Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

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LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM

LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM

(17291781), German dramatist, critic, theologian, and most prominent proponent of the German Enlightenment. A son of the city's chief Lutheran pastor, Lessing was born in Kamenz in the Electorate of Saxony on 22 January 1729. After attending the local Latin school and the famous ducal school of St. Afra in Meissen, Lessing entered the University of Leipzig in 1746 in order to study theology. Having discovered his love for the theater, he left the university without a degree and, to the dismay of his father, started to make a living as a freelance writer and critic, moving back and forth between the cities of Leipzig, Berlin, Wittenberg, and Breslau.

Scholars emphasize Lessing's role in the development of German theater and drama and his aesthetic theory. His earliest tragedy, Miss Sara Sampson (1755), which foreshadowed his rise to literary prominence, constituted a shift from the prevalent French classicist models to an advocacy of Shakespeare and the English theater. Miss Sara Sampson can be called an early example of bourgeois tragedy. Lessing argued that the essence of tragedypitydepended on the depiction of human suffering and not on the social milieu of the protagonists. It was important, however, to create situations and characters with which the audience could identify.

This new concept is best exemplified in his last tragedy, Emilia Galotti (1772). The play is an indictment of an immoral prince who ruthlessly pursues his love interest, the virtuous bourgeois girl Emilia. Seeing no other way of defending his daughter, her father kills her in order to preserve her morality. The play shifts the focus from the court milieu of the heroic play into the private realm of the middle-class family. Later writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) and Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803) equally acknowledged the play's success in depicting an emancipated bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment rebelling against the corruption of court society.

Lessing outlined his thoughts on theater and drama in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (17671769; Hamburg dramaturgy), which he wrote while serving as a theater critic at the German National Theater in Hamburg from 1767 to 1769. Despite the fact that the Hamburgische Dramaturgie is not a systematic work, it provides many insights into Lessing's thought. Its main concern is the critique of French classical drama and the reinterpretation of Aristotle's work on tragedy.

Lessing's interest in the classics reveals itself in his work on aesthetics. In his Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766; Laocoon: or the limits of painting and poetry), Lessing emphasized the differences between the visual arts and literature. According to Lessing, literature focuses on action, whereas the visual arts focus on static objects. Lessing concluded that literature is superior to painting or sculpture because it can represent the full spectrum of human emotions.

With Lessing's acceptance of the post of ducal librarian at Wolfenbüttel in 1769, theological and religious themes emerged as the overriding concerns of his writings.

During his stay in Hamburg, Lessing had become a close friend of the children of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (16941768), a renowned Lutheran theologian and professor of Oriental languages at the academic gymnasium in Hamburg. Influenced by English deism, Reimarus had secretly written an attack on the veracity of revealed religion. After their father's death, Reimarus's children entrusted Lessing with the manuscript, from which Lessing published several parts under the title Fragmente eines Ungenannten (17741778; Fragments from an unnamed author). Most of the fragments criticized different parts of the Old and New Testament on moral as well as historical grounds. The publication created a stir in religious circles so that Lessing's employer, the duke of Brunswick, withdrew Lessing's censorship privileges. Forced to silence, Lessing wrote his most famous play, the epic poem Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the wise). Modern scholarship views the play essentially as a call for religious tolerance. By taking characters from the three major religious denominations, Lessing stressed his conviction that religious differences obscure the fact that all belief systems share a set of moral values. Lessing's last work, his Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780; The education of the human race) has often been viewed as his literary testament. The work addressed the theological issues raised during the Fragmente controversy and in Nathan der Weise, namely the problem of the relationship between reason and revelation. According to Lessing, religion is part of the process of the spiritual growth of mankind. Whereas ancient religions needed textual codification in order to provide human beings with guidance in their lives, eventually reason would free humankind of this necessity.

Lessing is justifiably regarded as one of the most distinguished representatives of the Enlightenment. His advocacy of basic humanitarian values such as tolerance illustrates that some proponents of the High Enlightenment not only debated their ideas and values behind the closed doors of the reading societies and salons, but also defended unpopular positions and values in public.

See also Drama: German ; Enlightenment ; German Literature and Language .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Emilia Galotti: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Translated by Edward Dvoretzky. New York, 1962.

. Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Paul Rilla. Berlin, 19541958.

. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Indianapolis, 1962.

. Miss Sara Sampson: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Translated by G. Hoern Schlage. Stuttgart, 1977.

. Nathan the Wise. Translated by Walter Frank Charles Ade. Woodbury, N.Y, 1972.

. Sämtliche Schriften. Edited and revised by Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker. 3rd ed. Stuttgart, 18861924. Reprinted Berlin, 1968.

. Theological Writings: Selections in Translation with an Introduction. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Stanford, 1956.

Secondary Sources

Albrecht, Wolfgang. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Stuttgart, 1997.

Allison, Henry E. Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966.

Batley, Edward M. Catalyst of Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Productive Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Germany. Bern, 1990.

Eckhart, Jo-Jacqueline. Lessing's Nathan the Wise and the Critics: 17791991. Columbia, S.C., 1993.

Engel, Eva, and Claus Ritterhoff, eds. Neues zur Lessing-Forschung. Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs zu Ehren am 26. August 1997. Tübingen, 1998.

Fick, Monika. Lessing-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung. Stuttgart, 2000.

Lamport, F. J. Lessing and the Drama. Oxford, 1981.

Ugrinsky, Alexej, ed. Lessing and the Enlightenment. New York, 1986.

Yasukata, Toshimasa. Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment: Lessing on Christianity and Reason. Oxford, 2002.

Ulrich Groetsch

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

views updated May 21 2018

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

The German philosopher, dramatist, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was one of the most brilliant representatives of the German Enlightenment and stood on the threshold of the Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, movement.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the son of a parson, was born on Jan. 22, 1729, in Kamenz in der Oberlausitz near Dresden, Saxony. After early education at the Fürstenschule St. Afra in Meissen, he attended the University of Leipzig from 1746 to 1748. This "little Paris" of 18th-century Germany was the stronghold of Johann Christoph Gottsched.

Early Works

In 1748 Frau Caroline Neuber's company performed Lessing's Der junge Gelehrte, a comedy about a haughty, pedantic young scholar, composed in the French manner and, to a degree, autobiographical, as Lessing himself was in danger of becoming a bookworm. From 1749 he was a feuilletonist and critic in Berlin; his friends and acquaintances included Karl Wilhelm Ramler, Christoph Nicolai, and Moses Mendelssohn, on whom Lessing modeled the noble Jew in his Lustspiel (comedy) entitled Die Juden (1749).

With Miss Sara Sampson (1755) Lessing introduced a new German genre, the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (domestic tragedy), which turned away from the French tragedy. The play is based on the Medea theme but in an English setting.

From autumn 1755 to May 1758 Lessing was in Leipzig, where he met Ewald von Kleist, the author of Der Frühling. Kleist, mortally wounded at the battle of Kunersdorf in 1759, was Lessing's model for Tellheim in Minna von Barnhelm. In Berlin from 1759 Lessing, with Mendelssohn and Nicolai, published the Briefe, die neuesteLiteratur betreffend (referred to as Literaturbriefe). These letters, concerning the most recent literature, attacked literary facades, mediocrities, and inflated celebrities, above all Gottsched. Nobody was supposed to deny that German theater owed many improvements to Gottsched, but Lessing, in the seventeenth Literaturbrief, claimed to be that "Nobody" and repudiated indebtedness to Gottsched, who, instead of pointing to Shakespeare as Lessing did, saw in the French theater the model for Germany.

At the end of the letters Lessing published his Doktor Faust fragment (1759), a brilliantly conceived work, unfortunately never completed. In Act II, scene 3, seven spirits of hell offer their services. Faust needs the swiftest: neither the finger through the flames, nor the arrows of the plague, nor the wings of winds, nor the rays of the sun, nor the thoughts of men, nor the revenge of the revenger can be as quick as the transition from good to evil, which he chooses as his quickest servant.

