Novalis 1772 – 1801

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, who published under the pen name Novalis, was a German poet, mystic, and philosopher of early Romanticism. Trained in law and mining engineering, he combined a professional life as a salt-mine inspector with an intense philosophical and literary engagement with Fichte, Spinoza, and the Bible. His Hymns to the Night, Spiritual Songs, and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen helped to shape Romantic literature, while his vast philosophical notebooks, the Allgemeine Brouillon and the Pollen fragments, outline a project he called magical idealism. He died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.