A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Contributors: Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox, Steven D. Martinson, Klaus L. Berghahn, John Pizer, Beate Allert, H. B. Ni...

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Contributors: Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox, Steven D. Martinson, Klaus L. Berghahn, John Pizer, Beate Allert, H. B. Nisbet, Arno Schilson, Willi Goetschel, Peter Höyng, Karin A. Wurst, Ann Schmiesing, Reinhart Meyer, Hans-Joachim Kertscher, Hinrich C. Seeba, Dieter Fratzke, Helmut Berthold, Herbert Rowland. Barbara Fischer is associate professor of German and Thomas C. Fox is professor of German, both at the University of Alabama.

A COMPANION TO THE WORKS OF

THE ESSAYS Introduction Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

Gender and Identity in Lessing’s Dramas Karin A. Wurst

Lessing’s Life and Work Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

Lessing and the Third Reich Ann Schmiesing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Lessing on the German-Speaking Stage in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, 1945–1990 Lessing the Critic: Polemics as Enlightenment Reinhart Meyer Klaus L. Berghahn Lessing on the East German Stage Lessing and the Fable and Screen Hans-Joachim Kertscher and Thomas C. Fox John Pizer Lessing and the European Enlightenment Steven D. Martinson

Lessing’s Poetics as an Approach to Aesthetics Modern Criticism in Historical Context: 200 Years of Lessing Reception Beate Allert Hinrich C. Seeba Lessing and Philosophy The Lessing Museum and Research Center H. B. Nisbet for Lessing Reception in Kamenz Dieter Fratzke Lessing and Theology Arno Schilson The Lessing Academy in Wolfenbüttel Helmut Berthold Lessing and the Jews Willi Goetschel A Brief History of the Lessing Society Herbert Rowland Lessing’s Drama Theory: Discursive Writings on Drama, Performance, and Theater Peter Höyng

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One of the most independent thinkers in German intellectual history, the Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to literature, philosophy, theology, criticism, and drama theory. As a playwright, Lessing created the first major German Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or bourgeois tragedy, Miß Sara Sampson, and wrote one of the finest German comedies, Minna von Bamhelm. In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious tolerance and intolerance and the clash of civilizations. Lessing’s dramas are the oldest German theater pieces still performed regularly on German and international stages. Both his plays and his drama theory have influenced such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Hebbel, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg, Schnitzler, and Brecht. Addressing an audience ranging from graduate students to seasoned scholars, this volume introduces Lessing’s life and times and places him within the broader context of the European Enlightenment. It discusses his pathbreaking dramas, his equally revolutionary theoretical, critical, and aesthetic writings, his original fables, his innovative work in philosophy and theology, and his significant contributions to Jewish emancipation. The volume concludes by examining the reception of Lessing and his oeuvre in Nazi Germany, in the former East and West Germanys, and in contemporary critical theory.

A Companion to the Works of Stefan George Edited by Jens Rieckmann ISBN 1–57113–214–7

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668 Mt. Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com

Edited by Fischer and Fox

Jacket Design: Lisa Mauro Jacket image: Portrait of the young Lessing by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Used by permission of Ullsteinbild.

9 781571 132437

Edited by Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Camden House Companion Volumes The Camden House Companions provide well-informed and up-todate critical commentary on the most significant aspects of major works, periods, or literary figures. The Companions may be read profitably by the reader with a general interest in the subject. For the benefit of student and scholar, quotations are provided in the original language.

A Companion to the Works of


Edited by

Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2005 by the Editors and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2005 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–243–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Companion to the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing / edited by Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–243–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1729–1781 — Criticism and interpretation. I. Fischer, Barbara (Karin Barbara), 1963–. II. Fox, Thomas C. III. Title. IV. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT2414.C66 2005 832⬘.6–dc22 2005008882 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Lessing Editions and Abbreviations

xi

Selected Works by Lessing Introduction Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

xiii 1

Lessing’s Life, Work, and Times Lessing’s Life and Work Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

13

Lessing and the European Enlightenment Steven D. Martinson

41

Criticism and Aesthetics Lessing the Critic: Polemics as Enlightenment Klaus L. Berghahn

67

Lessing and the Fable John Pizer

89

Lessing’s Poetics as an Approach to Aesthetics Beate Allert

105

Philosophy and Theology Lessing and Philosophy H. B. Nisbet

133

Lessing and Theology Arno Schilson

157

vi

CONTENTS

Lessing and the Jews Willi Goetschel

185

Drama and Drama Theory Lessing’s Drama Theory: Discursive Writings on Drama, Performance, and Theater Peter Höyng

211


231

Reception Lessing and the Third Reich Ann Schmiesing

261

Lessing on the German-Speaking Stage in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, 1945–1990 Reinhart Meyer

283

Lessing on the East German Stage and Screen Hans-Joachim Kertscher and Thomas C. Fox

301

Modern Criticism in Historical Context: 200 Years of Lessing Reception Hinrich C. Seeba

327

Contact Organizations The Lessing Museum and Research Center for Lessing Reception in Kamenz Dieter Fratzke

353

The Lessing Academy in Wolfenbüttel Helmut Berthold

357

A Brief History of the Lessing Society Herbert Rowland

359

Works Cited

363

Notes on the Contributors

393

Index

399

Illustrations Photograph of Lessing house in Wolfenbüttel

12

Photograph of the Laocoon statue

104

Engraving of Pastor Goeze

156

Engraving of Moses Mendelssohn

184

Photograph of Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater performance of Emilia Galotti, 2003

230

Photograph of toppled Lessing statue in Hamburg, 1945

276

Photograph of the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, 1955 production of Nathan der Weise

282

Photograph of Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 1960 production of Minna von Barnhelm

300

Caricature of Lessing’s competing claimants

326

Photograph of Lessing’s death mask

361

Acknowledgments

W

to express our gratitude to all who helped make possible this Companion to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a book situated between the 275th anniversary of Lessing’s birth (2004) and the 225th anniversary of his death (2006). We thank our contributors for their willingness to collaborate on this project and for their patience during a changing of the guard at Camden House. Camden House editor James Hardin and his successor Jim Walker made many helpful suggestions. Jim Walker oversaw the majority of this project, and we appreciate his judgment, diplomacy, and availability. We thank the University of Alabama, the Dean’s office of its College of Arts and Sciences, and Capstone International Programs for their generous support. The Lessing Museum in Kamenz, especially Matthias Hanke, and the Lessing Academy in Wolfenbüttel, especially Helmut Berthold, fielded numerous inquiries and helped us obtain photographs. Carl W. Schmidt-Luchs (Fotostudio Schmidt-Luchs), Monika Klocker (Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität Köln, Schloss Wahn), Christine Drawer (Deutsches Theater Berlin), Silke Bernd (Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin), and Peter Festersen also graciously made available photographs. We are grateful to our colleague George Williamson for his input as a historian, and we also thank our colleagues in the German Program at the University of Alabama for their support, which they have demonstrated in many ways. We thank our former graduate students: Bastian Quindt for his research assistance, and especially Tracy Graves and Martin Bäumel for their extensive help with correspondence, bibliography, and translations. As always, we are indebted to Lothar and Elfriede Fischer, Dr. Alois Biller, and Margaret Fox for their support. Last but certainly not least, we thank Katharina and Christopher for their patience and flexibility. We dedicate this book to them. E WOULD LIKE

Barbara Fischer Thomas C. Fox Regensburg, Germany February 2005

Lessing Editions and Abbreviations (In alphabetical order by title.) Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden. Ed. Paul Rilla. Berlin: Aufbau, 1954–1958. 2nd ed. Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1968. Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker. Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin/Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1886–1924. Reprinted Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968; Berlin/New York 1979. 23 volumes. Abbreviated as LM with volume and page number. Werke. Ed. Herbert G. Göpfert et al. Munich: Hanser (also Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), 1970–79. 8 volumes. Abbreviated as G with volume and page number. Werke. Ed. Kurt Wölfel. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1972. 3 volumes. Werke und Briefe in 12 Bänden. Ed. Wilfried Barner et al. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003. Abbreviated as Ba with volume and page number. Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe in 25 Teilen. Ed. Julius Petersen and Waldemar von Olshausen. Berlin: Bong, 1925–1935. Reprinted Hildesheim/New York: Olms, 1970.

Selected Works by Lessing Eighteenth-Century Editions of Lessing’s Works These editions include most of the individual works and translations mentioned below, sometimes in more than one edition. For recent Lessing editions see our introduction. Schrifften, 6 vols., 1753–55. Lustspiele, 2 vols., 1767 and 1770. Trauerspiele, 1772. Vermischte Schriften, vol. 1, 1771. Vermischte Schriften, 2–14 vols., ed. by Karl Gotthelf Lessing and Johann Joachim Eschenburg, 1771–1793. Sämmtliche Schriften, vols. 1–31, ed. by Karl Gotthelf Lessing, Johann Joachim Eschenburg, and Friedrich Nicolai, 1793–1825. Theatralischer Nachlass, ed. by Karl Gotthelf Lessing, 2 vols., 1784–1786. Theologischer Nachlass, ed. by Karl Gotthelf Lessing, 1784. Kollektaneen zur Literatur. 2 vols., ed. and expanded by Johann Joachim Eschenburg, 1790. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Leben, nebst seinem noch übrigen litterarischen Nachlasse, 3 vols., ed. by Karl Gotthelf Lessing, 1793–95.

Individual Works Authored or Edited by Lessing Listed here alphabetically with date of first publication. English title and date of first English publication in parenthesis. Anti-Goeze. D. i. Notgedrungene Beyträge zu den freiwilligen Beyträgen des Hrn. Past. Goeze, 1778. (Anti-Goeze, 1862). Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt. Wider den Herrn Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg, 1778. (Axiomata, if such there be in these matters, 1862).

xiv

SELECTED WORKS BY LESSING

Berengarius Turonensis: oder Ankündigung eines wichtigen Werkes desselben, wovon in der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel ein Manuscript befindlich, welches bisher völlig unerkannt geblieben, 1770. Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, 1750. Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, 1768–1769. Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759–1765. Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, 1789. D. Faust: “Berliner Szenarium” (Vorspiel, Erster Aufzug), 1786; Faust und sieben Geister, 1759. (Faust, 1823). Damon, oder die wahre Freundschaft. Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge, 1747. (Damon, or True Friendship, 1878). Das Christentum der Vernunft, 1784. (The Christianity of Reason, 1956). Das Neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes, 1751. Das Testament Johannis. Ein Gespräch, 1777. (The Testament of John, 1956). Daß mehr als fünf Sinne für den Menschen sein können, 1795. (That More than Five Senses Are Possible for Human Beings, 2005). Der Eremite: Eine Erzehlung, 1749. Der Freigeist. Ein Lustspiel in fünf Aufzügen, 1755. (The Freethinker, 1838). Der junge Gelehrte. Ein Lustspiel in drey Aufzügen, 1754. (The Young Scholar, 1878). Der Misogyne. Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge, 1755. (The Woman-hater, 1878). Der Schatz. Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge, 1755. (The Treasure, 1838). Die alte Jungfer: Ein Lustspiel in drey Aufzügen, 1749. (The Old Maid, 1878). Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1777/1780. (The Education of the Human Race, 1806). Die Juden. Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge, 1754. (The Jews, 1878). Die Matrone von Ephesus, 1784. Die Religion Christi, 1784. (The Religion of Christ, 1956). Durch Spinoza ist Leibnitz nur auf die Spur der vorherbestimmten Harmonie gekommen, 1795. (Spinoza only Put Leibniz on the Track of [his Theory of] Pre-established Harmony, 2005). Ein Mehreres aus den Papieren des Ungenannten, die Offenbarung betreffend mit Gegensätze des Herausgebers, 1777. (Editorial Commentary on the “Fragments” of Reimarus with Counter-Propositions of the Editor, 2005).


xv

Ein Vade Mecum für den Hrn. Sam. Gotth. Lange, 1754. Eine Duplik, 1778. (A Rejoinder, 2005). Eine Parabel. Nebst einer kleinen Bitte, und einem eventualen Absagungsschreiben an den Herrn Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg, 1778. (A Parable from the German of Lessing, 1806). Emilia Galotti. Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen, 1772. (Emilia Galotti. A Tragedy, 1800). Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freymäurer, 1778 and 1780. (Ernst and Falk 1–3, 1854; Masonic Dialogues, 1927). Fabeln. Drey Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen mit dieser Dichtungsart verwandten Inhalts, 1759. (Fables: In Three Books, 1829). Friedrichs von Logau Sinngedichte. Zwölf Bücher, 1759. Edited by Ramler and G. E. Lessing. Gedanken über die Herrnhuter, 1784. Gedichte von Andreas Scultetus: Aufgefunden von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1771. Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767–1769. (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1879). Kleinigkeiten, 1751. Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie, 1766. (Laocoon, or the Limits of Poetry and Painting, 1836). Leibnitz von den ewigen Strafen, 1773. (Leibniz on Eternal Punishment, 2005). Minna von Barnhelm, oder Das Soldatenglück. Ein Lustspiel in fünf Aufzügen, 1767. (The Disbanded Officer: or, the Baroness of Bruchsal. A Comedy, 1786). Miß Sara Sampson: Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen, 1755. (Lucy Sampson; or, the Unhappy Heyress. A Tragedy in Five Acts, 1789). Nathan der Weise. Ein dramatisches Gedicht, in fünf Aufzügen, 1779. (Nathan the Wise, 1781). Neue Hypothese über die Evangelisten als bloß menschliche Geschichtschreiber betrachtet, 1784. (New Hypothesis concerning the Evangelists regarded as merely human Historians, 1956). Noch nähere Berichtigung des Mährchens von 1000 Dukaten, oder Judas Ischarioth der Zweyte im November 1779. Nötige Antwort auf eine sehr unnötige Frage des Hrn. Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg, 1778. (Necessary Answer to a very Unnecessary Question, 1956). Philosophische Aufsätze von Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, 1776. Edited by G. E. Lessing.

xvi


Philotas. Ein Trauerspiel, 1759. (Philotas, 1878). Pope ein Metaphysiker!, 1755. Preußische Kriegslieder in den Feldzügen 1756 und 1757 von einem Grenadier. Mit Melodieen, 1758. Written by Gleim, edited by G. E. Lessing. Rettung des Cochläus aber nur in einer Kleinigkeit, 1754. Rettung des Hier. Cardanus, 1754. Rettungen des Horaz, 1754. Rettung des Inepti Religiosi, und seines ungenannten Verfassers, 1754. Samuel Henzi. Ein Trauerspiel, Fragment. 1753. Sophokles. Erstes Buch. Von dem Leben des Dichters, 1790. Tarantula. Eine PossenOper, im neuesten italienischen Gusto oder Geschmack, aufgesetzt von einem reisenden Liebhaber der Musik und Poesie, bey Eröffnung des Operntheaters in Teltow. Teltow an der Tyber, 1784. Theatralische Bibliothek, 1754–1758. Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft. An den Herrn Director Schumann, zu Hannover, 1777. (On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, 1956). Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion, 1784. (On the Origin of Revealed Religion, 1956). Über die Wirklichkeit der Dinge ausser Gott, 1795. (On the Reality of Things outside God, 1956). Vom Alter der Ölmalerei. Aus dem Theophilus Presbyter, 1774. Von der Art und Weise der Fortpflanzung und Ausbreitung der christlichen Religion, 1784. Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger. Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbüttelschen Ungenannten, 1778. Edited by G. E. Lessing. Von den lateinischen Trauerspielen welche unter dem Namen des Seneca bekannt sind, 1754 [1755]. Von Duldung der Deisten: Fragment eines Ungennanten, 1774. Edited by G. E. Lessing. Weiber sind Weiber, ein Lustspiel in 5 Aufzügen, 1784. Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet. Eine Untersuchung, 1769. (How the Ancients Represented Death, 1879). Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm, und einige der vornehmsten Epigrammatisten, 1771. Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, 1773–1781.


