"Rummaging among his books he came across Novalis' Ofterdingen [14] the book that had so often inspired him to write poetry a year before. While still at school he and some friends had founded a society by the name of Teutonia with the aim of increasing their understanding of German history and literature. In this society he had assumed the name of Heinrich von Ofterdingen.... Now the meaning of this name became clear to him. He saw himself as that same Heinrich in the charming little town at the foot of the Wartburg and a longing for the 'Blue Flower' took hold of him with overwhelming force. Minna could not be the glorious fairy-tale bloom, nor could she be his bride, however anxiously he probed his heart. Dreaming, he read on and on, the phantastic world of magic enveloped him and he ended by hurling himself weeping into a chair, thinking of the 'Blue Flower'."Gottfried here unveils the whole romantic lie which he had woven around himself; the carnival gift of disguising oneself as other people is his authentic "inner being". Earlier on he had called himself Gottfried von Strasbourg; now he appears as Heinrich von Ofterdingen [14] and he is searching not for the "Blue Flower" but for a woman who will acknowledge his claims to be Heinrich von Ofterdingen. And in the end he really did find the "Blue Flower", a little faded and yellow, in a woman who played the much longed-for comedy in his interest and in her own.
The sham Romanticism, the travesty and the caricature of ancient stories and romances which Gottfried re-lives to make up for the lack of any inner substance of his own, the whole emotional swindle of his vacuous encounters with Mary, Minna and Elise I & II have brought him to the point where he thinks that his experiences are on a par with those of Goethe. Just as Goethe had suddenly rushed off to Italy, there to write his Roman Elegies after undergoing the storms of love, so too Gottfried thinks that his day-dreams of love qualify him for a trip to Rome. Goethe must have had a premonition of Gottfried: