Ich liebe Deine Liebe

"I love your love." This is how Friedrich Schlegel wrote to his friend Friedrich von Hardenberg, the later 'Novalis', in 1797. This is a completely new tone for an exchange of letters, even between poets. How did this come about? The exhibition of letters exchanged between Schlegel and Hardenberg attempts to answer this question by focussing on the cultural and historical significance of their relationship.

It is not a matter of sensitive heartfelt enunciations in the style of Werther, nor of the balanced tone of German classicism, but of the search for one's own self, which has become biographical, but is also philosophically and literarily invented. Schlegel and Hardenberg explore each other, construct themselves in self-reflexive language games ("I love your ..."), and explore art and the world together. Despite frequent disagreements, symphilosophy and sympoetry emerge: letters become works of art, the boundary between life and poetry disappears. Separate identities first become many and then a new, romantic self, which unites with that of other early romantic friends and relatives to form a creative family, the nucleus of a new, poetic world.

edited by Nicholas Saul and Johannes Endres

published: 2022

scope: 192 pages, colour throughout

size: 24 × 30 cm / 9.5 × 11.8 inch

flap brochure, thread stitching

ISBN 978-3-945869-13-0

Sample