The Politics of Romanticism: Novalis and the White Rose

Abstract

Alexander Schmorell’s and Hans Scholl’s use of Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa in the fourth White Rose pamphlet of summer 1942 has previously been read as being indebted to the strength of Novalis’s oracular rhetoric. This article contextualises Schmorell’s and Scholl’s use of Novalis by clarifying how it deviates from the reception of Romanticism and specifically from the reception of Novalis in the early twentieth century. Romanticism acted — if only uneasily and reductively — as a point of identification for the development of a narrative of the cultural nation under National Socialism and has continued to be subject to a simplistic teleological narrative of how Romanticism’s elements of irrationalism, antisemitism, and nationalism led to National Socialism. In their reading of Novalis, Schmorell and Scholl are an instructive example of active reception: they re-activate the dormant political implications of Novalis’s work, which had previously been obscured by the persistent myth of Novalis. Their use of Die Christenheit oder Europa stems from the text’s fusion of ideals of a unified Christian community and Europe. Schmorell and Scholl expand on Novalis to include a vision of a pan-European confederation as an alternative to the aggressive, expansionist nationalism under the Nazi regime.