xvii

Translations or Fragments of Translations by Lessing Listed here alphabetically with date of first publication and title as given in Ba. Agamemnon. Ein Trauerspiel aus dem Englischen des H. Thomson übersetzt, 1876. Ajax des Sophokles. Fragment einer Übersetzung, 1790. Auszug aus dem “Schauspieler” des Herrn Remond von Sainte Albine, 1754. Auszug aus dem Trauerspiele “Virginia” des Don Augustino de Montiano y Luyando, 1754. Aus: Franz Hutchesons Sittenlehre der Vernunft: Aus dem Englischen übersetzt, 1756. Aus: [Johann Gotthilf Vockerodt] Anmerkungen eines unpartheiischen Fremden über die gegenwärtige Streitigkeit zwischen England und Preussen; in einem Briefe eines Edelmanns in dem Haag an seinen Freund in London. Aus dem Englischen, 1753. Aus: Römische Historie von Erbauung der Stadt Rom, Bis auf die Schlacht bei Actium, oder das Ende der Republik; aus dem Französischen des Herrn Rollins ins Deutsche übersetzt. 1749 /1750. Bemerkungen über Burke’s Philosophische Untersuchungen über den Ursprung unserer Begriffe vom Erhabenen und Schönen, 1793. Betrachtungen über das Weinerlich Komische, aus dem Französischen des Herrn M.d.C. [hassiron], 1754. Briefe über die Tanzkunst und über die Ballette [J.-G. Noverre]. Aus dem Französischen, 1769. Translated by G. E. Lessing and J. J. C. Bode. Catilina. Ein Trauerspiel des H. von Crebillon. Aus dem Französischen, 1876. Das Leben ist ein Traum. Ein Schauspiel aus dem Spanischen des Pedro Calderon de la Barca, 1838. Das Theater des Herrn Diderot. Aus dem Französischen, 1760. Des Abts du Bos Ausschweifung von den Theatralischen Vorstellungen der Alten, 1755. Des Herrn von Voltaire Kleinere Historische Schriften. Aus dem Französischen übersetzt, 1751/1752. Die Gefangenen, ein Lustspiel. Aus dem Lateinischen des M. Accius Plautus, 1750. Die Schauspielkunst. An die Madame *** durch den Herrn Franciscus Riccoboni, den jüngeren. Aus dem Französischen übersetzt, 1750.

xviii


Des Abts von Marigny Geschichte der Araber unter der Regierung der Califen. Aus dem Französischen, 1753. Des Herrn Prof. Gellerts Abhandlung für das rührende Lustspiel, 1754. Die Liebe macht edel. Eine Geschichte, 1751. Eine ernsthafte Ermunterung an alle Christen zu einem frommen und heiligen Leben. Von William Law. A. M. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt, 1756. Eraclio, 1876. Fenix, 1876. Friedrich II. Schreiben an das Publicum. Aus dem Französischen, 1753. Friedrich II. Zweytes Schreiben an das Publicum. Aus dem Französischen, 1753. Friedrich II. Drittes Schreiben an das Publicum. Aus dem Französischen, 1753. Hannibal. Nach Marivau, 1876. Hrn. Samuel Richardsons Sittenlehre für die Jugend in den auserlesensten Aesopischen Fabeln mit dienlichen Betrachtungen zur Beförderung der Religion und der allgemeinen Menschenliebe vorgestellt, 1757. Johann Huarts Prüfung der Köpfe zu den Wissenschaften. Aus dem Spanischen, 1752. Leben des Herrn Jacob Thomson, 1754. The Country-Wife, A Comedy by Wycherley, 1857. The Soldiers Fortune by Otway, 1857. [Thomsons] Tancred und Sigismunde. Ein Trauerspiel, 1876. Übersetzung der Ode des Horaz Ad Barinen, 1794. Virginia II, by Henry Samuel Crisp, 1754. Von Johann Dryden und dessen dramatischen Werken, 1758.

Introduction Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

O

independent thinkers in European intellectual history, a combative critic and major playwright, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to the discussion of philosophy, theology, and literature within the German-speaking countries and beyond. Lessing lived during the period of German Enlightenment, that liminal point between the age of religious authority and the more secular culture of modern times. He supplied new impulses to Christian theology, initiating one of the major theological disputes of the eighteenth century while contributing to debates on religious tolerance and on the emancipation of the German Jews. He published Laokoon (Laocoon, 1766) a trailblazing treatise on aesthetics, a work still influential today, particularly in semiotics and media theory. Long before Germany became a unified nation-state, Lessing supported the first attempt to create a German national theater, one financed by citizens and independent of any court. He wrote with great originality on drama theory, reinterpreting Aristotle for the eighteenth century, reforming German drama and opening it to contemporary social concerns of the rising middle class. As a playwright, Lessing employed a dramatic genre that was new to Germany, and in so doing wrote Miß Sara Sampson (1755), the first successful German “domestic” or “bourgeois” tragedy. He is also the author of one of the finest German comedies, Minna von Barnhelm (1767). In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious intolerance and the clash of civilizations. The centerpiece of that play, the parable of the rings, has entered the world’s cultural heritage.1 Still resonating today, Lessing’s dramas are the oldest theater pieces in German that continue to be performed regularly on German-speaking and international stages. Lessing’s plays and his drama theory influenced Goethe, Schiller, Hebbel, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg, Schnitzler, and Brecht, among many others. F. J. Lamport in fact calls Lessing not merely the founder of modern German drama but of modern European drama.2 The “first German intellectual in the modern sense of the word,”3 Lessing authored not only dramatic works, but also poetry, fables, and parables. In addition, he wrote intensively about literature, translated it, NE OF THE MOST

2

BARBARA FISCHER AND THOMAS C. FOX

and wrote critiques of translations. Today, we would call Lessing a freelance writer and journalist, in addition to a writer of belles lettres. He specialized in polemics and developed into one of the most respected, and feared, critics of his time. Germans often celebrate Lessing as part of a triad with the later writers Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), all “classical” authors incorporating the highest ideals of German thought and art. Schoolbooks and anthologies feature excerpts from his work. With remarkable frequency, Germans have interpreted Lessing as an exemplary national figure, even though his writings reveal only few German nationalist impulses. Some see in his work royalist, others bourgeois-revolutionary tendencies. The anti-Semites of the later nineteenth century, and their heirs, attributed “Jewish” traits to Lessing’s life and work, while orthodox Jews and the Zionists rejected his plays Die Juden (The Jews, 1754) and Nathan der Weise as too assimilationist. The Nazis banned both plays from their stages; after the war many major German theaters reopened with Nathan der Weise. Given the quality and sheer magnitude of Lessing’s achievement and reception, it would be an enormous and perhaps impossible task for any one book to do justice to the complex interrelation of biographical, historical, sociological, philosophical, and theological aspects in the work and reception of this canonical author.4 Not a little has already been written on Lessing. Wolfgang Albrecht has calculated that approximately 6000 publications had appeared by 1995.5 Especially since the major anniversary celebrations in 1979 and 1981 (marking Lessing’s two-hundred-andfiftieth birthday and the two-hundredth anniversary of his death, respectively) a considerable upsurge in Lessing scholarship has taken place, often marked by new critical and revisionist approaches within Enlightenment research. Lessing’s works belong to world literature and have a considerable international audience;6 by 1998 they had been translated into forty-one languages. One-hundred-and-forty-six English translations lead that list.7 Any Companion to Lessing’s work must confront the dilemma of where to begin and where to end, which aspects to include, which issues to treat, and which scholarly approaches to invite. The editors commissioned thirteen English-language contributions from scholars working in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the former East and West Germanys. Their essays discuss the most significant aspects of Lessing’s life and work for an audience ranging from novice to seasoned Lessing scholars. Considering the wide-ranging, different but often overlapping facets of Lessing’s career as Enlightenment thinker, scholar, freelance writer, journalist, translator, book reviewer, poet, art critic, librarian, dramaturge, and playwright, we deemed it more appropriate to structure the Companion according to broad themes rather than chronologically by individual works. Thus one will not find an individual essay on, for example, Nathan der

INTRODUCTION

3

Weise, but one can read discussions of that play from various perspectives in essays treating Lessing and religion, Lessing and the Jews, gender in the works of Lessing, or Lessing’s reception by the Nazis, the East Germans, or the West Germans. In addition we will provide short synopses of the major works in our essay “Lessing’s Life and Work.” Each reader will focus on different aspects of the Companion, and we trust that all will find at least some aspects useful to their purposes. We have organized the essays under the following rubrics: Lessing’s Life and Times; Criticism and Aesthetics; Philosophy and Religion; Drama and Drama Theory; and Reception. Following our introduction to Lessing’s life and work, Steven Martinson situates Lessing within a wider European context, tracing the interplay of ideas between the German lands and their neighbors. Arguing against the perception of the German Enlightenment as belated, and introducing many of the issues that will be developed further in the Companion, Martinson’s wide-ranging study examines Lessing within the context of European philosophy (Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza), emphasizes Lessing’s familiarity with European authors, many of whom he introduced to the Germans, and discusses Lessing’s encounters with the French theater of Corneille and Diderot. In the section dealing with Criticism and Aesthetics, Klaus Berghahn argues that Lessing’s acerbic criticism is the “purest expression of Enlightenment thinking: enlightenment as criticism and polemics as method.” He asserts that Lessing developed a new literary criticism, one that did equal justice to the principles of art and our emotional response to it. At the same time, drawing on Habermas and Koselleck, Berghahn emphasizes that debates on aesthetics and criticism in the eighteenth century were also a form of compensatory thinking with consequences for the development of a bourgeois public sphere in Germany. John Pizer notes how Lessing combines aesthetics and ethics in the fable. As an educational genre with moral utility and also the possibility for social commentary, the fable proved particularly attractive to Lessing, who thought it well suited to the development of inventiveness, creativity, and independent thought in readers. Pizer asserts that despite Lessing’s occasional pedantic streak, he wrote open-ended fables that demanded a hermeneutically active reader. In her essay “Lessing’s Poetics as an Approach to Aesthetics,” Beate Allert investigates text-image relations in Lessing’s fables, in his aesthetic treatise Laokoon, and in his parables, all of which have significant implications for the theory of art. Allert writes that Lessing was not a philosopher creating general rules for a theory of beauty, but rather an art critic trying to understand the working of such rules. According to her, Lessing made evident that not only what we read or observe in literature or art deserves to be understood and analyzed, but also how we do these things. In the section on Philosophy and Religion, H. B. Nisbet assesses as a distinct strength Lessing’s ad hoc, fragmentary, non-systematic approach

4


to philosophy. He argues that Lessing’s “method” resulted from his temperamental distrust of authority, his perspectival view of religious and philosophical questions, and his “tentative, self-subverting, yet richly suggestive” style of writing, which allows him simultaneously to proclaim an idea and to question it. Nisbet concludes by asserting that Lessing believed that all philosophical approaches and religious confessions contained a degree of verity; Lessing hoped that by scrutinizing these approaches and beliefs, we might keep moving in the direction of an ever-receding truth. Arno Schilson’s “Lessing and Theology” underscores Lessing’s vast knowledge of theological issues and his unique position between religious orthodoxy and the radically deistic work of such thinkers as Hermann Samuel Reimarus. Schilson praises the originality of Lessing’s thought, especially with regard to such central issues as the opposition between letter and spirit in the Bible or the role of revelation in the development of human reason. Here and elsewhere, Schilson asserts, Lessing achieved insights that echo far beyond his times. In “Lessing and the Jews,” Willi Goetschel writes that Lessing believed it imperative that Christianity acknowledge its foundations and genealogy in Judaism and that Christians rethink their relationship to Jews, if Christianity were to play a role in the Enlightenment at all. As opposed to many of his contemporaries, who helped define the emerging German national identity against the “foreign” element in “Germany,” Lessing argues for a recognition of Jewishness that enriches an already inherently multi-ethnic German society. Lessing’s attitude towards the Jews is not merely a token of good will, but a key element in his twin concerns of rethinking Christianity and imagining the nation. Beginning the section on Drama and Drama Theory, Peter Höyng notes that Lessing’s writing on the subject over decades should be seen as a work in progress rather than as one coherent statement. Investigating Lessing’s critical encounters with various dramatic texts, his reviews of theater performances, and his reflections on theater as a public institution, Höyng demonstrates that Lessing argued for, and helped create, a new approach to theater in general and to German theater in particular. Lessing developed a new style of theater for the emerging bourgeoisie, and his theory and practice of theater influenced many of the subsequent major German and European playwrights. Karin Wurst presents a survey of Lessing’s plays, with special attention to gender roles within the new bourgeois value system those plays helped engender. Wurst concentrates on the depiction of the familial value system in Lessing’s dramas, as well as the new kinds of love relationships developing in the eighteenth century. She concludes that Lessing’s general skepticism regarding absolute values carries over to his views on gender as well, where he appears reluctant to assign rigid roles based on biology. She argues that for Lessing, a complex sense of practical ethics, not gender, determines the essence of humanity.

