In the summer of 1798, the poet Novalis met Julie Charpentier, the daughter of the miner, who became his second great love after Sophie Kühn, who died young.

He writes to his dear friend Friedrich Schlegel: “A very interesting life seems to be waiting for me – but sincerely I would rather be dead.” Again and again there are passages in the correspondence between the two romantics in which Novalis speaks of dying seemingly without cause.

And death always does not appear as a turning point, but as a gradual transition to a more beautiful life.

Novalis is quite content with his earthly existence at this time.

He wants to get married and needs a solid income, but still has time for his writing plans: the "Hymns to the Night",

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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An all-pervasive cheerfulness speaks from his letters, a tenderness in dealing with people to whom he feels an obligation, although he actually seeks seclusion.

His nature distinguishes him from Friedrich Schlegel, the ingenious chief romantic, whom Goethe calls a “real stinging nettle” and whom Novalis calls a “hyper-mystical, hyper-modern hyper-lyric poet”, but both share a deep spiritual affinity: the urge for the universal and belief in the power of poetry.

The infinite inner life should be reflected in the infinite universe.

Because the outer world is constantly growing beyond the ego, an almost unbearable tension grows from it.

It's about religion, illness and death

towards death?

In a letter from April 1800, Novalis writes the enigmatic sentences “I hope it will soon have a happy ending for me.

I think I'll be in paradise at St. John's.” Did the seriously ill poet foresee his impending death?

Or did he mean by paradise the planned marriage to Julie Charpentier?

"It is certain that he had no idea of ​​his death, and one should hardly believe it, to die so gently and beautifully," wrote Schlegel, who accompanied his friend's death in March 1801 and who accompanied him in a Saw beauty and serenity die like no one before and after.

Previously, he had attested that he was the first person of his time to have an artistic sense of death.

Was it manners?

Coquetry with a transcendence that was already fading?

It is no coincidence that religion plays such an important role between Novalis and Schlegel.

The Frankfurt Romantic Museum has dedicated a small but worth seeing exhibition to this exchange of letters, cleverly curated by Nicholas Saul and Johannes Endres, which is now entering its sixth and final stage.

It's about religion, illness and death.

The soft spot for Catholicism has often been derided as a late-Romantic quirk.

However, religion had to become important to a world view with a universal tendency, which wanted to gather everything from science to philosophy under the umbrella of poetry, while also considering the peculiarities of style and character.

Schlegel was even willing to give it priority over poetry in order to tear out of itself the “eternally gyrating and dizzying I”.