What the most quoted Novalis poem really means
“When those who sing or kiss know more than the profoundly learned”
Quelle: Getty Images
Novalis’ most popular poem dreams of a life without math and exact sciences. It foresaw the power of today’s narratives. His solution to everything that feels wrong in this world surprises.
In one of the most famous poems of German Romanticism, someone dreams of a world without math. This is relevant to millions of schoolchildren every day:
“If not more numbers and figures
are keys of all creatures,
if they sing or kiss like that,
more than the deep scholars know
when the world turns to free life
and into the world will return,
when then again light and shadow
to real clarity
and one in fairy tales and poems
recognizes the true world stories
then fly before a secret word
the whole wrong thing away.”
The poem (which can be found in the novel fragment “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”) has twelve verses – and no title. Its author is called Novalis (more on him and his strange name in a moment). “If … then”: The whole poem is a conditional construction. It’s about the world as it could or should be. The poem has often been read as a rejection of the rational world and the exact sciences, and in fact, speaking from today’s perspective, there is a bit of Adorno (“Dialectic of Enlightenment”) in it. No sooner had people learned with Kant to use their intellect (it was called enlightenment) than the counter-enlightenment began again.
The true world stories
Instead of deep scholarship and bare truths, people also want a bit of fairy tales and stories (“the true world stories”), the buzz word “narrative” often sounds like it today. Romanticism believed in a world that everyone can dream up with “singing or kissing” (i.e. the muses and arts). And when, at the end of his poem, Novalis presents the language of poetry as the solution, like a magic spell (“then the whole wrong being flies away with ONE secret word”), it is reminiscent of Adorno: “There is no right life in the wrong one.” wrong beings”, it can be pretty much anything: the war, climate goals that are too lax or just a wrong pronoun for trans people. The passe-partout of romance as a license for anything that feels wrong.
But who was Novalis, who was born on May 2, 1772, exactly 250 years ago – and is today one of the most famous representatives of Romanticism? He wasn’t even 29 years old, and until then he was mostly only a secret poet. He gave himself the pseudonym Novalis (“the one who cultivated new territory”) in 1798 when he presented his “flower dust” fragments to friends. Almost everything he wrote was published posthumously.
The famous Novalis portrait, reinterpreted by Uta Matauschek
Quelle: picture alliance/ZB/Peter Endig
His real name was Friedrich von Hardenberg. Born in the Mansfelder Land, an old copper mining region in today’s Saxony-Anhalt, he first studied law in Jena, Leipzig and Wittenberg and then followed the profession of his father, who was a salt works inspector in Saxony, i.e. inspecting brine springs that were exploited for salt production.
Novalis took the salt works business one step further by no longer wanting to run it with insane amounts of firewood, but with lignite. He went to the Bergakademie Freiberg for postgraduate studies. There he took chemistry, “geognosy” (geology) and “pure mathematics” four times a week, as can be seen from the timetable to this day. So a math hater after all?