INTRODUCTION

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The final four essays in the volume investigate the reception of Lessing, and while they treat multiple aspects of his oeuvre, they emphasize his dramatic work. Ann Schmiesing, noting that little scholarly research has been done on Lessing’s literary reputation in the Third Reich, investigates the Nazi celebration of Philotas (1759) and Minna von Barnhelm as ostensibly patriotic works, the interpretation of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy 1767–69) as Germany’s liberation from France, and the use of Lessing’s aesthetic principles to legitimize Nazi film theory. She examines Hans Schweikart’s film version of Minna von Barnhelm, which glorifies German militarism and marginalizes women. While Nathan der Weise remained a forbidden embarrassment, the Nazis called for a new Lessing whose pursuit of truth would necessarily lead him, in the twentieth century, to take up arms against the Jews. Reinhart Meyer looks at representative postwar stagings of Lessing in West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Writing from the dual perspective of a scholar and a theater director, he underscores the tension between the richness of Lessing’s texts as literature, and the difficulty of actually staging those texts in the twentieth century. Meyer singles out Fritz Kortner’s 1970 production of Emilia Galotti in Vienna as a high point in Western postwar stagings. Hans Joachim Kertscher and Thomas Fox examine the situation in the former East Germany, where cultural politicians appropriated Lessing to demonstrate that “their” Germany had achieved enlightenment and “die Zeit der Vollendung.” The authors report on East German performances of Lessing’s major plays, including the provocative East Berlin Minna von Barnhelm production of 1960, which interprets the play as an anti-Prussian manifesto. Kertscher and Fox also examine two film adaptations of Lessing’s work made in East Germany, and a discussion of Lessing’s reception by Heiner Müller, the most accomplished East German playwright, concludes the essay. Finally, Hinrich Seeba discusses the use and abuse of Lessing over the past two hundred years. Lessing has served as intertext and foil for some of Germany’s most renowned Dichter und Denker: Schlegel, Goethe (who, famously, had his Werther commit suicide while reading Emilia Galotti), Heine, Nietzsche, Fontane, Brecht, and Müller, among others. Seeba describes the nineteenth-century attempts by both the left and the right within German culture to appropriate Lessing, and the struggles between proponents of Lessing and Schiller to canonize their respective poet as the German national playwright. Seeba notes that Lessing’s concerns prefigure those at the critical forefront today, including aesthetics, semiotics, politicized literature, and even post-colonial thought. The volume ends with short descriptions of important centers of Lessing research: the Lessing-Akademie in Wolfenbüttel, the Lessing-Museum in Kamenz, and the Lessing Society in Cincinnati.

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A Note on Editions, Archives, and Lessing Scholarship In collaboration with Klaus Bohnen, Gunter E. Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, Arno Schilson, Jürgen Stenzel, and Conrad Wiedemann, Wilfried Barner compiled the most recent Lessing edition, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Published by Deutscher Klassiker Verlag in Frankfurt am Main beginning in 1985 and finished in the fall of 2003, the impressive edition reflects the most recent scholarly research, and is edited by leading Lessing scholars. It organizes Lessing’s works chronologically, but primarily according to when they were written, not by publication date. This long-awaited edition, which provides excellent commentaries, will allow further scholarly progress8 and as such it will soon become the standard edition. Contributors to this Companion have generally used either the Barner edition, providing the necessary volumes were available, or the earlier standard edition, the twentythree-volume Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker. This edition, begun in the nineteenth century by the Germanist Karl Lachmann and later thoroughly revised by Franz Muncker, provided the first authoritative collection of Lessing’s literary estate and continues to stand as one of the most comprehensive Lessing editions available.9 Other editions often used by Lessing scholars or students are: Werke in eight volumes (1970–1979), edited by Herbert G. Göpfert,10 and Werke in three volumes (1967), edited by Kurt Wölfel.11 Two further editions, not used in this Companion, are Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe in fünfundzwanzig Teilen, edited by Julius Petersen and Waldemar von Olshausen from 1925 to 1935 and reprinted in 1970,12 and an East German edition: Gesammelte Werke in ten volumes (1954–1958; 2nd ed., 1968) edited by Paul Rilla.13 Our list of selected works by Lessing provides dates of the first translation into English of Lessing’s writings. Readers seeking information on these translations, additional translations, or secondary literature should consult the Lessing bibliographies compiled by Siegfried Seifert and Doris Kuhles.14 Another important study with a selected bibliography is Wolfgang Albrecht’s Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.15 Readers interested in Lessing biographies will find a wide selection;16 Willi Jasper’s Lessing: Aufklärer und Judenfreund. Biographie17 presents a recent and informative example of this genre. The following reference works will also prove helpful: Lessing im Urtheile seiner Zeitgenossen: Zeitungskritiken, Berichte und Notizen, collected and edited by Julius W. Braun; Lessing — ein unpoetischer Dichter: Dokumente aus drei Jahrhunderten zur Wirkungsgeschichte Lessings in Deutschland, edited by Horst Steinmetz; Richard Daunicht’s Lessing im Gespräch: Berichte und Urteile von Freunden und Zeitgenossen; Jürgen Jacobs’s Lessing: Eine Einführung; Wilfried Barner, Gunter E. Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, and Martin Kramer’s Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung;

INTRODUCTION

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Monika Fick’s Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung; Peter J. Brenner’s Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; and Werner Jung’s Lessing zur Einführung.18 Karl S. Guthke has written numerous investigations of Lessing research.19 An important venue for Lessing scholarship is the Lessing Yearbook, published annually since 1969 by the Lessing Society in Cincinnati. Various supplemental volumes resulting from conferences and symposia complement the Yearbook.20 Lessing’s literary estate is located primarily at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany; in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin; and in the Biblioteka Uniwersytecka Wroc5aw/ Poland.21 The Lessing-Museum in Kamenz, Germany, also possesses considerable material of interest to Lessing scholars, including manuscripts, first editions, stage-related material and realia, and documents relating to the German and international reception of Lessing’s work. The website of the Lessing-Akademie in Wolfenbüttel provides a link to a list with the location of all titles contained in the Lachmann-Muncker edition. The Akademie furthermore plans to develop a CD-ROM that will contain every Lessing title as well as the first lines of Lessing poems, and will provide for all these texts information concerning date of first publication and the text’s location within all major Lessing editions. The Digitale Bibliothek series published by Directmedia and the Projekt Gutenberg-DE published by Spiegel Online provide further internet and CD-ROM primary text and reference material concerning the life and work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

Notes 1

To mark the occasion of the 275th anniversary of Lessing’s birth, the LessingAkademie in Wolfenbüttel reissued known translations of the parable of the rings in twenty-seven different languages, including for example Arabic, Japanese, Armenian, Latvian, Greek, and Hebrew. 2

F. J. Lamport, German Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 31.

3

Peter Demetz, “Introduction,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Continuum, 1991), xxi.

4

Even Monika Fick’s impressive and wide-ranging Lessing handbook does not promise to be comprehensive. See Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2000), xiv.

5

Wolfgang Albrecht, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1997), 129. 6

A significant symposium on this subject was organized by John McCarthy at Vanderbilt University in 1999. The contributions on the subject appear in Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000), ed. John McCarthy, Herbert Rowland, and Richard E. Schade.

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7

Dieter Fratzke, “Lessing in fremden Sprach- und Kulturwelten: Übersetzungen als museale Zeugnisse der Rezeption und Wirkung im Ausland,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 408. For the most recent translations in English see Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).

8

See, for example, Guy Stern’s call for a new Lessing edition in his “Introduction: Current and Future Trends in Lessing Studies,” in Lessing and the Enlightenment, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 1.

9

Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Sämtliche Schriften, 3rd ed., 23 vols, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Stuttgart/Berlin und Leipzig: Göschen, 1886–1924 [Reprint Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968]). 10

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Werke, 8 vols., ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1970–1979). 11 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, 3 vols., ed. Kurt Wölfel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1967). 12 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe in 25 Teilen, ed. Julius Petersen and Waldemar von Olshausen (Berlin: Bong, 1925–1935, reprinted Hildesheim/New York: Olms, 1970). 13

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols., ed. Paul Rilla (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1954–58; 2nd edition: Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1968).

14

Siegfried Seifert, Lessing-Bibliographie (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1973); Doris Kuhles, Lessing Bibliographie 1971–1985, with Erdmann von WilamowitzMoellendorff (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1988). See also endnote 7, and Wolfgang Milde, Gesamtverzeichnis der Lessing-Handschriften: Veröffentlichung der Lessing-Akademie Wolfenbüttel, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1982); Karl-Heinz Finken (in cooperation with Richard E. Schade), “Lessing-Bibliographie 1979–1982: Veröffentlichungen in den Lessing-Jubiläumsjahren,” Lessing Yearbook 17 (1985): 285–319. 15 Wolfgang Albrecht, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. See also Wolfgang Albrecht, “Lessing-Forschung 1979 bis 1983. Ein Literaturbericht auf der Grundlage ausgewählter Buchpublikationen aus der BRD und den USA,” Weimarer Beiträge 31 (1985): 670–79; also his “Lessing-Forschung 1984 bis 1988. Ein Literaturbericht auf der Grundlage ausgewählter Publikationen,” Weimarer Beiträge 36:7 (1990): 1164–1180. 16

The following biographies in German will assist Lessing scholars: Erich Schmidt, Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923); Wolfgang Drews, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1962); Lessings Leben und Werk in Daten und Bildern, ed. Kurt Wölfel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1967); Gerd Hillen, Lessing Chronik: Daten zu Leben und Werk (Munich: Hanser, 1979); Dieter Hildebrandt, Lessing: Biographie einer Emanzipation (Munich: Hanser, 1979); Günter Schulz, ed., Lessing und der Kreis seiner Freunde (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1985); Gustav Sichelschmidt, Lessing: der Mann und sein Werk (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1989). For information in English see: H. B. Garland, Lessing: The Founder of Modern German Literature (London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin’s, 1962), and F. Andrew Brown, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (New York: Twayne, 1971).

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17 Willi Jasper, Lessing: Aufklärer und Judenfreund. Biographie (Berlin/Munich: Propyläen Verlag, 2001). 18 Lessing im Urtheile seiner Zeitgenossen, 3 vols., ed. Julius W. Braun (Berlin 1884–1893, reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1969); Lessing—ein unpoetischer Dichter: Dokumente aus drei Jahrhunderten zur Wirkungsgeschichte Lessings in Deutschland, ed. Horst Steinmetz (Frankfurt am Main/Bonn: Athenäum, 1969); Richard Daunicht, Lessing im Gespräch: Berichte und Urteile von Freunden und Zeitgenossen (Munich: Fink, 1971); Jürgen Jacobs, Lessing: Eine Einführung. (Munich/Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1986); Wilfried Barner, Gunter Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, Martin Kramer, Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung, 5th ed. (Munich: Beck, 1987); Peter J. Brenner, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000); Werner Jung, Lessing zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2001). 19

See Guthke’s “Lessing Forschung 1932 bis 1962,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 38 (1964): 68–169; Der Stand der Lessing-Forschung: Ein Bericht über die Literatur von 1932–1962 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965); “Lessing-Literatur 1963–1968,” Lessing Yearbook 1 (1969): 255–64; “Grundlagen der Lessingforschung: Neuere Ergebnisse,” Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, vol. 2, ed. Günter Schulz (Bremen/Wolfenbüttel: Jacobi, 1975), 10–46; “Aufgaben der Lessing-Forschung heute: Unvorgreifliche Folgerungen aus neueren Interessenrichtungen,” Das Bild Lessings in der Geschichte, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1981), 131–60; “Lessing zwischen heute und morgen: Expeditionen in die Region der offenen Fragen,” Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht, ed. Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Laurence G. Lyon (Detroit/Munich: Wayne State UP, 1982), 9–36.

20 Further important Lessing scholarship can be found in the series “Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung” and “Kleine Schriften zur Aufklärung,” published since 1974 and 1988 respectively by the Lessing-Akademie. 21

See also Wolfgang Milde, Gesamtverzeichnis der Lessing-Handschriften, vol. 1. Vol. 2, which will list all additional parts of the literary estate, is in preparation.

Lessing’s Life, Work, and Times

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

The Lessing House in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, where Lessing lived from 1777 to 1781. Here he wrote his play Nathan der Weise. Courtesy of Lessing Museum, Kamenz.

Lessing’s Life and Work Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox Wie lange währts, so bin ich hin, Und einer Nachwelt untern Füßen? Was braucht sie wen sie tritt zu wissen? Weiß ich nur wer ich bin. — G. E. Lessing, “Ich”1 Wir verlieren viel viel an ihm, mehr als wir glauben. — J. W. Goethe to Charlotte von Stein2

W

e can only speculate as to what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s self-analysis, cited above, might have revealed. By the same token we have no certitude as to what Goethe meant when he responded to Lessing’s death in 1781 with the remark that we have lost much, much more than we know.3 Yet if we summarize the many tributes of the past centuries to Lessing, the great man of letters born in a modest Lutheran parsonage, the following statement captures some of his salient traits: Lessing lived and worked at an important point in German intellectual history. He stands between the rationalist philosophy of Spinoza and Leibniz and emergent German idealism. In literature he helped Germans navigate away from Gottsched’s neoclassicism, based on French models, to the Storm and Stress period, with its admiration of Shakespeare, and then to a new understanding of classicism with Goethe and Schiller. In religion he mediated between orthodox Christianity and the radical deists of his age. He did all this at a time when there existed no unified German nation. Lessing worked in many spheres: literature and literary criticism, theology and philosophy, criticism, journalism, and translation. Despite the magnitude and versatility of his oeuvre, one can discern several recurring and unifying characteristics. Lessing employed a highly flexible, multidimensional, dialectical mode of thought. For him, thinking meant searching; the anti-dogmatic idea that no fixed truth exists (except with God) served him as guide. As a result, regardless of Lessing’s sphere of activity, he vigorously put everything into question. He attacked prevalent opinions and “truths” with a polemical energy that proved often rude but always brilliant.

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He believed in development through contradiction, in progress through education. In his early, unfinished Das Christentum der Vernunft (The Christianity of Reason, published posthumously in 1784) he expresses his belief that humankind can approach perfection, the absolute perfection reserved for God alone. This idea, which recurs throughout his work, culminates in his final drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) and his final completed work Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1780). Although a belief in progress through education is not unusual among Enlightenment thinkers, Lessing refused, both in his life and in his work, to acquiesce to the disciplining of the senses through reason that would appear to be one logical outcome of rationalist thought. In his personal life, Lessing early expressed his preference for the theater, the café, the pub, and the gaming table over the scholar’s study. His early reviews, one scholar points out, “show his positive response to such books that appealed not only to the mind but also to the heart, his later theological writing greater sympathy for the ‘feeling’ rather than the ‘rational’ Christian.”4 Lessing’s theology also affected his literary work. Although hardly unusual in his view that literature should serve a social purpose and improve morals, Lessing again differed from the rationalists in that he did not think this possible by reason alone; he sometimes called the stage his pulpit. Finally, Lessing’s sympathies lay with the weakest or with those who could not speak for themselves. He advanced new insights into the work of declared heretics, he rehabilitated the work of disrespected contemporaries and of those from the past, and turned an “outcast” of society, a Jew, into a dramatic hero on stage. Through his metonymical friendship with the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), and through his association with freemasonry, Lessing lived the idea of social, political, and religious equality. In this essay we introduce Lessing’s historical environment, present the important stations and signal events of his life, and introduce his major works. Subsequent contributions to this Companion will expand upon the outline we sketch here.

