Novalis ran salt mines by day and helped invent German Romanticism
Friedrich von Hardenberg studied law, mineralogy, chemistry and mathematics, worked as a director of salt mines, and died at 28. Under the pen name Novalis he also wrote Hymns to the Night and fragments fusing poetry, science and philosophy that made him a founding voice of Jena Romanticism.
Born on 2 May 1772 into a minor, not especially wealthy branch of an old noble family in Saxony, he was the second of eleven children in a strict Pietist home. An uncle in the Teutonic Order later exposed him to Enlightenment writers, Goethe and Shakespeare. At the University of Jena he studied Kant under Karl Reinhold, first encountered Fichte's philosophy, and grew close to Friedrich Schiller, even nursing him through a bout of illness. Publishing a poem dedicated to Schiller in 1791 helped persuade his father to move him elsewhere. In Leipzig he met Friedrich Schlegel, a lifelong friend, and he finished his law degree at Wittenberg in 1794.
Working as a clerk in Tennstedt, he fell for Sophie von Kühn, and they became secretly engaged in 1795. She fell gravely ill and died two days after her fifteenth birthday; months later his brother Erasmus died of tuberculosis too. The double loss drove him toward poetry, and Sophie became the central inspiration of Hymns to the Night.
His philosophy grew from wrestling with Fichte, who described identity as a tension between the self and the not-self. Novalis reframed that tension as one between language and imagination, and later as a living dialogue between equal partners, summed up in his line: instead of not-I, you. From 1797 he studied at the Freiberg mining academy under the geologist Abraham Werner, covering electricity, galvanism, chemistry and medicine, and met Schelling, Goethe and Jean Paul. The fragment, a short form he developed with Schlegel in the journal Athenaeum, let him blend all these interests.
In December 1798 he became engaged to Julie von Charpentier, who nursed him through a lung illness, thought to be tuberculosis or cystic fibrosis. He died on 25 March 1801. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck published his literary works in 1802, including the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, but his depth as a thinker became clear only when his notebooks appeared in the 20th century.
Source: Novalis