In the same year Lessing wrote Abhandlungen über die Fabel and Fabeln. Abhandlungen contains five "Essays on Fable": on the essence of fable; on the use of animals, for example, the wolf and lamb, to illustrate a moral truth; on the division of the stories; on their artistic presentation; and on their use in education. Lessing lets the readers discover the moral for themselves. In this respect and others he differs from Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's treatment of fable: Gellert imitated the easy, lengthy flow of Jean de La Fontaine's narrative, whereas Lessing is almost barrenly brief; Gellert wrote in verse meter, Lessing mostly in prose; Gellert's fables reflect his own age, Lessing's are timeless.

Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm (1771), counterpart to Abhandlungen über die Fabel, reveals Lessing's unique mastery of succinct statements, pointed modes of expression, and witty sayings. According to Lessing the Sinngedicht (epigram) is a kind of headline or inscription (as on monuments) to arouse curiosity and attention.

Middle Period

The Laokoon (1766, first part) is, next to Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Lessing's most important literary and esthetic criticism. Poetry and paintings are interpreted as essentially different expressions: actions, or things which succeed one another, are the true subjects of poetry; bodies are the true subjects of painting and sculpture. Beauty, not Johann Joachim Winckelmann's "noble simplicity and serene greatness," is the highest principle of artistic presentation. Laokoon's death agony would distort his features to an unbearable degree. The sculptor is subject to artistic laws different from those of poetry. Bildende Kunst (pictorial art) depicts bodies adjacent to one another and presented in the most pregnant moment of time, whereas literature presents actions in succession.

In 1767 Minna von Barnhelm, set in the Seven Years War, appeared, a landmark in 18th-century German drama—its first successful comedy, first truly national drama, and still a popular play. Doubtless the national elements are unmistakable, but they are not decisive in this comedy of situation (the deception with the ring, the apparent poverty, and so on) and of character (the teasing Minna and the chivalrous but rigid Tellheim). The vividly funny, mirth-provoking effects are mainly delegated to subaltern figures (Just, Franziska, and the retired sergeant major Werner), whose deeds are set against the serious, touching conflict between Tellheim and Minna, at times verging on tragedy. But their essentially generous characters assure an ultimately happy outcome.

From 1767 to 1770 Lessing was dramaturge of the national theater in Hamburg. His periodical, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, appeared on April 22, 1767, the day a national theater first opened in Germany. Lessing revealed himself as a champion of Shakespeare and a relentless critic of the slavishly observed French "three unities" of time, place, and action. For Lessing, Shakespeare was nearest to the Greek tragedians-thus in a sense a "classic" author.

It was not until the early German romantics that Shakespeare was fully understood as essentially akin to the German genius. But in a Literaturbrief Lessing maintained that, after Sophocles's Oedipus, no plays have more power over passions than Othello, King Lear, or Hamlet. Lessing translated Aristotle's fobos kai eleos as Furcht (fear; not Schrecken, or terror) and Mitleid (pity). The two terms are pivotal in the main discussions of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie: we are prompted by the fear that a similar fate may befall us; thus fear is pity transferred to ourselves.

Lessing's Letters of Antiquarian Content (Briefe anti-quarischen Inhalts, 1768-1769) arose from a bitter dispute in Halle with the antiquarian Christian Adolf Klotz, who attacked Laokoon. Another polemic against Klotz, who misunderstood a remark in Laokoon, is the inquiry into the theory about death and youth, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (1769), in which Lessing rightly maintains that skeletons portrayed by the ancient Greeks never were meant to symbolize death.

According to Lessing, the skeletons on sarcophagi, sepulchers, monuments, and the like portrayed lemures, or spirits of the dead. The Greeks showed death as the twin brother of sleep, as in Homer, namely as a youth. Klotz misread and deliberately obscured Lessing's statement about death in chapter 11 of Laokoon. There is no question of mawkishly glossing over the terrors of death. As a rationalist, Lessing faced the issue with unshrinking sentiment: death meant the end of suffering; Lessing, therefore, aptly concludes his erudite Untersuchung with a reference to Scripture in which an angel is the image of death.

