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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) | |
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Dramatist, aesthetician, and critic, the main representative of the German Aufklärung or Enlightenment. Lessing has been called the true founder of modern German literature. His most famous dramas are Miss Sara Sampson (1755), a domestic tragedy, Minna von Barnhelm (1755), a comedy about honor, marriage, and pretence, and Nathan the Wise (1779), set in Jerusalem during the Crusades. NATHAN. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in Kamenz, Saxony, where his
father, Johann Gottfried Lessing, worked as a Protestant minister.
Lessing
was the first of twelve children -
five
died in childhood. The family had long clerical traditions, and Lessing
was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father. Due to his
traditional but no means ultra-conservative views, Lessing
experienced Christianity at home in its learned, humane form. He was
educated
in Meissen at St. Afra's School; Lessing went to school at the age of
twelve. Most of the classes were conducted in Latin. The school
inspector described him as "a good boy, but somewhat satirical". (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life and His Works by Helen Zimmern, London: Longmans, Greenm and Co., 1878, p. 10) In 1746, at the age of seventeen, Lessing entered the
university of Leipzig, where he matriculated as a student of theology,
but his main interest lay in the philosophical (or arts) faculty. The
first months he spent immersed in books, and then took lessons in
dancing and fencing before launching himself to the society outside the
lecture rooms. To the disappointment for his family, Lessing deserted Lutheraranism and devoted himself to writing comedies. All his close friends had literary interests, among them his cousin Christolob Mylius, a freethinker, who went around as Karl Lessing said "in down-at-heel shoes, with holes in his stockings and tattered clothes, to the annoyance of the galant world of Leipzig." Lessing's first play, Der junge Gelehrte (1747, The Young Scholar) was performed by the acting company of Caroline and Johann Neuber. It was written in the style of Holberg and mocked arrogant students. For the most part, Lessing's comedies were conventional, but in Die Juden (1749) and Der Freigeist (1749) he also touched serious issues. Lessing's
early career as a playwright was stopped when the
acting company left him alone to cover its debts. In 1748 Lessing fled
to Wittenberg, where he studied at the university and then moved to
Berlin. At that time it had a hundred thousand inhabitants and its
atmosphere in religious matters was freer than in the provinces,
although Fredrick II did his best to suppress political discussion.
"Your Berlin freedon," Lessing wrote to Christoph Friedrich Nikolai, a
Berlin bookseller, in 1769, "reduces itself . . . to the freedom to
bring to market as many absurdities against religion as you like. . . .
But let someone . . . raise his voice on behalf of subjects, and
against exploitation and despotism, . . . and you will soon discover
which is the most servile land in Europe today. (quoted in The Story of Civilization: Part X: Rousseau and Revolution by Will and Ariel Durant, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967, p. 530) Lessing had arrived to Berlin without money and decent clothes, but he soon started to support himself with his pen, the first German writer to do so. By the age of 25, he established his fame as a sharp-witted critic and essayist. He contributed to Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, wrote plays, and established with Mylius a short-lived theatre quarterly, Beiträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theatres. His new friend, the Jewish philosopher Mises Mendelssohn, Lessing portrayed in the play Jews. In 1751 Lessing received his Master's degree at Wittenberg, and published a collection of poems, Kleiningkeiten. Again in Berlin in 1752, Lessing continued his literary activities. As a playwright Lessing made his breakthrough with Miss Sara Sampson, the first noteworthy German tragedy of bourgeois domestic life, with contemporary characters, situations, and issues. From 1755 to 1757, Lessing was in Leipzig, where he met Ewald von Kleist, a poet and a major in the army. The character Tellheim in Minna von Barnheim was partly based on him. After returning to Berlin with Christoph Friedrich Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn, he began publishing the literary review Briefe die neuste Literatur betreffend, the first independent review of modern German letters. But Lessing did not gain any strong foothold in Berlin. Voltaire, the French thinker and satirist, denounced Lessing to Fredrick the Great, ruler of Prussia. Behind Voltaire's anger was an unlucky remark Lessing had made about him, and false rumors that Lessing planned to publish a pirated edition of Voltaire's Le siècle de Louis XIV. Lessing had also criticized a translation of Horace, made by a protégé of Frederick II. In the 1760s Lessing served as secretary to General Friedrich von Tauentzien in Breslau. During these years he started to write Laoköon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766), which was inspired by the thoughts of J. J. Winckelmann. Lessing argued