At the age of sixteen or seventeen, at the time of my first attempts at writing, I discovered the small complete works of Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, who, as a romantic poet, adopted the pseudonym Novalis: the one who ordered new land.

I had heard the name for the first time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Berlin and immediately identified with what was so completely foreign.

Stranger hardly conceivable: Growing up in a Protestant Thuringian noble family in the late eighteenth century as one of eleven children, light years away from my Jewish American-Austrian only child identity, so to speak.

I became his enthusiastic disciple, gradually reading every line of his "Hymns to the Night", the poems, his extensive collection of fragments,

his novel fragment "Heinrich von Ofterdingen".

The young poet Heinrich, who goes in search of the blue flower he saw in a dream: "It's constantly on my mind, and I can't write or think anything else."

Novalis' blue flower became my guiding star, a symbol of longing for a thoroughly poetic world.

What's more, I began to feel like a soul mate to Friedrich von Hardenberg, I thought I heard an ecstatic voice in his work, more intimately linked to me than anything I had previously learned, read or experienced.

A sort of exuberance of the youngster I was then, who had the idea of ​​possibly being the reincarnation of the poet who died at twenty-nine.

I smiled at myself and at the same time thought my secret consideration was not entirely unrealistic.

Last but not least, it will probably have been influenced by the ideas of anthroposophy, which we Waldorf students were given to take with us on our journey through life.

The views of the district leadership on May 1st

A mild delusion that culminated in the decision to travel to Weissenfels an der Saale on the occasion of the 200th birthday of my idol, on May 2, 1972, fifty years ago, to the town where Novalis spent most of his short life spent and where he was buried in 1801.

I was looking forward to meeting the poet's admirers from all over the world, who would not shy away from traveling to the German Democratic Republic on that date.

Soon after my arrival at the city's only hotel, the "Golden Ring", I had to realize that I was the only foreigner who had made the long journey.

A large red flag creaked in its holder outside the window of the shabby hotel room.

On dirty gray squares, in narrow desolate alleys, on the fire walls of ramshackle houses, I read: "What the 8th Party Congress of the SED decided will happen!" In soot-black courtyards, children played between overflowing rubbish bins.

Canned meat and vegetables were piled high in the dusty display case of a lonely grocery store.

Everyday life in an industrial city on the edge of the Thuringian Forest, not far from Leipzig, which proudly calls itself a shoe metropolis thanks to the local VEB "Banner des Friedens", the largest shoe factory in the workers' and farmers' state.

I made my way to City Hall, where I found out that a memorial service for the poet was planned for the next day, May 3rd.

When I asked why the celebrations did not take place on the actual birthday, the mayor's secretary informed me: "The district management is of the opinion that it is impossible to expect the Weißenfels workforce to hold a celebration for a person like that immediately after May 1st controversial and aristocratic writers at that.”