The Blue Flower #3: Something happened

Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 18–25 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

   Fritz told Just: 'Something happened to me.'
   Just replied that whatever it was, it must happen later.

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Hello and welcome to this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. My name is Simon Haisell and I am the host of Footnotes & Tangents, book guides and slow reads of novels worth savouring. Check out our read-along plans for 2026.

In Week 3 of this slow read, we are reading chapters 18–25. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.

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Woman at a Window, Caspar David Friedrich, 1822. Source.

This week: Something happened

   'You tell me, that a quarter of an hour decided you. How can you understand a Maiden in a quarter of an hour? If you had said, a quarter of a year, I should have admired your insight into the heart of a woman, but a quarter of an hour, just think of it.'

The poet-philosopher Novalis met Sophie von Kühn on 17 November 1794 at Grüningen Castle. He wrote to his brother Erasmus that fifteen minutes had decided his life. Erasmus wrote back that Fritz was “young and fiery” and an impulsive fool. He meant well.

What strikes me about The Blue Flower is the equanimous and expansive way Penelope Fitzgerald handles this encounter. There are so many ways to reduce it to a single interpretation, whether to lose ourselves in Fritz’s “fiery” exuberance or pour scorn on his ridiculous, not to say inappropriate, feelings.

Fitzgerald allows the characters to speak their minds and lets the reader form their own opinion.

This openness in the writing creates space for comedy, tragedy, romance and realism – nestled alongside each other, line by line.

Fritz had made himself susceptible to this moment. The Rockenthien’s house is the joyful and excessive opposite to the pious austerity of the Hardenbergs. Last week, we saw how Goethe’s Mignon embodies an ideal for him:

   'She is only a child,' cried Fritz, 'a spirit, or a spirit-seer, more than a child. She dies because the world is not holy enough to contain her.' 

But how irresistible this idea… Have there been fifteen-minute moments in your life that have changed you? Decided you? When you could say, “something has happened to me.” And were you right, or wrong, or both? How did you feel then, and what do you see now, looking back on your former self years later?

For every romantic, there is a realist. And Fritz confides in two of them, his brother Erasmus and his hilariously brutal sister Sidonie:

'But how can a girl of twelve look like a genius of twenty-five?'
   'That is easy,' said Sidonie. 'She cannot.'
   'But you have never so much as seen her.'
   'That's true. But I shall see her, I suppose, and when I do I shall tell you exactly the same thing.'

In Jena, Fritz swallowed Fichte’s “ich-philosophy”: the belief that everything we know about the world is the product of our own imagination. Sidonie’s response reflects this idea: there is no knowable Sophie-in-herself, only the one in Sidonie’s mind, a version of Sophie entirely incommensurate with Fritz’s vision of Sophie as “my heart’s heart.”

And Sophie confounds Fritz with her own entirely different version of herself!

This is what makes novels great. We spend our lives stuck in our heads with one image of the world. In the novel, we see and understand each character’s imagination and watch and assess its effect in the world beyond. Novels invite us to be simultaneously romantic and realist, empathetic and critical, sensitive and wise.

Something has happened to Fritz. But that’s not all that’s happened.

Nineteenth-century iron copying-press. Source.

Footnotes and tangents

1. A revolution would not remove them

‘I do not think I could endure life as a copying clerk,’ said Fritz. ‘Such occupations should not exist.’

Fritz begins to tell Just how chemicals might displace clerks in a revolution of office work. Meanwhile, thousands of years of manual copying are coming to an end with the invention of the copying press by the Scottish engineer and chemist, James Watt.

• Tangent: The invention of the copying press

Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson have all made use of it, but news has not yet reached Thuringia and Saxony.

‘Don’t suggest any improvements here.’

I couldn’t help but also think of the advent of AI. What would Novalis think of computers that write poems and publish novels? First they came for the copy clerks… Would he say that words without a body are without meaning? What does a copying computer understand of the human heart?

‘Words are given us to understand each other, even if not completely,’ Fritz went on in great excitement.