Lessing’s Times Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born on 22 January 1729 in Kamenz, a small, provincial Saxon town northeast of Dresden, close to what is today the Polish-German border. In order to understand what life was like in the German lands of the eighteenth century, one first needs have a sense of the socio-historical milieu with which Lessing interacted. His eighteenth-century “Germany” was, unlike France, Spain, and England, not a centralized nation-state. The Reformation and the counterReformation, as well as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had created

LESSING’S LIFE AND WORK

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religious schisms throughout the German-speaking world, and this retarded any movement towards centralization. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the German lands did not have a single national monarchy that could have served as a central reference point for national development, as elsewhere in Europe. “Germany” consisted of hundreds of virtually sovereign states and territories. They ranged in size and character from the Habsburg state of Austria to ecclesiastical territories, imperial cities, and minuscule enclaves ruled by imperial knights. These entities were loosely held together by the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation), an elective monarchy headed by an emperor. From 1438 until 1806, with one short interruption, the office was under the control of the Habsburg monarchy. While there were many aspects that made the Empire one German society, there were none that marked Germany as a single political entity or state, and the formal structure of politics of the Empire could not substitute for a national political structure. The Empire was a medieval construct that Napoleon would eliminate in 1806. But prior to Napoleonic intervention the political fragmentation and diversity of the Empire, caused by centrifugal forces, characterized German history. During the eighteenth century, the German Empire was dominated by the inner-German rivalry between Austria and the emerging Prussia, between the South and the North, between Catholicism and Protestantism. During most of Lessing’s lifetime the Hohenzollern King Frederick II, called Frederick the Great, ruled Prussia (1740 to 1786), while Empress Maria Theresia ruled the Habsburg Empire (1740 to 1780), which during various times in the eighteenth century incorporated parts of present-day Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, Poland, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. In ongoing competition with the House of Habsburg, Prussia advanced to the status of a European power; it did so by military interventions and by wresting the large, mineral-rich province of Silesia from the Austrians. This land grab by Frederick occasioned three wars. As a schoolboy in Meissen, Lessing witnessed an overwhelming number of dead and wounded soldiers as a result of the second Silesian war (1744–1745), an experience that troubled him deeply. Nonetheless, he sought out a position as secretary to a Prussian army officer during the last and longest struggle for Silesia, the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). That war and its aftermath constitute the backdrop for Lessing’s best-known comedy, Minna von Barnhelm (1767). German thought of the eighteenth century was profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement that found its beginnings in ideas circulating in England and France during the seventeenth century. These included British Empiricism, founded by John Locke (1632–1704), and Continental Rationalism, represented by René Descartes (1596–1650) and developed further by such thinkers as Baruch

16


de Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Optimism and a belief in progress characterized the reformers, who hoped for the improvement, if not the perfectibility, of humanity through the use of reason. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) chose as his motto the Latin sapere aude (dare to know) and he formulated his wellknown goal of enlightenment as humanity’s release from self-imposed tutelage: “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.”5 But beyond issues of political freedom, the Enlightenment in the German-speaking lands also featured attacks on religious orthodoxy and the authority of institutionalized religion. The propagation of tolerance towards other religions, and an emphasis on citizenship instead of religious denomination, became part of those debates. During this time German Jews began to emerge from the ghettos in which many of them had lived since medieval times and enter mainstream German society. The lively intellectual debates of the time often took place in learned journals. In 1740 alone, 260 journals were founded, between 1770 and 1780 718, and between 1780 and 1790 1,225.6 Censorship existed, but criteria differed, so that an essay forbidden in one German territory might well be published in the next. Lessing was an active participant in these intellectual exchanges. During his years in Leipzig, he made the acquaintance of the mathematician and poet Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800), the philologist Johann Friedrich Christ (1700–1756), the poet, dramatist, and editor Christian Felix Weisse (1726–1804), and the actress and theater director Friederike Caroline Neuber (1697–1760), among many others. During his stays in Berlin, the capital of German Enlightenment, he befriended the publisher Christian Friedrich Voss (1722–1795), the poets Karl Wilhelm Ramler (1725–1798) and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803), the philosopher and aesthetician Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779), the writer and publisher Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), and the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamburg Lessing met the poets Matthias Claudius (1740–1815) and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). Lessing was born at a time when Latin was still widely used by scholars and theologians, French by the aristocracy, Italian on stage. Lessing himself, although able to read, understand and translate Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and English, wrote his extensive oeuvre in the German language. In light of eighteenth-century “Germany’s” extreme political fragmentation, intellectuals viewed German language, philosophy, literature, and especially drama as potential elements of cultural consolidation. Such elements helped educated German speakers to imagine themselves as belonging to a community called Germany. In this sense one can understand the rather optimistic title of the short-lived (1767–68) German National Theater in Hamburg, where Lessing worked as dramaturge, playwright, and


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literary critic. The German Empire of this time also witnessed the emergence of a growing middle class that became increasingly self-confident and selfassertive. This led to class tensions, some of which Lessing records, but also to attempts to bridge class barriers, such as the German Free Masonic Lodge, of which Lessing was also a member. The first German lodge was founded in Hamburg in 1737 and hundreds more followed. They allowed for the mixing of nobles and non-nobles and helped contribute to the development of a new bourgeois public sphere. After 1770, the legacy of the Enlightenment became palpable though such radical political experiments as the American Revolution and Constitution and the French Revolution. In the German Empire, however, socalled enlightened or reformist absolutism became the predominant form of government during the eighteenth century. Enlightened rulers attempted to make their governments and states more modern and efficient, but they also began to be influenced by the teachings of such thinkers as Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754), both professors at Halle University, who developed natural law and social contract theory. They argued that it was the ruler’s duty to promote the general welfare and happiness of the ruled. Despite numerous reforms, however, the enlightened absolutist state remained, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, a modern head on a Gothic body.7 It was, to a limited and always arbitrary extent, government for the people, but most certainly not of the people.

Lessing’s Life and Work 1729–1746: Kamenz and Meissen Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in Kamenz, Saxony in 1729. He was the third child of twelve (seven survived early childhood), and the oldest son of Johann Gottfried Lessing (1693–1770) and Justina Salome Lessing (née Feller, 1703–1777). The Lessings and the Fellers were well known in Kamenz. Theophilus Lessing (1647–1735), the grandfather of Gotthold, had been mayor of Kamenz, and is also known for having presented a disputation on religious toleration.8 Growing up in a Christian parsonage, the young Gotthold absorbed countless sermons by his father, a learned Lutheran pastor, in the large church of St. Marien. Lessing’s father was a high-minded preacher with a brilliant command of rhetoric. These sermons played a central role in his son’s early years, and indeed had a lasting effect on his entire life and work. Lessing’s personality formed itself through an ongoing inner struggle with the Protestant tradition of his childhood, with the written and the spoken word, with books and sermons.9

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Lessing left Kamenz for the substantially larger city of Meissen to study at the elite school (Fürstenschule) St. Afra from 1741 to 1746. He obtained a strong grounding in theology and the classics, studying Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence, among others. He also began his literary efforts, writing poetry and drafting his play Der junge Gelehrte (The Young Scholar), which was staged in January 1748 and published in 1754. With a stipend from the municipality of Kamenz, he departed Meissen at the age of seventeen to enter the University of Leipzig, where the young Goethe was to study nearly twenty years later. Encountering the amusements of big-city life and the excitement of theater, Lessing quickly abandoned his plan of studying theology. He turned to other subjects, among them philology and later medicine, and most important, decided to investigate “real life.” He wrote his mother: “Ich lernte einsehen, die Bücher würden mich wohl gelehrt, aber nimmermehr zu einem Menschen machen. . . . und ich suchte Gesellschaft, um nun auch leben zu lernen.”10 Here we have an early indication that Lessing, though excellently equipped for the life of a scholar, would not be satisfied by books alone. 1746–1748: Leipzig Life in cosmopolitan Leipzig differed substantially from Lessing’s family life in the remote provincial town of Kamenz. Lessing’s contemporaries called the elegant city a “little Paris”; international trade fairs, among them the annual book fair, lent it a worldly touch. It was during his time here that Lessing, through his relative Christlob Mylius (1722–1754), a journalist, writer, and genial bohème, came into contact with touring theater companies and traveling actors. The actress and stage director Friederike Caroline Neuber administered the most prominent of these companies. Neuber had also worked with the famous Leipzig professor and theater reformer, Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), in earlier years, but their working relationship ended in acrimony. Lessing’s parents strongly disapproved of this growing flirtation with the theater, which in those days still stood in ill repute. Nonetheless, Lessing, who was also experimenting with other genres, for example Anacreontic poetry, embraced the theater with enthusiasm. Lessing’s Leipzig friend and fellow student Christian Felix Weisse shared his excitement. Lessing attended performances (he and Weisse translated French plays into German in order to pay for their tickets) and continued to write his own plays. The Neuber troupe staged the successful première of his comedy Der junge Gelehrte in January 1748. But his affiliation with the stage had a darker side as well; in the summer of 1748 Lessing fled Leipzig in order to avoid his creditors — he had offered surety for some actor friends who had then left the city. He traveled toward Berlin, rested in Wittenberg due to illness, and arrived in the Prussian capital in late 1748. There he found modest shelter with Christlob Mylius, who had already served as Lessing’s mentor in Leipzig before himself leaving for Berlin.


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1748–1755: Berlin and Wittenberg Lessing confesses in his preface to his comedy Die Juden that his pleasure in theater was so strong that he transformed everything that came to mind into a comedy: “Meine Lust zum Theater war damals so groß, daß sich alles, was mir in den Kopf kam, in eine Komödie verwandelte.”11 Exchanges of heated letters between the young bohemian and his parents demonstrate that the subject of theater versus theology proved a constant source of irritation. Yet Lessing saw little difference between pulpit and stage: both allowed public influence and served as moral institutions when the written and unwritten laws of society failed to function adequately. (In a famous statement in his later life Lessing notes that he will return to his old pulpit, the stage, to avoid censorship of his theological writing.12) His father, deeply angered, considered his son’s poetic ambitions atheistic and felt betrayed. Writing from Berlin on 28 April 1749, the son suggests that he would be eternally famous were he to become a great playwright, a second Molière. He adds that he cannot understand why a writer of comedies should not be a good Christian. Comedies, he continues, describe the ludicrous side of vice. Does vice then deserve so much respect, he asks, that a Christian may not laugh at it?13 Nearly ten years later, in 1758, he asserts to his friend, the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, that he intends to write three times as many plays as Lope de Vega.14 Gottsched’s rules for the theater, which Lessing later subjected to scathing ridicule, influenced the latter’s early writing. At a time when German drama compared poorly with that of England and France, Gottsched functioned as an influential German pioneer of theatrical reform. In his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (Essay in Critical Poetics, 1730) he defined the rules for all literary and dramatic genres, based on morality, reason, and good taste as well as the critical principles of seventeenth-century French drama. Especially Gottsched’s employment of comedy for didactic purposes left its mark on Lessing’s early work. Yet Lessing also included what Gottsched excluded: he was stimulated by Italian literature, especially the Commedia dell’arte, and by the Roman playwright Plautus, whose wit and lively dialogue had influenced Lessing already in Meissen. As a dramatist he followed the traditional premise that the action on stage serves to reveal and correct inappropriate behavior. Often the titles of his early comedies disclose the “vice” or character flaw in question. Some of Lessing’s better-known early dramatic achievements include Der junge Gelehrte, Der Misogyne (1755), and Der Freigeist (The Freethinker, 1755).15 One of Lessing’s finest early dramas, Der junge Gelehrte compared favorably with Enlightenment comedies by such established playwrights as Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) or Johann Elias Schlegel

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(1719–1749). Lessing sketched this traditional satire as a first draft in Meissen and finished it in Leipzig in 1747–48. The play reveals autobiographical traces in the characters Damis (with hints of the young Lessing in Meissen) and Valer (with echoes of the more mature Lessing in Leipzig), and pillories Damis’s pedantic scholarly existence with its meaningless, selfserving discussions divorced from real learning. In another early Lessing drama, Der Freigeist, written in 1749, Lessing devotes his analytical efforts to the psychology of friendship, family, love, and attraction. Freethinker Adrast regards all clergymen as hypocrites. Theophan, a pious young clergyman with a morally honorable character, challenges Adrast’s assumptions and brings him to the insight that people should be judged by their deeds and not by their profession alone. The comedy ends with a union of friendship (Freundschaftsbund) between the worldly, rationalist Adrast and the homebound and simple Theophan. Their connection deepens when they marry two sisters. Each marries his opposite: Adrast the virtuous Juliane, and Theophan the strong-willed, free-thinking Henriette, who demonstrates significant social skills. Family and friendship overcome all incompatibilities and contradictions. Der Misogyne16 presents an analysis of prejudice through its main character Wumshäter (Woman-hater). Hilaria, the fiancée of Wumshäter’s son Valer, unmasks Wumshäter’s vice. Degraded and humiliated by him due to her gender, she gains his respect when she interacts with him disguised as a man named Lelio. Lessing takes his strategy of revealing prejudice, hypocrisy, and intolerance yet further in Die Juden, staged in 1749 and published in 1754. Lessing’s contemporaries, aware of ancient conventions concerning the use of titles, might well have expected a play that presented Jewishness itself as the “flaw,” or a play that somehow corrected the “vice” or “flaw” represented by the Jews. Lessing, however, utilized the title to lure his audience into the theater in order to present it with a reversal of expectations, as well as a reversal of patterns of prejudice. A virtuous and learned traveler saves the life of a Christian baron after the latter is attacked by robbers. Stich and Krumm, Christians and servants of the baron, claim that the robbers were Jews. Their strategy succeeds until they themselves are revealed in the end as the thieves. After the attack, the baron, in order to show his gratitude towards the traveler, invites him to his estate and offers him his daughter in marriage, unaware that his savior is a Jew. In the end the traveler reveals that he is Jewish. After the publication of Gellert’s novel Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G. (Life of the Swedish Countess of G., 1747/1748), to which Lessing was quite likely responding,17 Die Juden is one of the first works of German literature to portray a Jew in a positive light. Nonetheless, this play about tolerance also reveals its limits as set by the religiously motivated moral codes of the eighteenth century: the traveler and the baron’s daughter do not marry. The baron’s well-known line regarding the interference of heaven (“. . .wo uns der Himmel selbst


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verhindert dankbar zu sein”)18 is one of the concluding statements of the play. During Lessing’s initial sojourn in Berlin, it was again Christlob Mylius, now writing for the Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, the leading newspaper of Berlin, who supported his interest in journalism. Beginning in early 1751, Lessing worked as a contributor to what since March 1751 was called the Berlinische privilegirte Staats- und gelehrte Zeitung, for which he published the monthly supplement “Das Neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes” (The Latest from the Realm of Wit). He was also responsible for the section “Von gelehrten Sachen” (On Scholarly Matters). Together with Mylius, Lessing founded the first theater magazine in Germany, the quarterly review entitled Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (Contributions to the History and Reception of the Theater, 1750). Only four volumes appeared, but they allow excellent insight into the changing literary scene, especially the theater. Lessing decried the uniformity (Einförmigkeit) of the German stage and promised a new development influenced by English and Spanish theater.19 As F. J. Lamport points out, Lessing began to direct attention both to the dramatic repertory of classical antiquity — Plautus, Seneca, Euripides — and to the latest developments in modern European theater. He encouraged German dramatists to experiment and to liberate themselves from their exclusive dependence on the models of French neoclassicism.20 Lessing developed this approach further in his Theatralische Bibliothek (Theatrical Library, 1754–58). In 1750 and 1751 Lessing is also said to have contributed to the weekly Critische Nachrichten aus dem Reiche der Gelehrsamkeit (Critical News from the World of Erudition), which was founded by Johann Georg Sulzer and edited by Sulzer, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, and later Mylius.21 Lessing interrupted his stay in Berlin and spent nearly a year in Wittenberg (1751–1752), where his younger brother Theophilus was studying theology and philosophy. There, Lessing studied religious thought, primarily of the Reformation. In keeping with his instinct to side with those who could not speak for themselves, he employed the knowledge gained in his theological studies in writing his Rettungen (Vindications, 1754),22 which focus on a number of “heretics” or thinkers whose ideas had been, in Lessing’s view, unjustly ignored or dismissed. In Wittenberg Lessing also continued his study of medicine and obtained the degree of Magister Artium in that subject on 29 April 1752. Legend has it that Lessing had left Berlin suddenly for Wittenberg due to a falling out with the great French Enlightenment writer and philosopher, Voltaire (1694–1778), who lived in Prussia at the time, at the court of Frederick II in Potsdam, outside Berlin. Lessing’s not very felicitous contact with Voltaire may have prevented the former from achieving closer ties, and a secure position, with the king.23

