This is one of the few handwritten pages to have survived from the first part of Heinrich von Afterdingen. At the top, Novalis wrote the title the way he wanted it to appear in print. Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, who published the novel after Novalis’s death, changed it to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The document also sheds light on the genesis of the two opening sonnets. In these drafts, Novalis weighs the meaning of different words: “And does not your love protect / sustain / defend / shield me on earth?” The physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter later owned the page, having requested it from Novalis’s family: “I couldn’t part with it, any more than I could part with the memory of Novalis himself.”