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.

Novalis was the pen-name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, born in 1772 at the family seat of Oberwiederstedt in Saxony-Anhalt, into a Pietist-Moravian noble family of modest means. He studied law at Jena under Friedrich Schiller, at Leipzig where he befriended Friedrich Schlegel, and at Wittenberg, and from 1797 attended the Mining Academy at Freiberg under the great geologist Abraham Werner.

His decisive intellectual experiences came in two waves. The death in 1797 of his fifteen-year-old fiancee Sophie von Kuhn turned him to the philosophical mysticism of the Hymns to the Night and the Spiritual Songs. His mining studies and his reading of Fichte produced the fragmentary Allgemeines Brouillon (the General Notebook) and the Faith and Love of the late 1790s, the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen with its blue flower, the philosophical fragments Pollen and Faith and Love or the King and Queen, and the visionary essay Christianity, or Europe (1799).

Novalis is the central poet-philosopher of early German Romanticism, the inventor of its 'magical idealism' in which the poetic imagination remakes the world and the spheres of nature, history, and religion are reconciled into a single living organism. He died of tuberculosis at Weissenfels in March 1801, twenty-eight years old, leaving his major works unfinished.