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Though Lessing was not able to find employment that would allow him financial independence during his Berlin years, his literary activity was immense. His writing was printed, staged, and read; he became widely known and feared for his sharp criticism. He made such new acquaintances as the poet and later director of the Berlin National Theater, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, and the publisher Christian Friedrich Voss, who, after the death of his father-in-law, inherited the Berlinische, later called the Vossische Zeitung (Voss’s Newspaper). In 1754 Lessing began to develop friendships with Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai, who would later become leading representatives of the Berlin Enlightenment. As early as 1747 Lessing’s poetry (odes, songs, epigrams, didactic poetry, fables in rhyme) had appeared in various journals published by Mylius, and in 1751 Lessing himself published anonymously a collection of his anacreontic lyrical efforts titled Kleinigkeiten (Trifles).24 As the title suggests, Lessing himself did not overestimate this poetry dedicated to wine, women, and song, to the sensual pleasures of the here and now, though his contemporaries had much praise for it. In its refusal to submit to the rules and didacticism governing early Enlightenment literature, anacreontic poetry presented, in its way, a declaration of the aesthetic autonomy of literature.25 Together with his friend Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing would develop this argument in “Pope—ein Metaphysiker!” (Pope, a Metaphysician!) in 1755. In that anonymously published essay, the authors argue that poetry and philosophy represent two distinct modes of discourse, and that one cannot submit the former to the rules of the latter. Between 1753 and 1755 the six volumes of Lessing’s Schrifften (Writings) appeared. The first volume contains many of Lessing’s epigrams. The form of the epigram, with its concentrated distillation of an idea, its contrasts and witty, surprising turns, fit Lessing’s temperament well. Here he already was practicing the rhetorical style that recurs in his fables, his critiques, and his plays. In 1754 he also published the first issue of Theatralische Bibliothek, which concluded with the fourth issue at Easter in 1759, though dated 1758. Lessing gained a reputation as a combative literary critic with the publication of his first large scale polemic entitled Ein Vade Mecum für den Hrn. Sam. Gotth. Lange, Pastor in Laublingen (A Primer for Mr. Samuel Gotthold Lange, Pastor in Laublingen, 1754), in which he dismantles Lange’s translation of Horace. The interest in English literature that formed a bond between the three friends Nicolai, Mendelssohn, and Lessing led to the first German bourgeois or domestic tragedy (bürgerliches Trauerspiel): Miß Sara Sampson. One of Lessing’s most important early plays, it was included in the last volume of his Schrifften (1755). Lessing wrote the play in solitude in a Potsdam garden house in eight weeks, and the Ackermannsche Truppe staged it in Frankfurt an der Oder on 10 July 1755. Lessing and Ramler


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attended the successful première. Miß Sara Sampson clearly breaks with French influence and the conventional dramatic forms and rules favored by Gottsched. Lessing instead follows English models, the Restoration drama and the English family novel, for this play set in England. Sara Sampson, a virtuous young woman, has at the beginning of the play eloped with her lover Mellefont to a wretched inn. The conflict between passion and religiously motivated morality structures much of the play and culminates with Sara’s death. Through the tragedy of Sara’s passing, her father Sir William Sampson becomes capable of unconditional love for humanity. He learns to overcome the barriers that separate people, including family members, by shedding his own role of authoritarian patriarch in order to become a prime example of bourgeois virtue. This “enlightened” father expresses love, tenderness, emotion (Gefühl), and forgiveness both for his daughter and her lover, whom he is willing to recognize as a son. One critic sees in Sir William the “first notable representative of sentimental patriarchy in German domestic drama.”26 Lessing’s contemporaries were moved to tears, the play received many favorable reviews, and even Diderot was interested in translating it. The plot presents a rewriting of the classical story of Jason and Medea, though Lessing has done away with the trappings of royalty to bring tragedy to the level of so-called ordinary people. In this first German “bourgeois tragedy” it does not matter that Sir William is of the lesser nobility. By moving away from kings and queens, by writing in prose, not verse, by emphasizing not the public sphere, but rather the private one of the family and opening that to tragedy, Lessing articulated the values and sentiments of the rising German bourgeoisie. This new genre would resonate in German literary history, with Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784) and Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene (1844) two of the more notable examples. Recently, with the rise of gender studies and with growing interest in the social history of women and the family, Miß Sara Sampson has received renewed attention. 1755–1760: Leipzig and Berlin In 1755 Lessing returned to Leipzig. He agreed to accompany Johann Gottfried Winkler, the son of a rich Leipzig merchant, on a four-year-long trip through Europe. On 10 May 1756 Lessing and Winkler departed from Leipzig, but towards the end of August, while they were in Amsterdam preparing for the voyage to England, Winkler decided to return home due to the beginning of what would become known as the Seven Years’ War. Winkler’s actions caused Lessing to sue for breach of contract. He won the drawn-out lawsuit, ironically enough, after seven years. Lessing remained in Leipzig until 1758. He could barely support himself with his translation work, and from 1757 to 1758 he collaborated with Mendelssohn and Nicolai, who were in Berlin, on the Enlightenment journal Bibliothek der

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schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Library of the Liberal Arts, 1756–1806), which later was edited and published as Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (New Library of the Liberal Arts), by Christian Felix Weisse, Lessing’s friend from his youth. While in Leipzig, Lessing was reunited with Weisse. In addition, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim introduced Lessing to the officer and poet Ewald Christian von Kleist (1715–1759), with whom Lessing shared a short but close friendship until Kleist’s death in battle. In May 1758, during the second year of the war, Lessing moved back to Berlin, where he met often with his Berlin friends, among them Ramler, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn. Together with Ramler, Lessing edited the works of the seventeenth-century poet Friedrich von Logau in 1759. Due in no small part to Lessing’s efforts to resurrect Logau’s reputation, the latter’s life and works would influence later German writers of stature, for example Gottfried Keller with his cycle of novellas Das Sinngedicht (Epigram, 1881) or Günter Grass with his story Das Treffen in Telgte (Meeting in Telgte, 1979). Also in 1759 Lessing published Fabeln: Drey Bücher (Fables: In Three Books). Lessing found the genre of the fable, with its inherent didacticism, well suited to his desire to improve humanity through literature. During this time in Berlin, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai conversed regularly, and decided to record their topics of discussion in the form of fictional letters. Ewald von Kleist served as model for one of the imagined recipients of the Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Newest Literature, 1759) which were published by Nicolai’s own publishing firm on a weekly basis from 4 January 1759 to 4 July 1765. The three friends considered the letters as intellectual weapons for a “war” on the battlefield of contemporary literature during the time of the Seven Years’ War.27 Lessing criticizes one of his well-respected literary contemporaries, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), in these letters, but it is Gottsched whom he most fiercely attacks in the best-known letter, the “17. Literaturbrief” (17th Literary Epistle) dated 16 February 1759. This epistle represents a watershed for German drama. Gottsched’s reputation was already on the decline, but Lessing argues that German drama would have been better served without Gottsched’s efforts, and he clearly breaks with the French neoclassical tradition of drama that Gottsched had promoted. Instead he praises the English drama, primarily Shakespeare, and recommends such models to the Germans, arguing that English theater better fits the German national character. He ends by including a scene entitled Faust und sieben Geister (Faust and Seven Ghosts).”28 Here Lessing wishes to demonstrate to Gottsched, who in his Critische Dichtkunst had associated the Faust theme with improbabilities and irregularities, that these elements belonged to Enlightenment theater.


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The Faust legend itself occupied Lessing as early as 1755. In July 1758 he wrote to Gleim of a plan to stage a play called Doctor Faustus in Berlin,29 but it was never staged and is not extant. The evidence at hand suggests three phases in Lessing’s involvement with the Faust theme. In the first, he planned a drama featuring devils and a devil’s pact, as presented in the “17. Literaturbrief.” An additional Faust fragment possibly written around 1758/59 and published posthumously in 1786 demonstrates similar tendencies.30 In the second phase, Lessing appeared to envision a “bürgerliches Trauerspiel” with no demonic elements. Finally, he combined elements from the first two phases. Such documentation as the “Schreiben über Lessings verloren gegangenen Faust” (“A Text Concerning Lessing’s Lost Faust,” 1784) by Hauptmann von Blankenburg and Johann Jakob Engel’s short Faust reconstruction from memory31 suggest that Lessing was not concerned merely with the theme of intellectual curiosity, but also, and perhaps more importantly for an Enlightenment audience, with exploring the limits of such curiosity.32 In parts of the Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend Lessing also discusses the work of translation. He worked actively as a translator, an occupation with which he earned much-needed money. Lessing read and translated widely from Greek, Latin, English, French, Spanish, and Italian, especially dramas, history, philosophy, and religious works. He also reflected upon the process of translation and was interested in translation theory in general. In the eighteenth century, translations fulfilled a double purpose: they brought German readers into contact with non-German literature, philosophy, and culture, and they exerted a considerable influence on the formation of German as a literary language. Lessing, not a friend of French theater in general, nevertheless valued the work of Denis Diderot, whom he highly respected. Diderot’s interest in new forms of theater made him an ally of Lessing, who attempted to break open the ossified constraints of neoclassical genres. In 1760 Christian Friedrich Voss in Berlin published Lessing’s anonymous translations of Diderot: Das Theater des Herrn Diderot. Aus dem Französischen (The Dramatic Work of Mr. Diderot. Translated from French). On 18 March 1759 Lessing sent Gleim a tragedy in one act entitled Philotas. Set in Greek antiquity, this short piece has occasioned heated debate regarding Lessing’s attitude towards patriotism. The young prince Philotas has been wounded in his first battle and taken prisoner by King Aridäus. While Philotas makes clear that he would have preferred death to captivity, Aridäus informs him that the king’s own son, Polytimet, has also been taken into captivity by Philotas’s father. Aridäus hopes for a speedy exchange of hostages. Philotas, realizing that his father would have the advantage over Aridäus if his son were dead, commits suicide for the fatherland. In the end, Aridäus contemplates the vanity of war and its bloodshed; he is determined to give his conquests to Philotas’s father in

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order to free his son. Then he intends to abdicate. Does Philotas criticize or heroicize love of fatherland? Lessing wrote the play during the Seven Years’ War, as a wave of patriotic sentiment swept Prussia, the “northern Sparta,” and his friend Ewald von Kleist risked his life—and later died—for the Prussian king. Is the sacrifice of the title character an indictment of, or praise for a society that teaches its young to place state interest above their own life? To make matters yet more confused, Lessing, a Saxon, was about to become secretary to a Prussian general. (Prussia invaded Saxony to start the war). One can read the play not only as an examination of passionate heroism or of patriotism, but also as an analysis of the senselessness of hostage taking.33 1760–1765: Breslau In fall 1760, Lessing left Berlin for the Silesian capital of Breslau. There he became regimental secretary to the Prussian general and later governor of Breslau Bogislaw Friedrich von Tauentzien, whom Lessing had met through his friend Ewald von Kleist in Leipzig. Working for the Prussians in Breslau, Lessing enjoyed greater financial stability than ever before. He fully indulged his passion for theater, but often left performances early to visit pubs and the gaming table. Goethe wrote in the seventh book of his autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811–33) of Lessing’s joie de vivre at the time: “Lessing, der im Gegensatze zu Klopstock und Gleim, die persönliche Würde gern wegwarf, weil er sich zutraute, sie jeden Augenblick wieder aufnehmen zu können, gefiel sich in einem zerstreuten Wirtshaus- und Weltleben, da er gegen sein mächtig arbeitendes Inneres stets auch ein gewaltiges Gegengewicht brauchte, . . . .”34 Lessing also delved into philosophy and theology during his time in Breslau, conducted research on the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), and developed his own theological standpoint between orthodoxy and rationalism. Lessing’s experiences with the life of soldiers, including those dismissed from service, influenced his later literary production. He came into close contact not only with the cruelty of the battlefield (he accompanied Tauentzien into battle and participated in the siege of Schweidnitz), but also with the frustrations of military bureaucracy, which he later worked into his best-known comedy, Minna von Barnhelm. 1765–1767: Berlin In spring 1765 Lessing took his leave from Tauentzien and Breslau and returned via Kamenz — he had not seen his parents for nine years — to Berlin. In 1766, the year Gottsched died, Lessing published his most systematic treatise on aesthetics, one written primarily during his Breslau years: Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. Mit beyläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte (Laocoon; or Concerning the Limits of Poetry and Painting, 1766).35


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Here Lessing compares the plastic arts and poetry by reflecting upon the classical Greek Laocoon group. Lessing’s publication was part of a larger European debate on aesthetic perception, and needs to be analyzed in the context of the scholarship of classical antiquity that became popular in Germany after the publication of the research and writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). In his earlier Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (On Imitating Greek Artworks in Painting and Sculpture, 1755) Winckelmann had discussed the Laocoon group. Winckelmann believed that the Greeks avoided the artistic expression of extreme emotion, that nothing could disturb Laocoon’s “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur). Noting that Greek writers depict extreme emotion, Lessing argues that different laws must apply to literature as opposed to sculpture or painting. Literature uses successive signs in time, while the pictorial arts employ coexisting figures in space. Limited to the choice of one moment in time, the pictorial artist must choose one before or after the climactic moment, one that leaves the imagination the most room for free play. Lessing concludes that literature is the superior art, inasmuch as it can portray the entire range of human emotions. Laokoon had an immediate and considerable impact on contemporary discussions relating to aesthetic perception and the scholarship of classical antiquity. Reactions, praise, and criticism came from numerous contemporaries, among them Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and Christian Adolf Klotz (1738–1771), a professor of rhetoric in Halle against whose attack Lessing defended himself in Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts (Letters on Classical Matters, 1768–1769). 1767–1770: Hamburg In 1767 Lessing moved to the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg, a welcome change after Prussian Berlin. His hopes for employment as Royal Librarian in Berlin or at the famous art gallery in Dresden had not materialized, and he accepted a position as theater critic and dramaturge of the newly founded first German National Theater in Hamburg. On 22 April 1767 the theater opened, and in the same year, on 30 September, Minna von Barnhelm, oder das Soldatenglück (Minna von Barnhelm, or A Soldier’s Fortune) had its premiere. Minna von Barnhelm is Lessing’s finest and best-known comedy, and was published by Christian Friedrich Voss in Berlin in 1767. Situated in Berlin in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Lessing’s comedy draws on his experiences with the war in Breslau. The character Tellheim, which Lessing is rumored to have based on his friend Ewald von Kleist, is a discharged and bitter Prussian officer determined to withdraw from the world. Erroneous accusations of financial misconduct have deeply wounded his sense of honor. Tellheim’s Saxon fiancée, Minna, tries to win him back for herself and for society through her love. The play depicts the

