This does little to change Fritz into a more stolid and practical young man, however. Disapproving of Fritz's youthful idealism and burgeoning romanticism, he attempts to nip his heretical ideas in the bud by sending him to boarding school. He intends Fritz to eventually enter the salt trade as well. A hard-working man of high birth but dwindling fortune, the elder Hardenberg converts to the Herrenhut Brotherhood. Fritz's father, Director of the Salt Mining Administration of Saxony, runs a salt mine in Weissenfels on behalf of the Prince. His youngest sibling, referred to cryptically as “the Bernhard” is supernaturally intelligent, but his gift is never fully explained. Michael Hoffman of The New York Times described The Blue Flower as “a masterpiece.” Friedrich “Fritz” von Hardenberg was born in 1772, the second of a brood of eleven. Hardenberg asks those who have read the chapter (including young Sophie) what they think the flower symbolizes this question becomes one of the most important motifs in the book. It tells the story of the formative years of early Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), who would later achieve acclaim under the pen name “Novalis.” Hardenberg has two obsessions, a twelve-year-old named Sophie von Kühn, and the blue flower that dominates the first chapter of a book he is writing. The Blue Flower is a critically acclaimed 1995 historical novel by author Penelope Fitzgerald.
0 kommentar(er)