Later Works

In the spring of 1770 Lessing went to the Brunswick Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, where he stayed until his death on Feb. 15, 1781. Emilia Galotti, a domestic tragedy based on the Virginia theme, appeared in 1772. Lessing's intention was to modernize the Roman story; rather than fall into the prince's seductive power, Emilia chooses to die at the hands of her father, Odoardo. The ultimate solution remains a rather unconvincing, highly intellectual exercise: Friedrich von Schlegel called it "a great example of dramatic algebra;" Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spoke of a nur gedacht (thought-out) play.

Lessing's introduction of the theme of political power and arbitrary authority, however, must have found a ready response among the angry young men of his time, although the play does not advocate a violent break with traditional powers. Galotti sacrifices his daughter—he does not kill the prince. The real flaw is that Emilia Galotti has no hero. Emilia is clearly not the hero, nor is her father. Marinelli is too contemptible a villain, and the prince lacks personal stature as a ruler. Although he masters brilliant repartee, for example, in the conversation with the painter Conti, he reveals himself as a moody, irresponsible lover and ruler who is quickly ready to sign a death sentence.

From 1778 Lessing engaged in a vehement theological conflict with orthodox Protestants when he published fragments from the Apologia for the Reasonable Worship of God by the Hamburg professor Hermann Samuel Reimarus. Lessing's fearless attack on the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze in Anti-Goeze (1778) and his noble defense of tolerance were, however, frustrated when the Protestants persuaded Karl I, Duke of Brunswick, to silence him. Lessing, cruelly condemned to refrain from answering the attacks, suffered a year of despair: his beloved wife, Eva König, widow of a Hamburg friend, died in January 1778. Lessing had married her in the autumn of 1776.

In Anti-Goeze Lessing uttered the proud statement: "If God in His right hand held all truth and in His left hand the ever-active quest for truth, although with the reminder that I shall for ever and ever err, and said to me: 'Choose,' I would in humility choose His left hand and say: 'Father, give. Pure truth is for You alone."' Lessing's views obviously had much in common with Baruch Spinoza's pantheism. Both believed that ultimate truth lay beneath all church dogmas.

Nathan der Weise: Ein dramatisches Gedicht (1779; Nathan the Wise), written in blank verse, demonstrates that idea. It is less a drama than a manifestation of Lessing's progressive thinking, religious tolerance, and enlightened humanitarianism. There is no doubt that Mendelssohn and Lessing himself were the models of Nathan's character. The play, in spite of comedy-like features, is no comédie larmoyante. It turns on the meaningful ring fable from Boccaccio's first day in The Decameron: the rings symbolize the three religions—Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan. This ring parable appears also in the Gesta Romanorum, an early-14th-century Latin collection of stories.

Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780) reaffirms Lessing's profound belief in the enlightenment and progress of the human race. Various forms of religion are merely stages in the striving toward perfection and truth. Lessing pretended to be merely the editor of the hundred paragraphs of "The Education of the Human Race." In fact, it summarizes his doctrines of faith. Does he uphold the dogma of immortality? He clearly believes in metempsychosis, that is, the transmigration of the soul of a human being (or animal) at death into a new body; and he strongly reasserts his trust in human progress and its highest stages: enlightenment and the purity of the heart. The doctrine of Erbsünde, the original sin, is demonstrated as the inability of man to be intelligently governed by moral law. Education is the key to Lessing's faith. There is a very personal note in the statements of religious conviction as regards the foundation of all certainty in knowledge and of faith in an eternal Providence that can never be rationally perceived. Lessing realizes that "the shortest line is not always the straight one."

Whether Lessing was the first critic in Europe, as Thomas Babington Macaulay claimed, is arguable, but he was certainly, with Goethe and Schiller, a most brilliant and fearless judge of artistic form and a great modern literary critic.