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conflict between two strongly held positions: the “male” insistence on honor, and the “female” insistence on love. In order to solve this conflict Minna turns to intrigues, including an elaborate scheme involving their engagement rings, which come dangerously close to tipping the plot into a tragedy. In the end, as one critic points out,36 it is comedy that defeats tragedy, with the character of Minna embodying the spirit of comedy. Here as elsewhere in his dramas, Lessing blends traditional elements with modern, realistic ones.37 He bases the plot, structured around a lover’s quarrel, on a familiar comic formula, but the lovers also represent Prussia and Saxony, who had recently been at war. (Concluding the comedy at the time he took his position at the Hamburg National Theater, Lessing clearly envisioned it as a play of national reconciliation.) The comedy observes the classical conventions of time and place, but the place is realistically sketched and specified as postwar Berlin. The figures are stock comic ones, but they bear contemporary names and identities. Minna and Tellheim also transcend those stock roles, learning from each other in the course of the play. This is German drama as Lessing projected it: at once modern and classical, contemporary yet timeless. In Hamburg Minna von Barnhelm proved a great success. It was also the first German play adapted for the English theater, playing in London in 1786.38 During the nineteenth century, nationalistically-minded Germans often read the play as a glorification of Prussia; a letter from Frederick, after all, restores Tellheim’s honor, leading Tellheim to rapturous praise of the king: “Ha! Er hat sich auch hier nicht verleugnet! O, mein Fräulein, welche Gerechtigkeit! — Welche Gnade!”39 But performances in the twentieth century began to read the play as a criticism of Prussia; the last lines, spoken by Tellheim’s comrade Werner, are ambiguous, promising Werner’s beloved a comfortable, honored existence, or perhaps widowhood: “Geb’ Sie mir Ihre Hand, Frauenzimmerchen! Topp! — Über zehn Jahr’ ist Sie Frau Generalin, oder Witwe!”40 Minna von Barnhelm remains a frequently staged comedy in German-speaking repertoires today, and has been used as a model for film versions, including one by the Nazis and one by the East Germans, who used it to glorify Prussia and to denigrate it, respectively. Lessing discussed the work of the first German National Theater in a biweekly periodical, the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy), published in book form in 1769. He originally intended the periodical to accompany and review all theater productions at the National Theater, but professional jealousies among the actors rendered this goal ever more unfeasible. As a result, Lessing’s attention turned increasingly to more general matters concerning drama and drama theory. One of his repeated themes here, as in the earlier “17. Literaturbrief,” is the devaluation of neoclassical French drama and the celebration of Shakespeare. Most importantly, Lessing reinterprets Aristotle, translating phobos and eleos as “Furcht” (fear) and “Mitleid” (pity), with “fear” being the pity we feel for ourselves. Lessing


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then declares these emotions to be the essence of the cathartic experience in drama.41 He believes that the aristocratic, stoic hero can elicit admiration, but not pity, which can be aroused best through depictions of human suffering. The pity the audience feels will be yet greater if the characters are like them. Thus Lessing supplies the theoretical basis for his own theoretical practice in a piece such as his earlier Miß Sara Sampson. The Hamburg attempt to establish a center of national cultural significance failed due to lack of interest on the part of the audience, mismanagement, rivalries, and lack of support from well-established members of Hamburg society; the last performances were staged in November 1768. Lessing comments on the failed enterprise at the end of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie: “Über den gutherzigen Einfall, den Deutschen ein Nationaltheater zu verschaffen, da wir Deutsche noch keine Nation sind! Ich rede nicht von der politischen Verfassung, sondern bloß von dem sittlichen Charakter.”42 In retrospect he finds it naive that the Germans should envision a “national” theater at a time when they were neither a political nor a cultural entity. The failure of the National Theater exhausted Lessing’s pecuniary resources, and the situation was exacerbated by his failed partnership in a publishing house. To cover his debts he sold parts of his exquisite private library. Yet Hamburg proved welcoming with regard to Lessing’s social life. He found new acquaintances and enjoyed a large circle of friends, met with the famous writers Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Matthias Claudius, the liberal pastor Julius Gustav Alberti (1723–1772), and Lessing’s later adversary, the orthodox Chief Pastor Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786). Lessing was a friend of the family of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), professor of Hebrew and oriental languages and author of the unpublished manuscript “Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernüftigen Verehrer Gottes” (Apology for Rational Worshippers of God). Reimarus’s children Elise (1735–1805) and Johann Albert Hinrich (1729–1814) most likely introduced Lessing to their father’s radically deistic work from which Lessing later published excerpts as Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Fragments of an Unnamed Man, 1774–1778). Lessing visited regularly with the family of businessman Engelbert König (1728–1769), whose wife Eva (1736–1778) married Lessing after her husband’s death. Lessing also met Johann Arnold Ebert (1723–1795), professor of history and English literature from Braunschweig, who secured for him a position at the Ducal Library (Herzogliche Bibliothek) in the town of Wolfenbüttel. 1770–1781: Wolfenbüttel In 1769 Lessing decided to move to Wolfenbüttel, in the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, but due to illness and financial difficulties, he first started his work as librarian of the Ducal Library on 7 May 1770. Working in one of the best library collections of the eighteenth century

30


(even today this is one of the most significant libraries in Europe), Lessing was inspired by the variety of extraordinary texts and editions. He utilized some of them as the basis for further publications, among them the sixvolume Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (On History and Literature: From the Collections of the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel, 1773–1781), which, due to its exemption from censorship, would later (from 1774 until 1777) be used for the publication of the Fragmente eines Ungenannten. That publication and Lessing’s commentaries, the so-called Gegensätze des Herausgebers (Editor’s Counter-Propositions, 1777) led to a heated controversy with numerous contemporary theologians. Lessing had especially rancorous exchanges with the Lutheran Chief Pastor Johann Melchior Goeze, his above-mentioned acquaintance from Hamburg. Their debate, called the “Fragmentenstreit” (Fragments Controversy), occupies an important place in the history of theology. It grappled with the certainty and status of scriptural claims, and continues today.43 After Lessing’s stimulating years in Hamburg, the provinciality of the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and the isolation from friends brought him melancholy and loneliness. The court had moved from Wolfenbüttel to Braunschweig, which only added to the general tristesse. After the death of her husband, Eva König became engaged to Lessing in 1771, but they had to wait five additional years before they could marry. Eva needed to organize her deceased husband’s financial affairs, a complicated task that necessitated frequent extended visits to Vienna. While residing in Wolfenbüttel, Lessing once again encountered the influence of the Prussian king. Frederick’s sister, Philippine Charlotte, was married to Duke Carl I, who ruled the principality from 1735–1780. Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, who was born on 9 October 1735 in Wolfenbüttel, was a favorite nephew of Frederick the Great. On 13 March 1772, on the occasion of the birthday of Philippine Charlotte, the première of Emilia Galotti took place. A “bürgerliches Trauerspiel,” Emilia Galotti is probably Lessing’s greatest prose drama despite its frequently cited imperfections, which result in part from the gap between the start of its composition in late 1757 or early 1758 and its hasty finish for the royal birthday in 1772. Lessing sets the play in Italy, but the royal court might resemble many eighteenth-century German courts. The play depicts the wedding day of Emilia Galotti and Count Appiani. Prince Hettore Gonzaga has his own designs on Emilia, and allows his ruthless advisor Marinelli to arrange the murder of Appiani and the abduction of Emilia. After Appiani’s death, Emilia, though not aware of the details of the Prince’s scheme, suspects the worst. She also realizes she is not immune to his seductive charm, and recalls for her father the Roman story of Virginia, whose father Virginius killed her rather than allow her to become a tyrant’s concubine. In the end,


31

Emilia’s father Odoardo follows Emilia’s wish and sacrifices her by stabbing her with a dagger. The contrast between a clear plot structure in five acts and impenetrable psychological motivation has made Emilia Galotti one of the most interpreted pieces of German literature. Scholars have approached the play with historical, political, feminist, and psychological interpretations; one scholar entitled his article “Emilia’s Guilt Once More”44 while another asked: “Why does Emilia Galotti die?”45 Lessing has here once again updated a classical story, yet commentators have pointed out that in the Roman story, the daughter’s death leads to an uprising, an event Lessing pointedly omits. Is this an indication of resignation, or a call for action? Should not the father have murdered the Prince rather than his own daughter? In a letter to his brother, Lessing himself describes the play as a modernized Virginia retelling, devoid of all political concerns;46 this may indicate that his concerns were indeed elsewhere, or he may have been downplaying the political aspects of the play to avoid censorship. Some of the most productive and original recent readings have emphasized gender, sometimes combined with feminist-psychological analysis.47 One critic has argued that the play presents an elaborate depiction of the incest motif.48 Lessing spent the years 1772 and 1773 in melancholia and waiting. He longed to be reunited with Eva, and he hoped, too, for a higher salary from the court. He published the first fragment from the Fragmente eines Ungenannten in Zur Geschichte und Litteratur in October 1774. In 1775 Lessing traveled to Vienna, where he saw Eva after three years of separation. Against his will he had to continue his travels with Leopold, the youngest prince of the house of Braunschweig, on winding travels through Italy which lasted until the end of the year. Finally, on 8 October 1776, Lessing married Eva, and she moved to Wolfenbüttel. In 1777 their son Traugott was born, but the infant died on 25 December, having lived only one day. Lessing, who rarely displayed personal emotions in his correspondence, wrote his close friend, the Braunschweig literary historian Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820), tersely on 31 December: “Ich wollte es auch einmal so gut haben, wie andere Menschen. Aber es ist mir schlecht bekommen.”49 On 10 January 1778 the death of Eva Lessing followed, who never recovered from the complications of the birth. These later years in Wolfenbüttel brought upheaval not only to Lessing’s life, but also to his thought. In 1778, he published Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freymäurer (Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons, 1778/1780), containing five dialogues that analyze the origins of the Masonic movement and its contemporary condition. Lessing had joined the Freemasons in Hamburg several years earlier in 1771, and was deeply disappointed by the gap between the theory and reality of the lodges. Nonetheless, in Ernst und Falk he sets out to portray what he calls “the true ontology of freemasonry.”50 The interlocutors Ernst and Falk discuss

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the necessary restrictions on personal freedom that states impose upon their subjects, and how one might lessen those restrictions. They also discuss the American Revolution, which, due to the number of Freemasons among the Founding Fathers, some Europeans viewed as a logical extension of the goals of the lodges. Lessing was no revolutionary enthusiast, but Ernst und Falk undoubtedly reveals a utopian element in his political thought, and, as such, complements the utopian projections evident in such other late works as Nathan der Weise and Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. The years 1777 and 1778 also featured bitter theological disputes with those who responded to the publication of the Fragmente, the most prominent critic being Chief Pastor Goeze. The acrimonious exchanges inspired a large number of Lessing’s own theological writings: Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (On the Proof of the Spirit and Power, 1777), Das Testament Johannis (The Testament of John, 1777), Eine Duplik (A Rejoinder, 1778), Eine Parabel (A Parable, 1778), Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt (Axioms, 1778), Nötige Antwort auf eine sehr unnötige Frage des Hrn. Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg (The Necessary Answer to the Very Unnecessary Question of Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg, 1778), as well as other arguments against his critics. Lessing had more than once tested the limits of what the rulers could permit him to say; on 6 July 1778 the court of Braunschweig withdrew Lessing’s privilege of immunity from censorship. When Lessing learned in August that, in addition, no essay of his relating to religion could be published anywhere without the Archduke’s permission he decided to use “his old pulpit, the theater,” and announced his play Nathan der Weise.51 The play, written in blank verse unusual for German drama at that time,52 takes place in twelfth-century Jerusalem, at the time of the Crusades. The wealthy Jew Nathan returns from a long journey to discover that his adopted daughter Recha has been saved from a fire in his house by a Christian Templar. Nathan wishes to thank the rescuer, Curd von Stauffen, whom the Muslim Sultan Saladin had saved from execution because Saladin discerned in von Stauffen a resemblance to his brother. Initially, the Templar does not treat the Jew Nathan with respect, but he is later impressed by the latter’s wisdom, and he furthermore falls in love with Recha, whom he hopes to marry. Later in the play we learn that the orphaned Recha had been given to Nathan shortly after Christians had murdered Nathan’s wife and seven sons. Nathan accepted the Christian child, an act of pure humanity, and raised her without forcing her to adopt any religion: “Die jedes Haus, jeden Glaubens Zierde zu sein erschaffen und erzogen ward.”53 In the course of the play it becomes clear that Recha is the sister of Curd von Stauffen, who had been raised by his uncle in Germany. The


33

Sultan and his sister Sittah find in Recha and the templar their niece and nephew, for the Sultan’s brother was in fact Recha’s and Curd’s father. He had married their German mother, a von Stauffen. In the end all family members, who come from different religious backgrounds, embrace each other in a metonymic act referring to the universal human family. A central and much-excerpted part of the play is the parable of the rings, based on a scene from Boccaccio’s Decameron. The Sultan asks Nathan to tell him which religion—Judaism, Islam, or Christianity—is the true one. Nathan responds with a fairy tale of a man with three sons whom he loves equally. He cannot decide to whom he should leave his ring, which possesses the power to make whomever wears it pleasing to humans and to God. He has copies made, and leaves each son a ring. Each son feels that he possesses the true ring, and all press their claims in court. The judge ascertains that the rings are indistinguishable from each other, and suggests that the true ring will be revealed by the actions of those who wear it. In Nathan der Weise Lessing disseminated to a large audience of readers and theatergoers his concept of tolerance and religious truth, though many of his other works, among them Die Juden and such important philosophical writings as Ernst und Falk, Eine Duplik, and Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts also devote themselves to these ideas. The publication of Nathan coincided with and became part of a growing movement towards Jewish emancipation. Historians view Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing’s close friend from his Berlin years and a prominent representative of German-Jewish Enlightenment, as the model for Nathan. For some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jews, Nathan’s message, that all three religions should tolerate each other and concede each other a degree of social equality, prophesied the fulfillment of Jewish emancipation legally instituted to a large extent in 1871, and fully in 1919. In 1929, at commemorations of Lessing’s two-hundredth birthday, many speakers, among them Reichspräsident von Hindenburg and Thomas Mann, praised Lessing’s play of tolerance as a high point of German literature and culture. But with the rise to power of National Socialism it was banned from all German theaters in 1933. In 1945, as if to signal the reinstatement of a civilization ruptured by the institutional genocide of European Jewry, many German theaters reopened with Nathan der Weise, and it remains one of the most performed plays in the German repertoire. The more provocative Nathan stagings by Claus Peymann, Joshua Sobol, and George Tabori in postwar, post-Auschwitz Germany have concentrated on the pogrom that destroyed Nathan’s family, and have emphasized the pronouncement of the Christian patriarch who, when informed that a Jew has raised a Christian child, exclaims: “Der Jude wird verbrannt!” (The Jew shall be burned!).54 Today, stagings in Germany and elsewhere (Nathan is Lessing’s most internationally performed play) often emphasize the challenges facing multi-ethnic or multi-