that although painting and poetry are similar in creating an illusion -"both are imitative arts" - painting uses completely different means or signs from poetry; the plastic arts are spatial while poetry is temporal. This was a new view - in art theory they were considered sister arts. Horace's "Ut pictura poesis" (painting is like poetry) had been part of the humanistic tradition since the fifteenth century, but Lessing rejected this belief - painting uses "forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time". (Laokoon, an Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, with remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art, translated by Ellen Frothingham, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887, p. 91) To clarify his idea he analyzed the famous sculpture, representing three dying figures in the grip of snakes. (The work is thought to be from the 2nd century B.C.E.) "Imagine Laocoon’s mouth open, and judge. Let him scream, and see. It was, before, a figure to inspire compassion in its beauty and suffering. Now it is ugly, abhorrent, and we gladly avert our eyes from a painful spectacle, destitute of the beauty which alone could turn our pain into the sweet feeling of pity for the suffering object." ( Ibid., pp. 13-14) Lessing knew that his hopes of becoming Royal Librarian in Berlin were not realistic, because he was not in favour with Fredrick. He moved to Hamburg and assisted in the founding of the Nationaltheater, which was funded by a group of merchants. The project was not a success. The audience was not ready for his ideas, but they paved the way for the realistic social drama which began to fully develop in the 19th century. His reviews of the performances Lessing published under the title Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-69). In this work, which owed more perhaps to Mendelssohn's theory of "mixed sensations" than to Aristotle, he attacked the formalism of neoclassicism, and the French classical theater which dominated the German stage. One of Lessing's targets was Voltaire, whose tragedies he criticized; he praised the genius of Shakespeare. Also In Hamburg he ran with his friend a printing and publishing company. To cover his debts Lessing had to sell his own private library. Despite Lessing's refusal of help, his friends Kleist and Gleim used their influence to have him appointed to a secure salaried office. For short periods, Lessing lived the life of a freelance writer, in between carrying out low-paying secretarial jobs. "What a pity I cannot think without the pen in my hand!" he once said. Independent of the goodwill of patrons, he often mocked current opinion. Lessing did not believe in fixed truths but in discussion and dispute. In Eine Duplik (1778) he stated: "If God held all truth in his right hand and everlasting striving for truth in his left, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, "Choose," I would humbly pick the left hand and say, "Father, grant me that. Absolute truth is for thee alone." (quoted in Lessing's Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment by Toshimasa Yasukata, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 24) From
1770 until his death, Lessing was librarian to the duke
of Brunswick at Wolfenbüttel. Also the philosopher and mathematician
Leibniz had worked
at the court library, famous for its rare books, but it was Lessing who
discovered a Greek manuscript containing Archimedes' Cattle Problem. He
published the epigram in 1773 in Zur Geschichte und Literatur: Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Lessing welcomed the
post. It secured him a regular income, he could help his family, settle
his debts, but in Wolfenbüttel he also felt lonely. In 1776 he married
Eva König, the widow of his friend. With Prince Leopold of Brunswick he
travelled in Italy for a year. Eva died in January 1778; she had given
a birth a few weeks earlier to their son, Tragott, who lived only two
days. Lessing was left to take care for her four children, trying to be
a good father to them. Nathan der Weise, a kind of symbolic fairy tale, which Lessing wrote in Wolfenbüttel, was performed at Easter 1778. Its message of universal brotherhood was advocated through one of its central characters, a noble Jew, Nathan. He is called "the Wise" by Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike. Saladin, the Moslem chief, is honest, but Christians are scheming and unscrupulous. Nathan's family was murdered by Crusaders. At the center of the play is "the parable of three rings", adapted and reworked from Boccaccio's Decameron. Nathan offers the parable, an allegory of the thee (Abrahamic) religions, as an answer to Saladin's question, "It is another, a far different thing / On which I seek for wisdom; and since you / Are called the Wise, tell me which faith or law / You deem the best." Nathan avoids the pitfall of siding with one religion. (from Act III., Scene V., Lessing's Nathan the Wise, p. 90) "I came prepared for cash—he asks for truth!" (Ibid., p. 91) Lessing's tracts on
theological subjects caused a bitter dispute with the Church
authorities. To provoke public debate on the fundamental truths of
Christianity, he published H. S. Reimarus's Fragmente eines
Ungenannten
(1774-77, Fragments of an Anonymous Author), a
critical attempt to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus.
