Introduction

FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG’S experimental novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen is an attempt to realize the theoretical program of the Early Romantics in literary form. Although Hardenberg (known by his pseudonym Novalis) died before he could complete the novel, it remains one of the most significant texts of the German Romantic period. A fusion of genres, part fairy tale, part Bildungsroman, poetic and at the same time philosophical, it introduced to the movement its quintessential symbol, the blue flower, which signified the spirit of poetry, the never-ending quest for self-realization, and the restoration of a golden age. Hardenberg envisioned the novel in two (possibly three) parts. The first, “Die Erwartung” (The Expectation), the focus of this study, depicts the protagonist’s introduction to poetry and the awakening of his inner receptivity to art; the second, “Die Erfüllung” (The Fulfillment), would have been devoted to his final stage of enlightenment and development into a poet with transformative powers. Heinrich’s quest is inspired by a dream of the blue flower, and his search is both an internal and an external journey to the lyrical and unified world to be illuminated in “Die Erfüllung.” This mysterious, inward path toward a higher state of consciousness is expressed in Novalis’s well-known aphorism, “nach Innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg” (the secret path leads inward). It is a self-reflexive experience, one that leads the individual simultaneously away from its point of origin and back to it. When in the first and only chapter of “Die Erfüllung,” Heinrich asks his guide, Cyane (who, according to Ludwig Tieck’s notes for the novel’s projected end, “came from the East”), where their pilgrimage will take them, she tells him that they are always headed home, “immer nach Hause” (164).

Heinrich von Ofterdingen is thus much like its predecessors, Parzival and Fortunatus, in that it is a narrative of the self, a tale that maps the development of its eponymous hero across both geographical and psychological space. Here too, the protagonist is a traveler, and the novel’s organizational principle, the journey, is the means by which the hero defines and realizes his identity, the route that leads him to knowledge, self-understanding, and enlightenment; and it is the method employed by the narrative to plumb the depths of its protagonist’s subjectivity.