The Blue Flower (German: Blaue Blume) is a central symbol of Inspiration. It stands for desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable.
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German author Novalis first used the symbol in his unfinished Bildungsroman, entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen. After contemplating a meeting with a stranger, the young Heinrich von Ofterdingen dreams about blue flowers which call to him and absorb his attention.
In the book Heinrich von Ofterdingen the blue flower symbolise the joining of human with nature and the spirit so the understanding of nature and coincident of the self is growing. In the Romantic the meaning of human was a continuation from Humanism and the Age of Enlightenment, but the focus was on the own emotions not on abstract theory. Understanding and thinking rise in the comprehension of Romantic from own individual love. Feeling is based on the self, thinking is based on the self and the development of the self leads the individual person. Also very important is contemplation. About the feeling, the thinking and contemplation personal inward cognition is possible. The process of cognition merge again with own individual love. The self and the nature is in this theory always linked.
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.
C.S. Lewis, in his autobiographical book, Surprised By Joy, references the "Blue Flower" when speaking of the feelings of longing that beauty ellicited 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."
English writer Penelope Fitzgerald's historical novel The Blue Flower is based on Novalis's early life. 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 flowers.
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.
"Blue Flower" is the name of a song by the British avant-garde pop band of the early 1970s, Slapp Happy, later covered by the 1990s indy rock bands Pale Saints and Mazzy Star. "Blue Flowers" is a song by the alternative MC, Kool Keith (AKA Dr. Octagon), on his 1996 album, Dr. Octagonecologyst.
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 Berlin in 1968, one slogan of the German student movement stated "Schlagt die Germanistik tot, färbt die blaue Blume rot!" ("Strike Germanistics dead, color the blue flower red!") The discipline of Germanistics was targeted as a sclerotic field, not suited to the needs of the people of the present.
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 movie follow-up 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."
The rapper Kool Keith (in his Dr. Octagon persona) released a single entitled "Blue Flowers" as part of the 1996 album Dr._Octagonecologyst.
Blue flowers are featured in the 2005 film Batman Begins. In it, blue flowers are used as the source of a fear-intensifying hallucinogenic drug. 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 flowers are again used as the source of the fictitious drug Substance D in the 2006 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly.
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 Hoch 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.