze that wanders into the distance. His manageable literary work – the two novel fragments “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” and “The Apprentices at Sais”, the poems, the collection of fragments and notes “Blossom”, “Faith and Love” and “Das Allgemeine Brouillon” – has been regarded as a Precipitation of an ephemeral poet, at least since the loss of the young fiancée Sophie von Kühn, who was swept away by a longing for death. Only recently has literary research made it clear that this image of the spiritualized author, who speaks in fragments that are as enigmatic as they are apodictic, and which still has an impact today, is primarily also an effect of the administration of the estate.
During his lifetime, Friedrich von Hardenberg, who was actually a mine assessor, only published two bundles of fragments, heavily edited by the Schlegel brothers, in the journal Athenaeum. A year after his death Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck published the two-volume “Fonts” by Novalis, in which they cling to the veiled, almost mystical identity of the poet and his texts, as Erika Thomalla recently demonstrated in her book “Anwälte des Autors”, one of those in keeping with early romantic poetics undergo editing.
The literary fragment owes its existence to a scientific revolution
Novalis’ posthumous essays and choreographed collections of notes are separated, the author’s often deliberative and hesitant insertions and the consciously placed continuities between the entries are erased. In this way a model poet is born early romance, whose fragments consistently implement the literary theory of the Jena circle in their specificity and lack of reference. Friedrich Schlegel, only a few weeks older than Novalis, wrote to his brother as early as 1792: “Fate has placed in my hands a young man who can become anything”; in Hardenberg’s “heart”, according to Schlegel, “I have now set up my seat and do research”.
Ten years later, this cardiological research led to an edition that was comparable to the first posthumous editions of Nietzsche and Kafka in terms of its desire to intervene and the history of its impact. Only a biographical note by Ludwig Tieck from the 3rd edition of the “Fonts” in 1815 reveals the poet’s identity. By this time, Novalis’ texts had already turned into a kind of projectile that shot early romantic poetics into the world.
The fact that Friedrich Schlegel sharpened the fragmentary nature of the fragments in Novalis’ estate has to do with the fact that this “experimental” way of writing in fragments, as both authors called it, most accurately reflects the early Romantic understanding of literature. In his brilliant study a few years ago, Michel Chaouli reconstructed that this decision for the fragment must be linked to the scientific – and above all the chemical – upheavals of the late 18th century. Lavoisier’s revolutionary discovery that elements such as water and air, which had been considered indivisible since antiquity, are actually composite compounds, and the chemical pragmatics he promoted of no longer considering “elements” as safe natural categories, but as open, dynamic intermediate stages, were shaken the world view in a way that can compete with the political revolution that was taking place in France at the same time.
The chemist Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier in a contemporary representation during experiments on breathing air.
(Photo: imago/Leemage)
Chaouli argues that the fragmentary writing of Schlegel and Novalis can be understood as a reaction to this dissection of nature; In the “Laboratory of Poetry”, as his treatise was entitled, an unfinished, experimental, “chemical” literature was created. The often diffuse and almost esoteric sound of the irretrievable in Novalis’ texts immediately becomes clearer through this scientific-historical adjustment. A famous passage like the first fragment in “Blossom” – “We look for the absolute everywhere and only ever find things” – could also be interpreted as a commentary on the transformation of nature into atoms in chemistry around 1800.
When one reads Novalis’s texts again, one’s attention is immediately drawn to the rapturous passages that have become strange in their intonation, whenever the image of nature in the prose descriptions and notes, no matter how fairy-tale and medieval it appears, is related to contemporary knowledge can. This interest concerns above all the autobiographically founded meaning of geology in his writings. Friedrich von Hardenberg studied at the Bergakademie in Freiberg, Saxony, which at the end of the 18th century was an international center for mining science, and above all in the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” the underground world plays a decisive role as an arsenal of signs and signposts.
Heinrich’s encounter with the old miner, her way down into the ramified caves, the discovery of the hermit, in whose books Heinrich’s future life story is already written, are among the most frequently interpreted passages in Novalis’ work. More interesting than the hermeneutic interpretations of the cave as a symbol of the psyche, as an early romantic symbol of the subconscious a hundred years before Freud, however, is – especially from today – a literal geological reading. At the end of the 19th century, the Saxon mines, the management of which became Hardenberg’s job in the last years of his life, were a scene of crisis-ridden experiences of nature in two senses.
“Every new leaf, every strange flower is some mystery.”
On the one hand, the author of “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” worked on the transition to lignite mining in Saxony and experienced, as Hans Blumenberg wrote in 1981 in the Novalis chapter of his book “The Legibility of the World”, “the first ‘energy crisis’ through the exhaustion of charcoal resources and the turn to fossil fuels, the discovery and development of which was initially a by-product of the salt works”. On the other hand, while walking through the mountain in the novel and in Novalis’ many general comments on the “great cipher script of nature” (“The Apprentices at Sais”), there are repeated indications that the desire to decipher this script was inspired by the new geological knowledge correcting the knowledge of the age of the earth in the late 18th century.
Before the beginnings of the theory of evolution, the origin of all life was reckoned back to the beginning of the Old Testament, a period of almost 6000 years. In the early Romantic period there is growing evidence that this duration must be extended to a length of many millions of years, and it is an inspiring breach through the work of Novalis to combine the astonishing, overwhelming, sometimes terrifying readability of nature with this extension of the geological era around 1800.
The skeletons of long-extinct animal species in the cave, the hermit’s nice remark that miners are “wrong astrologers”, even Heinrich’s dream of the notorious blue flower from “old times”, as it is called at the beginning of the novel, are not in this respect to be understood as a mere enthusiastic backdrop, but as an ambassador of an image of nature that suddenly points back to an almost infinite duration through geological measurements and analyses. Romantic longing has its historically datable core here.
Today, two hundred years later, the experience of nature is undergoing a similar upheaval in the relationship between geology and time, but in precisely the opposite sense. Every mild winter day, every melting glacier reminds us of where the past opened up to Novalis and his literary characters at the sight of the surrounding world into infinity – “Every new leaf, every strange flower is some sort of mystery”, it says in the second part of the novel of the self-inflicted shrinking of the human future on the planet. For a long time now, the signs of the earth have no longer been interpreted euphorically, but with concern about further exploitation and destruction. For this reason alone it is worth reading Novalis again, as a solemn natural scientist on the threshold of the Anthropocene.