A blue flower (German : Blaue Blume) was a central symbol of inspiration for the Romanticism movement, and remains an enduring motif in Western art today. [1] It stands for desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable. It symbolizes hope and the beauty of things.
German author Novalis introduced the symbol into the Romantic movement through his unfinished coming-of-age story, entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen . [2] After contemplating a meeting with a stranger, the young Heinrich von Ofterdingen dreams about a blue flower which calls to him and absorbs his attention.
"This blue flower is the watchword and sacred symbol of the [Romantic] school," according to H.H. Boyesen. "It is meant to symbolize the deep and sacred longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with longing; not a definite, formulated desire for some obtainable object, but a dim, mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship with the infinite, and a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of happiness which the world has to offer." [3] Thomas Carlyle offered this, that the blue flower "being Poetry, the real object, passion and vocation of young Heinrich, which, through manifold adventures, exertions and sufferings, he is to seek and find." [4]
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff wrote a poem called Die blaue Blume (The blue flower). Adelbert von Chamisso saw the core of Romanticism in the motif, and Goethe searched for the "Urpflanze" or "original plant" in Italy, which in some interpretations could refer to the blue flower. E. T. A. Hoffmann used the Blue Flower as a symbol for the poetry of Novalis and the "holy miracle of nature" in his short tale "Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza".
In 1902, Charles Scribner's Sons published The Blue Flower, a collection of short stories by Henry Van Dyke, the first two of which, "The Blue Flower" and "The Source", refer to the blue flower as a symbol of desire and hope, and the object of the narrator's search. This volume also includes Van Dyke's most famous story, "The Other Wise Man".
Walter Benjamin used the image of the blue flower several times in his writing. For example, the opening sentence of his essay Dream Kitsch: "No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept." Also in his Work of Art essay: "The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology." [5]
C. S. Lewis, in his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy, references the "Blue Flower" when speaking of the feelings of longing that beauty elicited when he was a child of six. He associates it with the German word sehnsucht, and states that this intense longing for things transcendent made him "a votary of the Blue Flower." [6]
English writer Penelope Fitzgerald's historical novel The Blue Flower is based on Novalis's early life. [7] In John le Carré's 1968 novel A Small Town in Germany , the character Bradfield says, "I used to think I was a Romantic, always looking for the blue flower" (Pan edition, p. 286 – chap. 17). Substance D, a fictitious drug in Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly , is derived from a plant with blue flower.
Tennessee Williams used images of blue roses in his play The Glass Menagerie to symbolize the frailty and uniqueness of Laura, a central character that reflects the life of Williams' sister, who underwent a lobotomy. In the play, Laura is nicknamed "Blue Roses" after another character misheard her say "pleurosis".
The alternative rock band Mazzy Star released a charting single in 1990 titled "Blue Flower" from their album She Hangs Brightly .
The folk/pop/narrative band The Gray Havens released an album in 2021 titled “Blue Flower,” inspired by C.S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy.
In his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire , American author George R. R. Martin uses the blue flower as a reoccurring symbol to represent young women of the noble House Stark, often with hints to an illicit love affair. In one instance, Prince Rhaegar Targaryen uses blue winter roses to crown the Lady Lyanna Stark as the "Queen of Love and Beauty" at the Tournament of Harrenhal, passing over his own wife, Princess Elia of Dorne.
Nowadays there is a French expression, fleur bleue, describing a sensitive dreamer and ingénue person. The color blue applied to a flower means a tenderness unavowed but also an emotion of purity, sincerity, gentleness, sensitivity and discretion.
In 1960 Werner Helwig published the book The Blue Flower of the Wandervogel (Die blaue Blume des Wandervogels) a history of the youth movement. Within the movement, a number of folk songs used the motif.
In the 1960s, the German Left reacted against Novalis's imaginary blaue blume, which had become a symbol of Romanticism and bourgeois high culture. The student's chant was "Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot!" ("Strike Germanistics dead, color the blue flower red!"). [8]
David Lynch uses the symbol of the blue flower in the 2010 short film Lady Blue Shanghai , a 16-minute, promotional short film for fashion designer Dior starring Marion Cotillard, among others. In the film a blue flower is hidden in a Dior handbag, at first feared and finally embraced by the female protagonist. It may be said that Lynch is associating the handbag with "divine" inspiration and creativity.
Stanley Kubrick made use of the Blue Flower in his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Sandor Szavost (Sky Dumont) is wearing one while dancing with Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman).
In the prequel to David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks , entitled Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me , two FBI agents are informed about their upcoming task through a woman named Lil. On her lapel is a tiny, artificial blue rose, clearly symbolic of something; but when Sam asks, Chet simply replies, "But I can't tell you about that." [9]
Blue flower is featured in the 2005 film Batman Begins . [10] In it, a fear-intensifying hallucinogenic drug is manufactured from blue flowers. The drug is used by Ra's al Ghul and Dr. Jonathan Crane (the Scarecrow), who plan to terrorize Gotham City by weaponizing the drug into a concentrated powder form and release it into the city's water supply.