34


religious societies. In the year 2000, theaters in Berlin and Hannover staged the play not only in German, but in Hebrew and Arabic. An opera adaptation performed in Görlitz, Germany after 11 September 2001 featured in the theater entrance hall videos of airliners smashing into the World Trade towers. In 1780 Lessing published the philosophical-theological treatise Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), here also called the Erziehungsschrift, in one hundred paragraphs. Lessing had already published paragraphs 1–53 in 1777 in the fourth of his Gegensätze as part of the fragments controversy. Because his publications became subject to strict censorship in 1778, the complete Erziehungsschrift including the Vorbericht des Herausgebers (Preface of the Editor) appeared anonymously. Theologians consider the Erziehungsschrift, like Nathan der Weise, one of Lessing’s major theological-philosophical statements. Scholars often interpret Nathan in association with the Erziehungsschrift, and both need to be read within the context of the fragments controversy. In the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts Lessing again takes up the question of revelation and reason. He divides human history into three periods: childhood (the Old Testament), youth (the New Testament) and the yet-to-be-attained stage of adulthood, which represents true enlightenment and the time of perfection. In his dialectical conception of the relationship between reason and revelation Lessing suggests that the development of human reason entails a gradual appropriation of divine revelation. When a human is capable of being virtuous for the sake of virtue and “will do good because it is good,” as he notes in paragraph 85, then the ultimate stage of mature autonomy is reached, an autonomy aware of its own limitations and acknowledging that ultimate truth is for God alone. This “believing reason”55 or “reason as wisdom”56 constitutes the core of Lessing’s thought, which is distinct not only from orthodox Lutheran Biblicism as represented by Goeze, but also from the deistic-rationalistic criticism of Reimarus. As one recent study asserts, in his late writings such as the Erziehungsschrift, Lessing far exceeded the rationalist world-view of the Enlightenment.57 Lessing’s life and work had further ramifications for post-Enlightenment Germany. A “Spinoza controversy” erupted in 1785 with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s (1743–1819) publication of his Jacobis Gespräche mit Lessing (Jacobi’s Conversations with Lessing). Based on his private conversations with Lessing during Lessing’s final years, Jacobi asserts that Lessing acknowledged himself to be a follower of Spinoza. At that time many theologians considered the term “Spinozist” the equivalent of atheist or blasphemer; hence, Jacobi’s assertions proved nothing short of sensational. Moses Mendelssohn challenged Jacobi’s representation of their mutual friend, and the ensuing Jacobi-Mendelssohn debate regarding Lessing’s legacy would eventually be joined and transformed by many of the leading German intellectuals of the later eighteenth century, including Friedrich


35

Schlegel (1772–1829), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), Herder, Goethe, and Kant. Their discussion occasioned a Spinoza renaissance, which in turn led, it is often asserted, to the development and flowering of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German idealist philosophy as represented by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775–1854), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834).58 When Jacobi published his conversations in 1785, Lessing could no longer comment on them. He had died on 15 February 1781 in Braunschweig. The cause of his death is described as “Stickfluss,” a certain paralyzing of the lungs that would be diagnosed as pulmonary embolism in today’s medical terminology. Scholars speculate that Lessing’s frequent feverish illnesses, combined with poor nutrition, overwork, and unending heated disputes probably culminated in deteriorating health and heart disease.59 With Lessing at his deathbed were his doctor, his stepdaughter Amalia König, who during his last years was his caretaker and close friend, and Alexander Daveson, a Braunschweig Jew on whose behalf Lessing had interceded and who was residing temporarily in Lessing’s home. Lessing is buried at the cemetery Magnifriedhof in Braunschweig. What is striking about Lessing’s life is not only who and what he was, but in a real sense also who and what he was not. Goethe famously praised Lessing’s “manly” character, but through Lessing’s letters we also know of his disregard for his family, especially his impoverished mother and sister, after his father’s death. Through his correspondence with his fiancée Eva König we know that he would often fail to write to her for long periods, thus driving her to near despair. We know of his debts due to his passion for gambling, which today would most probably be viewed as an addiction. We know of his abrupt and often puzzling departures from places he lived; we know that he frequently appeared incapable of holding a job. Despite Lessing’s manifest legacy in many disparate fields, he was not a philosopher or a theologian, nor was he a systematic thinker on aesthetics or drama theory. And of course, Friedrich Schlegel noted early that Lessing was a “non-poetic poet,” a characterization that has often been misinterpreted. In a sense, the open, self-reflective form of Lessing’s writing mirrors and indeed generates its very content. Similarly, Lessing consciously employs (much to the consternation of Goeze) a metaphorical, multivalent language that rejects or undermines preformed, restrictive terminology. Truth is for Lessing neither a coin that derives its value from whatever is imprinted on it (“. . . neue Münze/Die nur der Stempel macht, die man aufs Brett/Nur zählen darf, das ist sie doch nun nicht!” exclaims Nathan),60 nor a blueprint that architects should take more seriously than the structure itself (Eine Parabel). Lessing suggests that just as language allows a multiplicity of significations, our multiple approaches to truth should coexist without hierarchy. Suspicious of absolutes, Lessing refuses to commit

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to closed systems, dogmas, or exclusive and exclusionary epistemologies of truth. As he wrote in Eine Duplik: Nicht die Wahrheit, in deren Besitz irgendein Mensch ist, oder zu sein vermeinet, sondern die aufrichtige Mühe, die er angewandt hat, hinter die Wahrheit zu kommen, macht den Wert des Menschen. Denn nicht durch den Besitz, sondern durch die Nachforschung der Wahrheit erweitern sich seine Kräfte, worin allein seine immer wachsende Vollkommenheit bestehet.61

For Lessing, absolute truth is with God. For human beings, whom he called “limited gods,”62 it is not so much the “truth” that matters, for such truth always remains incomplete and needs to be encountered with skepticism, but the sincere and resolute search for it. This search entails intellectual effort, as the master critic himself tirelessly illustrates. Lessing’s life and work continue to serve as inspiration for further disputes, polemics, critical exchanges, and creative thought.

Notes 1 Third stanza of “Ich.” In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), vol. 2, 400. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotations from Lessing are from this edition (Ba) and will be referred to with volume and page number, for example, here, Ba 2, 400. 2

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vom 7. November 1775 bis 2. September 1786, ed. Karl Eibl et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–), vol. 29, 330.

3

Wilfried Barner documents Goethe’s complicated relationship with the twentyyear-older Lessing, whom he never met, in his Goethe und Lessing: Eine schwierige Konstellation (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001). 4

Edward M. Batley, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781” in Encyclopedia of German Literature, ed. Mathias Konzett (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2002), vol. 2, 642. 5

Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Immanuel Kant. Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), vol. 6, 53.

6 Michael Hughes, Early Modern Germany, 1477–1806 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992), 147. 7

See Hughes, Early Modern Germany, 146–48.

8

Theophilus Lessing, De Religionum Tolerantia (1669), ed. and reprint LessingAkademie, Wolfenbüttel (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1991). 9

For recent work on Lessing and religion see Klaus Bohnen’s and Arno Schilson’s extensive commentaries in Ba 8, 9, and 10. See also Toshimasa Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment: Lessing on Christianity and Reason (Oxford/New York: Oxford UP, 2002).


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10 “Ich komme nach Leipzig, an einen Ort, wo man die ganze Welt in kleinen sehen kann. . . . Doch es dauerte nicht lange, so gingen mir die Augen auf: Soll ich sagen, zu meinem Glücke, oder zu meinem Unglücke? Die künftige Zeit wird es entscheiden.” G. E. Lessing, “An Justina Salome Lessing,” letter from 20 January 1749, Ba 11/1, 15–16. 11

“Vorrede zu den Schrifften. 3. Theil,” in: Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Sämtliche Schriften, eds. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker. 23 vols. (Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1886–1924; reprint Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1968), 5, 270. See also commentary by Jürgen Stenzel on the “Vorrede zum Lustspiel Die Juden” in Ba 1, 1152.

12

“An Elise Reimarus,” letter from 6 September 1778, Ba 12, 193.

13

“An Johann Gottfried Lessing,” letter from 28 April 1749, Ba 11/1, 24.

14

“An Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim,” letter from 8 July 1758, Ba 11/1, 293.

15

Lessing’s Damon, oder die wahre Freundschaft (Damon, or True Friendship) was his first play to appear in print (it was published in 1747 by Mylius in the journal Ermunterungen zum Vergnügen des Gemüts), but Lessing never had it published again. The play is included in Ba 1, 65–93.

16

Der Misogyne was written in 1748 as a comedy in one act, and included by Lessing for publication in the sixth part of the Schrifften in 1755. A longer version in three acts, called Der Misogyn, was included in Lessing’s Lustspiele. Erster Theil, 1767. 17

See Jürgen Stenzel’s “Kommentar” to Die Juden in Ba 1, 1153.

18

Ba 1, 486.

19

“Vorrede” of 1749 to Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, in Ba 1, 728–29. 20

F. J. Lamport, Classical German Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 14.

21

See Monika Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 86. Jürgen Stenzel points out in his commentary to “Ankündigungen der Critischen Nachrichten” that it is not proven whether Lessing contributed or not. See Stenzel in Ba 1, 1423–24.

22

The Simon Lemnius vindication was published earlier as “Briefe 1–8” in 1753 in the second part of the Schrifften. Included in Ba 2, 655–678. The Rettungen are included in Ba 3. 23

Dieter Hildebrandt, Lessing: Biographie einer Emanzipation (Munich: Hanser, 1979), 132–48. Ute van Runset notes that much polemical and non-scholarly writing about Lessing’s and Voltaire’s “encounter” has in turn affected scholarly interpretations of relations between the two authors. “Lessing und Voltaire, ein Mißverständnis,” in Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang, ed. Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh. Special volume of Lessing Yearbook (Detroit and Munich: Wayne State UP and text ⫹ kritik, 1984), 257–69. 24

Jochen Meyer published a facsimile edition: Kleinigkeiten: Faksimile des Marbacher Manuskripts (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000). 25

Peter J. Brenner, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 61.

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26

Gail Hart, “A Family without Women: The Triumph of the Sentimental Father in Lessing’s Sara Sampson and Klinger’s Sturm und Drang,” Lessing Yearbook 22 (1990), 118.

27

Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 157.

28

Ba 4, 61–63.

29

Ba 11/1, 293.

30

Ba 4, 59–61.

31

Blankenburg in Ba 4, 64–65; Engel in Ba 4, 66–69.

32

See Wolfgang Milde, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing “D. Faust.” Fragmente und Berichte. Mit einem vollständigen Faksimile der Fausthandschrift (Berlin: Berliner Bibliophilen Abend, 1988). See also “D. Faust” in Ba 4, 59–69 and 822–37, and Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 176–80.

33

For an interpretation of the play that departs from previous political readings see Susan Gustafson, “Abject Fathers and Suicidal Sons: G. E. Lessing’s Philotas and Kristeva’s Black Sun.” Lessing Yearbook 29 (1997): 1–29.

34

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), vol. 14, 308.

35 See also Gerd Hillen, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,” German Writers from the Enlightenment to Sturm and Drang, 1720–1764, ed. James Hardin and Christoph Schweitzer, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 97 (Detroit: Gale, 1990), 175–90, here 185. The following paragraphs draw on his summary. For a further concise discussion in English, see Nicholas Rennie, “Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 1766” in Konzett, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, 646–47. 36

Mark W. Roche, “Apel and Lessing, or: the Ethics of Communication and the Strategies of Comedy,” Lessing Yearbook 25 (1993): 41–54.

37

Lamport, Classical German Drama, 20–21. See his discussion, on which we partially draw here.

38 Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. 5th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987), 274. 39

Ba 6, 98.

40

Ba 6, 110.

41

Hillen, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,” 186.

42

Ba 6, 694.

43

See Terry Foreman, “The Quest for Religious Truth 200 Years On: Lessing’s Role in the Current Anglophone Culture-War,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 391–405.

44

Henry Hatfield, “Emilia’s Guilt Once More,” Modern Language Notes 71 (1956): 287–96.

45

Alois Wierlacher, “Das Haus der Freude oder Warum stirbt Emilia Galotti?” Lessing Yearbook 5 (1973): 147–62.

46

Ba 11/2, 362.


39

47

See notably Susan Gustafson, Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995). See also her short discussion in Konzett, Encyclopedia, vol.2, 645–46.

48 See Brigitte Prutti, Bild und Körper: Weibliche Präsenz und Geschlechterbeziehungen in Lessings Dramen “Emilia Galotti” und “Minna von Barnhelm” (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1996). 49

“An Johann Joachim Eschenburg,” letter from 31 December 1777, Ba 12, 116.

50

Ba 10, 12.

51

On the reception history of this play, see among others: Bettina Dessau, Nathans Rückkehr: Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986), and Barbara Fischer, Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von “Nathan der Weise” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000). For a short discussion of the play in English, see Susan Gustafson, “Nathan der Weise, 1779” in Konzett, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, 647–49. 52

For a discussion of the significance of Lessing’s decision to use blank verse (which in England was associated with the heroic and the tragic) for this family drama, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: “Nathan der Weise.” Dichtung und Wirklichkeit, ed. Peter Demetz (Frankfurt/Berlin: Ullstein, 1966), 128–32.

53

Ba 9, 598.

54

Ba 9, 578.

55

Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, 142.

56

Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Vernunft als Weisheit: Studien zum späten Lessing (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991). 57

Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, 142.

58

See Yasukata, Lessing’s Philosophy of Religion and the German Enlightenment, 117–18. 59

Brenner, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 52.

60

Ba 9, 554.

61

Ba 8, 510.

62

Das Christentum der Vernunft in Ba 2, 406.