“From every tall window the lights shone extravagantly.” Schloss Grüningen, where Hardenberg met Sophie von Kühn. Source.

2. Someone who keeps his doors open

The Rockenthien house at Grüningen is the mirror opposite of the Hardenbergs at Weissenfels.

At the Kloster Gasse, the Freiherr keeps worldliness from the door, enduring occasional visits from Uncle Wilhelm, dutifully dispensing charity at the gates on Christmas Eve. “Moral grace” is the watchword, revolutionary politics is forbidden, and the Freiherr’s word is final.

The Rockenthiens is “the most hospitable house in the world.” Light shines “extravagantly” from every window, and the rooms overflow with life and laughter. It is a looking-glass world: the Bernhard with his illicit red cap is compared to the “Demon George” in his tricolour waistcoat. Silly Sophie is not sensible Sidonie. Papa Rockenthien is as agreeable as the Freiherr is disagreeable, and has no control over his household:

At forty, he was large and loose, with impulses as benevolent and ill-directed as a badger-hound’s as he trundled through Schloss Grüningen’s long corridors.

• More: Present-day images of Schloss Grüningen

The Rockenthien house is full of inhabitants, guests and callers, including one Dr Johann Langermann. A tangent: Langermann also studied under Johann Gottlieb Fichte at the University of Jena, and went on to take a special interest in the diagnosis and treatment of melancholia. “Unfortunately for himself,” Sophie’s father tells Fritz, the physician “can never find anything wrong with us.” Unsurprising, if his main concern is depression. But portentous, given the future of the family.

Sophie von Kühn. Source.

3. Youth’s wild ocean

At the back of the room, a very young dark-haired girl stood by the window, tapping idly on the glass as though she was trying to attract the attention of someone outside.

Fritz, sincere and earnest. Sophie, distracted and amused. She laughs, which is something of a sin to the Hardenbergs. She does not believe in the immortal soul, which is definitely a sin to the Hardenbergs! And she is too busy being to care about becoming anything, let alone the wife of this poet-philosopher.

‘I want to be, and not to have to think about it.’

Andrea Wulf writes¹ that Novalis “fell in love easily,” and here he is, the romantic fool and impulsive youth. Somewhat like Vaska Denisov and Andrei Bolkonsky at the Rostovs in War and Peace, he is swept up by the spirit of the house. Wulf writes:

Where Novalis’ father was constantly on his knees praying and prohibiting any social gatherings at Weißenfels, Sophie’s family loved to drink and sing while constantly teasing each other. They were good-humoured and often played cards after breakfast, lunch and dinner. Unconventional and open-minded, they also embraced the ideas of the French Revolution, something that Novalis’s father rejected entirely.

Like the men in War and Peace, he’s in love with the idea rather than the reality. Sophie is, as Wulf puts it, “a typical adolescent girl.” She enjoys food and music, laughs at silly things, and stands up for herself when necessary.

Fritz’s friends are bemused, his family mildly horrified by his fixation, his Rausch as Erasmus puts it – his frenzy, his mania! He has lost his senses.

But if Sophie is “only” ordinary, perhaps that is the point?

If Novalis believed that we should “educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary”, then it is not that he is deluded about Sophie, but that his imagination alchemises her ordinariness. If the world is only what we imagine it to be, then the “something” that has happened to Fritz is a revolution, a transformation of perception.

Question: If we believe something or someone is beautiful or extraordinary, does that thing or person become beautiful and extraordinary? Ask Karoline Just:

‘But he has always talked a great deal of nonsense. When he first came here, he said my hands are beautiful, also the tablecloth and the tea-tray.

Still Life with Swan and Game before a Country Estate, Jan Weenix, c. 1685. Source.

4. Oh, but what about Karoline Just?

She felt as though her body had been hollowed out. Fritz was perplexed.

Fritz deals Karoline a “wound,” carelessly telling her that “she did not understand the nature of desire.” Chapter 20 is excruciating as Fitzgerald makes the briefest outlines of a broken heart. Fritz is always talking, always letting others know how he feels. Karoline says:

‘Not everyone can speak about what they suffer,’ she said. ‘Some are separated from the only one they love, but are obliged to remain silent.’

