FOREIGN HANSER RIGHTS - Hanser Literaturverlage
FOREIGN HANSER RIGHTS - Hanser Literaturverlage
FOREIGN HANSER RIGHTS - Hanser Literaturverlage
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<strong>FOREIGN</strong><br />
<strong>HANSER</strong><br />
<strong>RIGHTS</strong><br />
Wolfgang Hädecke<br />
Novalis<br />
A biography<br />
400 pages. Hardcover<br />
Publication date: August 29, 2011<br />
B I O G RAP HY<br />
»All is seed«: The definitive biography of Novalis, whose thinking and poetry still<br />
resonate to this day.<br />
The short but intense life of the romantic poet caught between his quest for the<br />
‘blue flower’ and his striving for ‘wedding night, matrimony and progeny’.<br />
Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), who called himself Novalis, was the young genius<br />
among the German Romantics. His definition of Romanticism also holds true for his life:<br />
»Insofar as I imbue the mundane with meaning, the ordinary with mystery, the familiar<br />
with the seemliness of the unfamiliar, and the finite with the semblance of the infinite, I<br />
romanticize it.« He studied law, geology and mine engineering, was inspired by the French<br />
Revolution and wrote the poems Hymnen an die Nacht and Geistliche Lieder, as well as<br />
the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. He penned philosophical critiques of Fichte and Kant<br />
and advocated fair pay for miners. He befriended the seriously ill Schiller at an early age<br />
but shortly after was forced to watch the love of his life, Sophie von Kühn, die; he would<br />
have liked to die alongside her.<br />
Wolfgang Hädecke recounts a life suspended between the extremes of the coal pits in the<br />
heart of Germany and European enlightenment and idealism – which engendered an understanding<br />
of nature and society that is highly topical once more.<br />
Wolfgang Hädecke<br />
born in 1929 in Weißenfels on the Saale, lives in Dresden. He is the author of biographies<br />
on Heinrich Heine and Theodor Fontane among others, and also wrote the monograph<br />
Dresden. Eine Geschichte von Glanz, Katastrophe und Aufbruch (2006).