Blue flower is again used as the source of a fictitious mind-altering drug, here called Substance D, in the 2006 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. [11]
A display of blue Baptisia australis flowers is used as a symbol of private support for an annual night of extrajudicial killings that serves as the central plot device of 2013 motion picture The Purge . [12]
James and Ruth Bauer, husband and wife collaborative team, wrote an unconventional music theatre piece entitled The Blue Flower at the turn of the 21st century. Speaking through liberally fictionalized versions of artists Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, and Hannah Höch as well as pivotal female scientific figure Marie Curie, the piece works with the romantic significance of the blue flower as it meditates on the brutal political and cultural turmoil of World War I, the short lived Weimar Republic, and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the Nazi Party. [13]
A 2012 episode of the BBC television series New Tricks , entitled "Blue Flower", concerns the murder of an East German refugee who had been involved in the Blue Flower organisation. [14]
Blue flower is used in the 2016 film Zootopia . In it, the flowers are called "night howlers" and are the source of a drug that causes mammals to become savage and attack anyone who comes near.
"The Gray Havens" music group wrote an album titled "Blue Flower", reflecting this metaphor. The songs revolve around the belief of an infinite, powerful, love of God within Christianity.
Romanticism is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. For most of the Western world, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval to the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of Nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
German Romanticism was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, influencing philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism. Compared to English Romanticism, the German variety developed relatively early, and, in the opening years, coincided with Weimar Classicism (1772–1805). In contrast to the seriousness of English Romanticism, the German variety of Romanticism notably valued wit, humour, and beauty.
Karl Wilhelm FriedrichSchlegel was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.
The term neo-romanticism is used to cover a variety of movements in philosophy, literature, music, painting, and architecture, as well as social movements, that exist after and incorporate elements from the era of Romanticism.
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, pen name Novalis, was a German aristocrat and polymath, who was a poet, novelist, philosopher and mystic. He is regarded as an influential figure of Jena Romanticism.
Der Blaue Reiter is a designation by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc for their exhibition and publication activities, in which both artists acted as sole editors in the almanac of the same name, first published in mid-May 1912. The editorial team organized two exhibitions in Munich in 1911 and 1912 to demonstrate their art-theoretical ideas based on the works of art exhibited. Traveling exhibitions in German and other European cities followed. The Blue Rider disbanded at the start of World War I in 1914.
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850. Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
Loschwitz is a borough (Stadtbezirk) of Dresden, Germany, incorporated in 1921. It consists of ten quarters (Stadtteile):
Philipp Otto Runge was a German artist, draftsman, painter, and color theorist. Runge and Caspar David Friedrich are often regarded as the leading painters of the German Romantic movement. He is frequently compared with William Blake by art historians, although Runge's short ten-year career is not easy to equate to Blake's career. By all accounts he had a brilliant mind and was well versed in the literature and philosophy of his time. He was a prolific letter writer and maintained correspondences and friendships with contemporaries such as Carl Ludwig Heinrich Berger, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Henrik Steffens, and Ludwig Tieck. His paintings are often laden symbolism and allegories. For eight years he planned and refined his seminal project, Tageszeiten, four monumental paintings 50 square meters each, which in turn were only part of a larger collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk that was to include poetry, music, and architecture, but remained unrealized at the time of his death. With it he aspired to abandon the traditional iconography of Christianity in European art and find a new expression for spiritual values through symbolism in landscapes. One historian stated "In Runge's painting we are clearly dealing with the attempt to present contemporary philosophy in art." He wrote an influential volume on color theory in 1808, Sphere of Colors, that was published the same year he died.
The German Youth Movement is a collective term for a cultural and educational movement that started in 1896. It consists of numerous associations of young people that focus on outdoor activities. The movement included German Scouting and the Wandervogel. By 1938, 8 million children had joined associations that identified with the movement.
Henry Jackson van Dyke Jr. was an American author, educator, diplomat, and Presbyterian clergyman.
Heinrich von Ofterdingen is a fabled, quasi-fictional Middle High German lyric poet and Minnesinger mentioned in the 13th-century epic of the Sängerkrieg on the Wartburg. The legend was revived by Novalis in his eponymous fragmentary novel written in 1800 and by E. T. A. Hoffmann in his 1818 novella Der Kampf der Sänger.
Dark Romanticism is a literary sub-genre of Romanticism, reflecting popular fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Often conflated with Gothic fiction, it has shadowed the euphoric Romantic movement ever since its 18th-century beginnings. Edgar Allan Poe is often celebrated as one of the supreme exponents of the tradition. Dark Romanticism focuses on human fallibility, self-destruction, judgement, punishment, as well as the psychological effects of guilt and sin.
Christiane Wilhelmine Sophie von Kühn was the love interest and eventual fiancée of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg, known simply as Novalis. Her image famously appears in Novalis’ Hymns to the Night, a foundational text of the literary movement known as German Romanticism.
The Blue Flower is the final novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald, published in 1995. It is a fictional treatment of the early life and troubled relationships of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, became a foundational figure of German Romanticism.
Marcel Brion was a French essayist, literary critic, novelist, and historian.
Louise Reichardt or Luise Reichardt was a German composer and choral conductor. Her German songs, or Lieder, were written in an accessible style akin to folk music and were popular. Louise Reichard was known for composing in the style of “romantic songs,” which are based on poetic settings. Additionally, she was influential in the musical life of Hamburg, Germany, where she lived from 1809.
View from the Artist's Window is a painting from 1825 by Martinus Rørbye, depicting the view from his childhood home at Amaliegade 45 in Copenhagen. The painting is in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. The painting is considered one of the highlights of the Danish Golden Age painting. It incorporates themes and symbols that resonated with its audience.
The Deutsches Romantik-Museum is a museum dedicated to German Romanticism, located in the Innenstadt area of Frankfurt, Germany.
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