Fitzgerald’s novel is historical fiction based on the life and loves of the Romantic poet and philosopher, Novalis, whom Fitzgerald refers to by his Christian name, Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenberg. Fritz’s father was a member of the impecunious aristocracy, who had turned pious late in life, after a religious awakening. “While they were living at Oberweiderstadt, the Hardenbergs did not invite their neighbors, and did not accept invitations, knowing that this might lead to worldliness…. As a member of the nobility, most ways of earning money were forbidden to the Freiherr.”
In college, Fritz fell in with the so-called Jena circle, led by the Schlegels and mentored by Goethe and Schiller, “They were all intelligent, all revolutionaries, but since each of them had a different plan, none of it would come to anything. They talked continually of going to Prussia, to Berlin, but they stayed in Jena…. To the Jena circle Fritz was a kind of phenomenon, a country boy, perhaps still growing, capable in his enthusiasm of breaking things, tall and awkward.” As a poet, he professed, “Politics are the last thing that we need. This at least I learned with the Brethren at Neudietendorf. The state should be one family, bound by love.”
Fritz was apprenticing to become a salt mine inspector, one of the few occupations open to the nobility. On a business trip he fell in love with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie, on first sight, from across the sitting-room of an old manor home. “I can’t comprehend her, I can’t get the measure of her. I love something that I do not understand. She has got me, but she is not at all sure she wants me.” Fritz was much more confident about his philosophy, “I think, indeed, that women have a better grasp on the whole business of life than we men have. We are morally better than they are, but they can reach perfection, we can’t…. Furthermore, I believe that all women have what Schlegel finds lacking in so many men, a beautiful soul. But so often it is concealed.” The philosophy of Fritz borrowed much from Fichte, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and others in his orbit, who had learned idealism from reading Kant and hearing Fichte lecture. Fritz pontificated, “The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light…. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.”
His friends knew Fritz lived life on another plane of reality. Johann Wilhelm Ritter said of him, “Hardenberg could not be judged by any ordinary standards.” Speaking to Caroline Schlegel, he continued, “For him there is no real barrier between the unseen and the seen. The whole of existence dissolves itself into a myth.” The great man himself, Goethe, tried to explain Fritz’s unusual love for the young Sophie to Fritz’s brother, Erasmus, thus, “Rest assured, it is not her understanding that we love in a young girl. We love her beauty, her innocence, her trust in us, her airs and graces, her God knows what—but we don’t love her for her understanding—nor, I am sure, does Hardenberg.”
Fritz, himself, concludes, “We think we know the laws that govern our existence. We get glimpses, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime, of a totally different system at work behind them…. As things are, we are enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day…. This is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.”
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