The study analyses early Romantic models of individuality and their relevance in the literature and philosophy of aesthetic modernism after 1945. Starting with Novalis, the self as a work of art is delineated in the way it manifests itself in figural constellations of androgynity, role-change, sex-change and various forms of love. Authors like Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and Michel Foucault have directly taken their bearings from Novalis in plumbing the potentialities of a liberated creation of the self under the conditions dictated by modern power constellations.