This icy utterance has power on many levels. It is generally true; Karoline stands for everyone who remains silent while another speaks. It is intimately true for Karoline, who loves Fritz but cannot say it. And as though to prove the point, she is misunderstood by Fritz, who assumes she is speaking of some secret admirer of hers: “He was so real at that moment that she could have put out a hand and touched him.” Fritz makes this absent lover real in a poem, picturing himself and Sophie beside Karoline and her “respectable minor official.”

Once again, the novel is in dialogue with Fichte’s philosophy of the self: Karoline’s imagined version of reality is painful because it is a lie, “intended as a lie.”

Between them they had created out of nothing a new and most unwelcome entity.

This is the counterpart to Fritz’s work of imagination at Schloss Grüningen. What extraordinary things we can do when we love the world as it is, and see beauty and wonder in it. But our imagination may also hatch horrors that express and respond to our silent sufferings.

And what other suffering does our imagination make?

Cairn in Snow, Caspar David Friedrich, 1807. Source.

5. I am willing it to snow

Sophie’s idle telekinesis aligns with the book’s theme of the power of the mind and imagination: Sophie makes it snow, allowing us to “all amuse ourselves.”

And of course, later, it does snow, and Fritz uses this as an opportunity to get himself snowed in with Sophie at Grüningen. Always the realist, Karoline Just exposes this as “nonsense” for “in that great house there must be someone who can clear the carriageway.” Every time Fritz makes “something happen” through his imagination, there is someone nearby to turn his snow palace to slush and sludge.

• Romancing the snow: The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Tangent: A brief history of snow

“Snow is to water what poetry is to prose,” writes the historian Bernard Mergen.² It’s a cinematic cliche that a love story must have a snow scene. And snow itself is like nature romanticising itself, transforming the ordinary and the familiar into something extraordinary and fleeting.

Here, my reference points are from my childhood. In Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Will Stanton wakes up in another century on a midwinter morning transformed by snow. The boy in Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman is similarly spellbound:

6. On lilacs and linnets

Fritz was not sure whether there were any lilacs in the garden or not. He was inclined to think not.

At Grüningen, Fritz catches himself fichtisieren – i.e philosophising in the manner of his Jena mentor Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The lilacs do not exist outside of Frau Rockenthien’s fertile imagination. And when the conversation turns to the Advent Fair, Fritz asks, “Where is this fair?”

it’s not in order to fichtisieren here, he told himself – better to say no more about it.

Non-existent flowers made me think of the elusive blue flower. Lilacs are associated with life, youth, and first love, early-blooming flowers that herald the arrival of spring. But they may also symbolise death and mourning.

In Greek mythology, Pan chases the nymph Syringa, who turns herself into a lilac bush to escape. In anger, Pan breaks off the lilac branches and blows a kiss into them, making the first panpipes.

Walt Whitman wrote his poem Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d in memory of US President Abraham Lincoln, “Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, I leave thee there in the door yard, blooming, returning with spring.”

Lilacs appear in the opening lines of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The lingering scent of lilacs as an intense memory appears in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons³ as a means of escape from a materialistic and mechanical attitude towards nature.

• Lilac’s Reach Beyond the Garden: From Walt Whitman to Claude Monet, Lilacs Sparked the Imagination of Creative Minds

Lilacs, Grey Weather, Claude Monet, 1872

Penelope Fitzgerald is a master of the surreal. Rockenthein conjuring up “a string of small dead birds” from his pocket is one such arresting image.

   'Linnets! They won't go far' shouted George. 'Thrree at a time I could crunch them.'

Isn’t George just wonderfully monstrous?

Why linnets, I wonder? The collective noun for linnets is a parcel, which is rather neat. In Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Selfish Giant, a giant builds a wall around his garden to keep out children. Without the sound of children, spring refuses to come to his garden, until:

One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King’s musicians passing by.
   It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. “I believe the Spring has come at last,” said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.