Further Reading

Important works on Lessing are Henry Burnand Garland, Lessing: The Founder of Modern German Literature (1937; 2d ed. 1963), and J. G. Robertson, Lessing's Dramatic Theory (1939). Interesting recent studies are Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-century Thought (1966), and Peter Heller, Dialectics and Nihilism: Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann, and Kafka (1966). See also Kuno Francke, A History of German Literature as Determined by Social Forces (1897; 4th ed. 1927); W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (1935); Curtis C. D. Vail, Lessing's Relation to the English Language and Literature (1936); and E. L. Stahl and W. E. Wuill, German Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries, edited by A. Closs (1970).

Additional Sources

Garland, Henry B. (Henry Burnand), Lessing, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977. □

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

views updated Jun 11 2018

LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM

German critic, dramatist, leading exponent of the Aufklärung; b. Kamenz, in Oberlausitz (Saxony), Jan. 22, 1729; d. Braunschweig, Feb. 15, 1781. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor and attended the celebrated school of St. Afra in Meissen (174146). He then entered the University of Leipzig, where, at the wish of his father, he studied first theology, then medicine. But his main interest was in philosophy and literature. His early play, Der junge Gelehrte, was produced at Leipzig in 1748 by the company of actors under the direction of Caroline Neuber (16971760). When this company failed in the same year, Lessing, who had become surety for its debts, fled to Berlin to escape his creditors. There he again wrote plays: Der Freigeist (1749), under the influence of the French comedy, and Die Juden (1749), which foreshadowed the themes of his later play Nathan der Weise. He also became a literary and dramatic critic; his essays were published in the short-lived journal Beiträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (174950; with Christlob Mylius, 175254), the Berliner Privilegierte Zeitung, and the Vossische Zeitung and its supplement, Das Neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes, of which he was editor in 1751.

In 175152, after having studied for his master's degree in Wittenberg, Lessing was again in Berlin, where he published the first volumes of his collected works (Schriften, 6 v., 175355, which included the lyrics and epigrams originally published as Kleinigkeiten in 1751). Lessing's second review of drama, Die theatralische Bibliothek, was published from 1754 to 1758. In collaboration with Moses Mendelssohn (172986) he published Pope, ein Metaphysiker! (1755), an essay that defines the distinct roles of poet and philosopher. He frequently changed his residence in the following years: he was at Leipzig (175558), where he formed a close friendship with the poet Ewald Christian von Kleist (171559); at Berlin (175860); Breslau (176064), as secretary to the governor, General Tauentzien; Berlin (176567); Hamburg (176768); and in Italy (176870). In 1770 he accepted the position of court librarian at Wolfenbüttel in Braunschweig, where, except for a visit to Vienna and Italy in 1775, he remained until his death. In 1776 he married a widow, Eva König, who died in childbirth the following year.

Influence as Critic. Lessing, in whom the German enlightenment found its culmination and German classicism its most eminent precursor and teacher, has been called the foremost critic of his time. His essay on the nature of the fable, prefixed to the collected edition of his Fabeln (1759), distinguishes the kinds of action proper to fable, drama, and epic. Perceptive criticisms of contemporary authors, among them Klopstock and Wieland, are to be found in the 54 letters he contributed to the journal Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, published in Berlin (175965), with Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai (17331811), the latter a bookseller and writer of rationalistic literature. Especially noteworthy is the seventeenth letter, in which Lessing strove to free German literature from its subjection to the artificial rules of French pseudoclassicism by reinterpreting the classical tradition of the ancients and pointing the way to a proper appreciation of Shakespeare. In Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) he defined the boundaries between the plastic arts, which portray objects in space, and literature, which portrays events in time.

