Friedrich von Hardenberg genannt Novalis

Friedrich von Hardenberg genannt Novalis

A gleaning from the sources of the family archive

by Sophie von Hardenberg

with 32 contemporary illustrations, a complete index of persons, extensive biographical notes, and a detailed preface by Ulrich Taschow

326 pages, paperback, 5th edition 2015, series: avox ad fontes, ISBN: 978-3-936979-02-2

An in many respects unusual, unique, touching, and yet completely forgotten biography of Friedrich von Hardenberg, perhaps the most influential Romantic writer, anonymously written by his niece and estate administrator Maria Sophie Bernardine Freiin von Hardenberg. She was able, as hardly anyone else, to grasp the man whom posterity programmatically shortened to “Novalis” as a person very close to her, and for the first time also in his wholeness as a scientist, mining engineer, poet, mystic, and philosopher.

Sophie experienced the reception history of the nineteenth century as a direct contemporary witness and compared it over the years, with increasing astonishment, to the personal reports of her family, to conversations with Friedrich’s close confidants, and to the extensive handwritten traditions, letters,

diaries, and notes that were available to her in a way they were not available to her contemporaries. From these sources emerges an intimate family history of the von Hardenbergs, one that draws an entirely different picture of her uncle from the image projected by the outside world.

At the same time, Sophie directs attention to a human being who himself regarded writing, to which posterity later reduced him, as only an insignificant secondary occupation, and thus to the true secret of his immense aftereffect.