He discovers that the children have crept in through a hole in his wall and brought spring with them. It is then that he realises how selfish he has been.

• Read: The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde

The common linnet, male and female. Source.

7. And now some music

‘They played “Wenn die Liebe in deinen blauen Augen”. That of course could not be for me, my eyes are dark, but it was very beautiful.’

This, I think, is Mozart’s “An Chloe”, a composition to a poem by Johann Georg Jacobi. It’s interesting to note that Mozart only uses the beginning of the poem and leaves out its unhappy end in betrayal and death. Here is “An Chloe” sung by Sabine Deveilhe with pianist Mathieu Pordoy:

Later, Rochenthien exclaims that “Partings are painful” and “in a voice as deep as the third level of a copper-mine, but with inappropriate cheerfulness, broke into the plaintive song: ‘Scheiden und meiden tut weh …’”

This is a traditional German folk poem that was later recorded by Romantic writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in The Boy’s Magic Horn (1806-8). Gustav Mahler later set many of them to music.

• Listen: “Scheiden und meiden” by Gustav Mahler

Illustration from The Boy’s Magic Horn by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (1806-08) Source.

“Partings are painful”, sung with “inappropriate cheerfulness”, makes me think of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet:

                                             Sweet, so would I.
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.
Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet
     sorrow
That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.

At this time, Fritz’s friends in Jena were busy translating William Shakespeare. They began with Romeo and Juliet. August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel worked on the translation together, Caroline “tapping her fingers on the table as she transformed August Wilhelm’s text into melody and poetry.”⁴

On 7 May 1789, Friedrich Schlegel sent a copy to Novalis. He wrote: “I think you’ll be drawn to Romeo … this is more than poetry.”⁵

Self-portrait, Raphael. Source.

8. Appearances can be deceptive

What or whom does she look like? he thought, with this rich hair, and her long, pretty nose, not at all like her mother’s. Nor were her arched eyebrows. In the third volume of Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente there was an illustration, after a copperplate by Johann Heinrich Lips, of Raphael’s self-portrait at the age of twenty-five. This picture had exactly the air of Sophie. From the copperplate, of course, you wouldn’t tell the colour, or the tonality of the flesh, only that the expression was unworldly and humane and that the large eyes were dark as night.

It seems significant that Fritz thinks of a portrait from Johann Kaspar Lavater’s work, which links physical appearances to personality traits. Running through this book is the idea that appearances are deceptive and the internal and external worlds may not align.

And what should we do about this non-alignment? At Christmas, Fritz’s mother is worried that someone might disillusion the Bernhard and “destroy his belief in Knecht Rupert.” Knecht Ruprecht is a companion of the gift-bearing Saint Nicholas, who would dish out punishments to naughty children in a similar manner to the more notorious Krampus. According to tradition, Knecht Ruprecht was a farmhand or wild foundling raised by Saint Nicholas.

‘I don’t remember the Bernhard ever believing in Knecht Rupert,’ said Fritz to Sidonie. ‘He always knew it was old Dumpfin, from the bakery, in a false beard.’

So, who is being deceived, the Bernhard or his mother? What starts as an attempt to preserve the magic of Christmas ends in only causing distress to the Freifrau.

• Footnote: Who is Knecht Ruprecht?

Knecht Ruprecht is a sort of anti-Santa Claus, a nightmare of the imagination or perhaps a necessary evil to counterbalance the benevolence of Saint Nick.

Running through this week’s story are the entwined twins of the imagination: love and despair, fulfilment and hollowing out, joy and pain, song and silence.

Saint Nicholas and Knecht Ruprecht

Next week

Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Next week, we will read chapters 26–33. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main page for The Blue Flower at Footnotes & Tangents.

This slow read and book guide is free. If you have enjoyed it and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription or a one-off donation to support Footnotes & Tangents. Thank you!

In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.

Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.

Simon

1. Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 96.

2. Bernard Mergen, Snow in America, 1997

3. Penelope Fitzgerald greatly admired the Russian author.

4. Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 81

5. Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 145.