As dramatic critic of the newly established National Theater in Hamburg, Lessing published the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (176768). Intended originally as a series of reviews of plays performed at the National Theater, these essays became in point of fact vehicles for the expression of Lessing's own dramatic theory, which, though largely derivative, exerted a major influence on 18th-century drama in Germany and in Europe generally. In them he again strove to break the tyranny of French pseudoclassicism in Germany and to create a German national drama based on a correct interpretation of Aristotle's dramatic theory of the unities. Out of Lessing's feud with the antiquarian Christian Adolf Klotz (173871), professor at the University of Halle, arose the Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts (176869) and the admirable essay Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (1769).

Dramatic Work. Lessing's interest in the theater was not confined to criticism. Besides the plays already mentioned, he is author of a one-act tragedy Philotas (1759) and of the more important Miss Sara Sampson (1755), the first significant tragedy of middle-class life (bürgerliches Trauerspiel ) in German literature. Based on English models (especially George Lillo's Merchant of London, 1731), this play gave practical expression to Lessing's revolt against Johann Christoph Gottsched (170066), the chief patron of French pseudoclassicism in Germany. In Minna von Barnhelm (1767), a play whose setting was the Seven Years' War, Lessing wrote the first German national drama of modern times, the first play in which a soldier (the hero, Major von Tellheim) has an honorable role. It is also the first masterpiece of German comedy, in which the comedy has its logical source in the events themselves, and the events in the characters who portray them; it is still popular in Germany. Lessing likewise gave Germany its first political tragedy, Emilia Galotti (1772), an indictment of corruption and immorality among the petty princes of absolutism.

Lessing's last drama, Nathan der Weise (1779), belongs more properly among the theological polemics precipitated by his publication, in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur (177381), of selections from the Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (16941768). To the ensuing controversy between orthodoxy and rationalism belong Lessing's Anti-Goeze (1778), a rebuttal of his most vehement opponent, the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze (171786), and Nathan der Weise, in which

Lessing, forbidden by the Braunschweig government to continue his strife with orthodoxy, returned to his "old pulpit," the stage, and pleaded for religious tolerance; the play's parable of the three rings reflects his rejection of the concept of one true religion. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780) is an essay that contains his doctrine of an organic religious evolution away from revealed religion and toward a future rational religion to succeed Judaism and Christianity. Ernst und Falk: Gespräche für Freimaurer (1777, 1780) is a group of five dialogues in which Lessing renewed his plea for religious and political tolerance. Mention should be made also of the volume of Rettungen (175354), in which Lessing sought to vindicate earlier victims of theological bigotry, and of the publication of a previously unknown manuscript of berengarius of tours, a work Lessing found in the Wolfenbüttel library.

Bibliography: Works. First ed. by his brother k. g. lessing et al., 31 v. (Berlin 17711825); ed. k. lachmann, 13 v. (Berlin 183840); ed. w. stammler, 2 v. (Munich 1959); ed. h. kesten, 2 v. (Frankfurt 1962). Studies. k. g. lessing, ed., Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Leben nebst seinem noch übrigen literarischen Nachlasse, 3 v. (Berlin 179395). j. sime, Lessing: His Life and Writings, 2 v. (London 1877). e. schmidt, Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, ed. f. schultz, 2 v. (4th ed. Berlin 1923). h. kesten, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Ein deutscher Moralist (Mainz 1960). w. kosch, Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, ed. b. berger (Bern 1963) 246248. h. b. garland, Lessing: The Founder of Modern German Literature (2d ed. New York 1962).

[m. f. mccarthy]

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

views updated Jun 11 2018

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81). German poet, dramatist, and religious essayist who influenced theological and philosophical discussion both within Germany and beyond. He helped to arrange publication of some controversial essays by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, 1774–8) in which then-novel methods of criticism were employed to undermine traditional aspects of Jewish and Christian scripture. Lessing's own religious views were broadly deistic. He advocated complete toleration in matters religious in his play Nathan the Wise, a work modelled loosely on his close friend Moses Mendelssohn.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

views updated Jun 11 2018

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81) German philosopher, writer, and critic. He revealed his commitment to the German enlightenment in the verse play Nathan the Wise (1779). His other plays include Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and Emilia Galotti (1772), and the critical work Laocoon (1776).