Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729 – 1781

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, and critic and one of the most important figures in the development of modern German letters. As dramaturge at the Hamburg National Theatre he reshaped German drama, and his close friendship with Moses Mendelssohn produced an enduring partnership of Jewish and Christian Enlightenment thought. Nathan the Wise, his late dramatic poem set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, articulated a powerful vision of religious toleration; the parable of the three rings remains its most-read passage. His theological essays anticipated the historical-critical study of religion.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in 1729 at Kamenz in Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor. After Meissen and the University of Leipzig he made his career as a freelance writer and editor in Leipzig, Berlin, and Wolfenbuttel, where he served from 1770 as librarian to the Duke of Brunswick at one of the great libraries of Europe. He married Eva Konig in 1776; she died fifteen months later in childbirth, a loss that darkened his last years.

His major works are the bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson (1755), the comedy Minna von Barnhelm (1767), the tragedy Emilia Galotti (1772), and the philosophical play Nathan the Wise (1779), with its plea for religious tolerance between Jew, Christian, and Muslim. The aesthetic and religious-philosophical essays — Laocoon (1766), the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-1769), the Education of the Human Race (1780), and the Fragments of Reimarus that triggered the Goeze controversy — are among the founding documents of modern German letters.

Lessing's distinctions between the visual and the temporal arts, his rejection of French classical drama in favor of Shakespeare, his philosophical treatment of revealed religion as 'historical truths' that cannot prove necessary truths of reason, and his lifelong defense of intellectual freedom made him the most influential German writer of his generation. He died at Brunswick in February 1781.