Why don’t many people in Germany get vaccinated? Is that a late consequence of German Romanticism? Yes, says the literary critic Volker Weidermann.
In the “Zeit” he accused the early romantic poet Novalis, who was born 250 years ago (May 2nd) and is particularly popular with anthroposophists: He was “to blame for the German vaccination gap” and for the widespread “German love of irrationalism”. .
Novalis experts like the Trier literary scholar Herbert Uerlings can only shake their heads. “Romanticism as an alleged German fate is a cliché,” he says. One shouldn’t use Novalis as a label or cue to muse about an alleged “national character of the Germans”.
meaning today
The poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, who came from the Central German landed nobility and called himself Novalis, was long considered a death-seeking enthusiast. In his “Hymns to the Night” he shunned the light of reason and said goodbye to the Enlightenment, it was believed. A visionary experience at the grave of his fiancée Sophie von Kühn, who died in 1797, made him a mystically enraptured poet of love.
Two friends and fellow romantics, Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, coined this cliché in their 1802 edition of Novalis’ writings. It was not until 160 years later that research began to discover a completely different Novalis with the historical-critical edition of the estate.
“The utopian power of his thinking is important for us today,” says Prof. Uerlings. Novalis had intellectually exceeded all boundaries in order to “help the dialogical and republican reason to become reality”. Accordingly, politics also needs ethics and public spirit in order to be a “free connection of self-determined beings” beyond a mere balancing of egoisms.
Ask for the absolute
Every single subject is already a connection: of spirit and matter, consciousness and body. Novalis explored this unity in meticulous discussion with the main representatives of transcendental idealism, Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But not philosophy, but poetry was for him the decisive medium for the question of the absolute. In his novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” he made the “blue flower” a symbol of the romantic “longing for the infinite”.
For Novalis, this longing can never be satisfied. For reflection inevitably turns the infinite into a finite. Absolute being only ever appears as relative consciousness. This is seen through by reflecting on the limits of reflection: Romantic poetry says in an ironic way that it misses what is to be said precisely by what it says.
Novalis also relates this approach to the “dialectics of enlightenment”: the enlightenment must be enlightened about its own limits in order not to turn into terror – as it did after the French Revolution.
Museum and Research Center
Anyone who wants to get closer to the poet and thinker can visit the birthplace of Oberwiederstedt Castle in Mansfelder Land (Saxony-Anhalt). It is now a museum and research center for early romanticism. There, other sides of the multi-talent also become clear: As a trained lawyer, he began studying at the Bergakademie Freiberg near Dresden in 1797. There he dealt with questions of chemistry, mineralogy, mining, physics, mathematics and medicine, which is often reflected in his poetry. In 1799 he was appointed salt works assessor and entered the higher civil service career. He died in Weißenfels in 1801 at the age of only 28, presumably of tuberculosis.
There was no vaccination against this lung disease at that time, but there were first attempts at smallpox vaccinations. Novalis knew how dangerous smallpox virus is because two family members died from it. The basic idea of vaccination corresponds exactly to his approach, which he called “Ordo inversus”: You have to abolish reflection by reflection, eradicate disease with disease. It doesn’t look like vaccination skepticism. (dpa)