Although Lessing held fast to his vision of a benevolet
Providene, his concept of religious truth was individualistic and
basically relative in its nature. Lessing's intense speculations never
achieved clarity: "I was pulled from one side to the other; neither
satisfied me entirely . . . The more conclusively the one side
sought to prove Christianity, the more dubious I became.," he said
toward the end of his life. (quoted in Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present by Rainer Forst, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 302) In Erziehung des
Menschengeschlechts (1780, The Education of the Human Race) he
connected the progress of religious thinking with three different
stages of the human race; every religion has contributed something to
human development. Judaic tradition represents the childhood, but the
third stage is still waiting in the future. Lessing's writings were
censored and he had to submit his works to the duke for approval. In
spite of this, he was offered membership to the Academy of Mannheim and
he also was an adviser to the Mannheim theatre. When his sight began to
fail, he had to give up his literary activities, and he could not carry
out his duties as a librarian. Lessing died in Brunswick on February 15, 1781, following a
stroke. He was buried at public expence. Before his death, Lessing
apparently told Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi (1743-1819) that he was a kind of follower of Spinoza. At that
time it was considered one step short of declaring as an atheist.
When Jacobi published his correspondence with Moses Mendelsson
concerning Lessing's final philosophical position, this unleashed
a controversy known as the Pantheismusstreit (Pantheism Controversy);
Kant disagreed with Jacobi, while Herder and Goethe defended Spinoza's
theism. But neither Kant nor Lessing seriously questioned the existence
of God. Lessing advocated liberal thoughts and religious tolerance. Due to his criticism of anti-Semitism many Jewish families adopted the name Lessing. Although his intellectual legacy stood in opposition to the ideology of the Third Reich, the Nazis refashioned Lessing into their own national ideals. Mathilde Lundendorff, a neuropsychiatrist and General Ludendorff's wife, who had a large following among Nazis, maintained in her pamphlet Mozarts Leben und gewaltsamer Tod (1936), that Mozart, like Lessing, Schiller and many others, had been poisoned by the Freemasons. For further reading: Life of G. Lessing by T.W. Rolleston (1889); Lessings Nathan der Weise: Die Idee und Charaktere der Dichtung by Kuno Fischer (1896); Lessing als Philosoph by Christoph Schrempf (1921); Lessings Weltanschauung by Hans Leisegang (1931); Lessing's Dramatic Theory by John K. Robertson (1939); Lessing und Aristoteles by Max Kommerell (1940); Lessing als ästhetischer Denker by Folke Leander (1942); Von der Menschlicheit in finsteren Zeiten by Hannah Arendt (1960); Lessing: The Founder of Modern German Literature by H. B. Garland (1962); Lessing und Brecht. Von der Aufklärung auf dem Theater by Hans Joachim Schrimpf (1965); Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought by Henry E. Allison (1966); The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism by Peter Gay (1966); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by Karl S. Guthke (1967); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by F. Aandew Brown (1971); Lessing und sein Zeitalter by Paul Rilla (1973); Lessings Aufklärung by Eckhard Heftrich (1978); Lessing and the Drama by Francis John Lamport (1981); Lessing's "Laocoön" by David Wellbery (1984); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by Gerhard Bauer and Sibylle Bauer (1986); Catalyst of Enlightenment: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by Edward M. Batley (1990); Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing's Aesthetic and Dramatic Production by Susan Gustafson (1995); A Companion to the Works of Lessing, edited by Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox (2005); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought by Hugh Barr H. Nisbet (2013); Lessing und das Judentum: Lektüren, Dialoge, Kontroversen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, herausgegeben von Dirk Niefanger, Gunnar Och und Birka Siwczyk (2015); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by Friedrich Vollhardt (2016); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Epoche und Werk by Friedrich Vollhardt (2018); Literary Conclusions: The Poetics of Ending in Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist by Oliver Simons (2022) Selected works:
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