Lessing and the European Enlightenment Steven D. Martinson

T

HIS ESSAY EXAMINES Lessing’s activities and position within a number of contexts of the European and German Enlightenment. It is designed to capture the rich interplay and exchange of ideas between the intersecting cultures of Germany and the rest of Europe. The Enlightenment did not constitute a fixed set of ideas that were agreed upon by all enlightened philosophes. In general, historians have favored the French Enlightenment, followed by its English counterpart. The German Enlightenment receives far less attention. As long as one regards the Aufklärung as a “latebloomer,” as does Peter Gay, German writers will not be regarded as major players within the European Enlightenment.1 Yet, ironically, almost all historians begin their accounts of the Enlightenment with Immanuel Kant’s famous definition in “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1784). Two vital elements of the epoch are, however, often not mentioned: Lessing’s concept of perpetual striving for the truth in Eine Duplik (A Rejoinder, 1778) and Moses Mendelssohn’s, “Über die Frage: was heißt aufklären?” (On the Question: What is the Meaning of to Enlighten, 1784). Significantly, Mendelssohn (1729–86) subsumed within the word Bildung both Kultur (the practical) and Aufklärung (the theoretical).2 For the vast majority of writers, Enlightenment in Germany concerned, most essentially, the education and moral development of the individual, first, within society, second, as a representative of humankind, and third, in history. Mendelssohn’s distinction between the enlightenment of the Bürger, the citizen of a particular society and that of the Mensch, a member of humankind, is of special interest, as it envisions that both society and humanity may be improved. Mendelssohn’s experience as a Jew among Christians surely sharpened his sense of the disparity between social reality and humane ideals. Among German Aufklärer, both Lessing and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) knew that the rationalistic social movement in which they were participating was but one, albeit critical, episode in the history of humankind. They did not hope for a quasi-chiliastic fulfillment of history at any specific time, let alone their own. Rather, each sought to inculcate and actualize the new values and ideals of enlightenment in present society,

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and over time. Whereas Kant was the greater theoretician, Lessing was the greater practical enlightener. Both held that the moral development of the individual was of paramount importance for human progress. In his own way, Mendelssohn was of the same conviction. Spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European Enlightenment movement3 sought to investigate along many avenues the nature of reality in its manifold phenomena, including an individual’s own experience in and of the world. With the aid of rational and logical analysis supported by sensual experience and accurate observation, enlightened philosophes collected their findings and made them available to a broad public in readily accessible encyclopedic books, such as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Heinrich Martin Gottfried Köster’s Deutsche Encyklopädie (1778), and the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768–71), as well as Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexikon Aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Complete Universal Lexicon of Science and the Arts, 1732–50).4 However, proponents of enlightenment were not content simply to inscribe their observations. As they endeavored to comprehend the world, they were also engaged, often simultaneously, in examining the emotions and passions that inform human nature, social customs, and mores, knowledge of which was considered indispensable for the advancement and improvement of society. The Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711) by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Moses Mendelssohn’s Briefe über die Empfindungen (Letters on Sensations, 1755), and François Marie Arouet’s (Voltaire’s) Essai sur les moeurs (Essay Concerning Mores, 1769) are but a few influential examples. Discussing Christian Thomasius, an early German Aufklärer, Frederick Copleston draws attention to a major characteristic of the Enlightenment, namely “that reason can heal the wounds of human life, and that exercise of reason should be directed to the social good. The individual should find his own good in overcoming his egoistic desires and lusts and in subordinating himself to the good of society.”5 But the Enlightenment embraced far more than the theoretical constructs of philosophy. Works of literature were far more numerous than philosophical treatises, and in a sense closer to the people. Furthermore, the eighteenth century is wellknown for its new discoveries in archaeology and explorations of unknown and unseen regions, including the voyages of Captain Cook and the scientific expeditions of an Alexander von Humboldt. In fact, the European Enlightenment as a whole truly marked the birth of modern times, and of modernity. In a way that is helpful for our consideration of Lessing, Hagen Schulze defines the Enlightenment as being not so much an elitist philosophy as a spiritual and cultural climate that prevailed in all areas of life and inspired people with the confidence that it was in their power to find happiness in accordance with the laws of nature and reason.6 Schulze too,

LESSING AND THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT

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however, takes his model of Enlightenment from the French and the English traditions: “Human salvation no longer dwelt in Heaven but on Earth; no more seemed necessary to achieve it than the use of Reason and a degree of fortitude.”7 German Aufklärer were not content to work only within the immanent realm. Even in their critiques of religion, they sought to mediate between reason and revelation, a classic example of which is Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1777/80). In sum, confident in the powers of human reason to analyze and differentiate, and well aware that the passions, however unpredictably, inspire human actions, proponents of the Enlightenment worked to bring about change through a wide range of activities, not only in the individual but in political society as well. How they went about the work of enlightening individually and, at times, collectively, is just as important as what philosophes and Aufklärer alike discovered and believed. To determine, for example, how nature operates is a more difficult task than simply describing its appearances. No doubt, this was one reason why Lessing committed himself to the quest for Truth, rather than to the hope that he would ever possess it.

Intellectual-Historical Contexts: The Search after Truth Discussions of the nature of the European Enlightenment frequently juxtapose the rationalism of René Descartes and the empiricism of John Locke, thus “canonizing” their work and that of other major writers of the time, and acknowledging the profound influence that their thinking had on adherents of the enlightenment movement in Europe.8

René Descartes (1596–1650) In reading Descartes, one must remain sensitive to the autobiographical nature of his most influential work, Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method, 1637). By casting new light on his famous proposition, I think, therefore I am, we will identify several aspects of his writing that bear some resemblance to Lessing’s work. Stephen Toulmin has suggested that the more we study seventeenthcentury crises (for example, the Thirty Years’ War), the more evident the intellectual progress of the time becomes.9 Toulmin understands Descartes’s philosophy to be an intelligible and critical response to a political turmoil that demanded “more rational methods of intellectual inquiry” (125). Compelling as this argument appears, we must note that Descartes left

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France in 1629 to take up residence in Holland. He recounted his reasons at the end of Part III of the Discours. In Holland, “the long-continued war has caused such order to be established that the armies which are maintained seem only to be of use in allowing the inhabitants to enjoy the fruits of peace with so much the more security” (20). It was here, Descartes adds, that he could live “as solitary and retired as in deserts the most remote” (20). In his Meditationes de prima philosophia (Les meditations metaphysiques, 1647; Meditations on First Philosophy) we read “that it is only the things which we conceive clearly and distinctly that have the power of persuading us completely.”10 In the Discours de la Méthode, the writer maintained that one’s consciousness affirms that one exists, that is, that one is in the world. The human being is an autonomous individual who is capable of rendering intelligible the world around us. The thinking subject does not depend, as Locke would argue, on the information supplied by the senses, that is, on the body; rather, our ability to account for and gain clarity about the nature of reality owes exclusively to the power of the mind. One of the hallmarks of the French Enlightenment is Descartes’s sharp distinction between the thinking subject (res cogitans) and the material world (res extensa) and his privileging of mind over body. It should be kept in mind, however, that the mathematical formulae that Descartes elsewhere develops account only for the phenomena they are designed to clarify. How, then, do we account for those aspects of reality in the widest sense that are not susceptible to mathematical certainty? The so-called “skeptical threat” evoked by Descartes’s writing did not escape the attention of his contemporaries.11 As Toulmin sees, “The skeptical issue was not so much the truth or falsity of our beliefs as their claim to certainty.”12 Even more importantly, the Discours de la méthode is the product not only of a systematic philosopher but, also, a writer who has confidence in his autobiography, the cognitive validity of the facts of his own life.13 In the Discours itself, he does not claim that his method should be employed universally: “My design has never extended beyond trying to reform my own opinion and to build on a foundation which is entirely my own” (11). His description of a “code of morals” (15–16), together with the final pages of the work, confirm Descartes’s earnestness. In Part IV of the Discours, Descartes relates how he had arrived at the proposition I think, therefore I am. Giving himself entirely to “the search after Truth” [emphasis mine], he rejected “as absolutely false everything as to which I could imagine the least ground of doubt, in order to see if afterwards there remained anything in my belief that was entirely certain” (21). Not allowing his senses to divert his attention, “and judging that I was as subject to error as was any other, I rejected as false all the reasons formerly accepted by me as demonstrations” (21). Only when thinking through this most fundamental proposition, says Descartes, will one realize that one has


45

one’s being in the world, a being however that one cannot ultimately know. Elaborating on his general rule “that the things which we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true . . .” (22), the writer adds a caveat, “remembering, however, that there is some difficulty in ascertaining which are those that we distinctly conceive” (22). Hence, as the writer works from doubt to certainty, that is, from autobiography to science, his approach drags along with it some degree of uncertainty, of which he himself was aware. Throughout the Discours, Descartes acknowledges time and again the limits imposed upon his own comprehension. In the end, only the idea of the perfection of God and one’s reliance on God could instill in him the assuredness of his convictions. In the Discours de la Méthode, Descartes drew upon experience and self-critical analysis in order to arrive at the proposition I think, therefore I am, which he describes as that “first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking” (21). With this unshakable truth he believed that he had actually defeated “all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the skeptics” (21). Descartes spent twenty years in Holland before taking up residence in Stockholm at the invitation of Queen Christine. Here he observed that, although everyone is endowed with reason, some put it to better use than others. Common ground for certain knowledge is found by “carefully” avoiding “precipitation and prejudice in judgments” (13). Given the autobiographical nature of the writing of his Discours, perhaps it is not simply interesting but characteristic that Descartes’s famous proposition should follow almost immediately after underscoring his commitment to the search after truth and not necessarily to its possession.

John Locke (1632–1704) Unlike Descartes, John Locke valued sense experience. As his critic Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz pointed out in the preface to his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (New Essays on Human Understanding, 1768), Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) “is one of the finest and most admired works of the age.”14 In brief, Locke’s sensualism is based on the idea that, upon birth, the mind is a blank slate (“tabula rasa”). “The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet [of the mind].”15 We attain knowledge by degrees, moving from simple to complex ideas. Interestingly, it is the simple ideas that are “much more clear, precise and distinct” than complex ones (151). At the same time, there are certain “acts of the mind” that “exert power over its simplest ideas” (153). The experiences that one accumulates leave their imprint on the mind. Since there are no inherent categories by which our experience is

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organized, sense perception and experience are central to Locke’s epistemology. Ideas are not innate; as Locke argues, there is no universal assent (33) that would achieve the kind of congruence necessary to support such a hypothesis.16 One of the most interesting aspects of Locke’s account of human understanding is that while, on the one hand, the senses facilitate knowledge, on the other hand, the mind is capable of reflecting on its own operations within itself. Locke would seem to accept the idea of self-reflexivity that was at work in Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode. In theory, Locke denies the existence of innate ideas when discussing his position that there are “no innate practical principles”; he states explicitly, however, that “a desire for happiness, and an aversion to misery” are indeed “innate practical principles” and that these aspects of nature “may be observed, in all persons and all ages, steady and universal” (36). Quickly, Locke goes on to differentiate among these “inclinations of the appetite to good,” which are “not impressions of truth on the understanding” (36). But where do such practical principles originate? Considerably later, in his twentieth chapter, “Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain,” Locke advances a related idea, namely that “we love, desire, rejoice, and hope, only in respect of pleasure; we hate, fear, and grieve, only in respect of pain ultimately . . .” (234). The former he calls good, and the latter evil (231). He makes this comparison on the basis of his conviction that “Actions are the interpreters of one’s thought” (39). As is characteristic of the European Enlightenment in general, in the work of Descartes and Locke, theory and practice have merged. In sum, like Descartes, Locke wished to secure knowledge about the nature of reality with certainty, but his method of achieving this end was qualitatively different. Whereas, for Descartes, reason, with the aid of science (read: mathematics), is sufficient to account for the facts of reality, for Locke, the senses constitute the very source of our knowledge of reality.17 As we have seen, however, both philosophers were agreed that the mind is capable of understanding not only external reality but also itself. This type of reflexivity is also evident in the work of German Aufklärer. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) Leibniz was not, as some maintain, content with strictly rationalistic systematic philosophizing. The work of his student, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), first created this impression. While Leibniz’s approach was certainly rational, there is considerable evidence in his writings of the reciprocity of reason and experience, such as his ideas concerning the formation of theories.18 In light of the debates regarding aesthetics in mid-to-late eighteenthcentury Germany, it is important to recognize that Leibniz problematized


47

Descartes’s clear distinction between confused and distinct ideas, again with recourse to Locke. “Confused thoughts,” he writes, “often make themselves vividly sensed, whereas the distinct ones are usually only potentially vivid” (187). But, surely, this state of mind must work against the attainment of certain knowledge. Leibniz does leave the door cracked. According to Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Leibniz held “that most mental events lie beyond the reach of awareness (apperception) because they are too small or confused or overlaid with more vivid mental content” (xiv). Like Descartes, Leibniz would relegate what is unknown to God’s omniscience: “divine grace itself is a pleasure which brings enlightenment” (187). Convinced, as he was, that we need “to seek out enlightened and rational pleasures to bring against the confused but potent pleasures of the senses” (187), Leibniz proposed education (Bildung) as the first step in what was to be a lifelong process of development. This is to be attained “in such a way that true goods and evils are made as thoroughly sensible as they can be, by clothing one’s notions of them in details which are more appropriate to this end” (187). The gateway to the artisticaesthetic transformation of society had been opened. While clearly aware of the limits of reason, Leibniz appreciated its utility. His spokesman, Theophilus, states the case: “Since we cannot always analyse the notions of true good and true evil to the point where we can see the pleasures and pains which they involve, so as to be influenced by them, we must make this rule for ourselves once and for all: wait till you have the findings of reason and from then on follow them, even if they are ordinarily retained only as ‘blind thoughts’ devoid of sensible charms” (187–188). However, as we have seen, Leibniz’s complex metaphysics of a larger reality also had the residual effect of undercutting clear and distinct, that is, certain knowledge. Leibniz’s Monadology was originally written in French, in 1714, just two years before the author’s death. It was first made available in German translation by H. Köhler in 1720. The work had a profound effect on the German eighteenth century, including both Lessing and Goethe. The term “monad” has a long history. In the second chapter of Book 1 of his treatise On the Soul, for example, Aristotle states that “Mind is the monad. . . .”19 These simple substances have, as Leibniz writes, no “windows” through which something can pass. In short, monads are indivisible. While they differ from one another with regard to the position they hold vis-à-vis the “Urmonade,” which is God, the dynamics of every monad stems from its own inner principle (“inneres Prinzip”; Para. 11). This principle is the source of a monad’s perpetual activity and development. To be sure, every monad is subject to change (“[ist] . . . der Veränderung unterworfen . . .”; Para. 10), however, the change that it undergoes is internal to, and consistent with itself. At the same time, the monad is dependent upon the force that set it into motion from the beginning. Each monad has

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been imprinted with its own stamp, in accordance with which it strives to become what it is in perfection. Already at the beginning of the German Enlightenment, Werden and Sein are posited as interdependent elements of life, and it is in fact this dynamic interplay between becoming and being that transcended the philosophies of Descartes and Locke and impacted so pervasively the subsequent history of German thought. The position that a particular monad occupies within the whole of Leibniz’s “world,” in relation to all other monads, is not an arbitrary assignment in space but, rather, a determination based on degrees of awareness, or “knowledge.” As we have already seen, every monad is comprised of a certain degree of clarity and confusion that differs from one monad to another. Since, however, only the “Urmonade,” God, is perfect, and all other monads must seek greater knowledge and perfection, all are engaged in a perpetual process of dynamic development. As long as a monad is active (“tätig”), it is able to conceive distinctly (“deutlich perzipiert”). But when its perceptions are indistinct, or confused (“verworren”), it experiences what the writer describes as suffering (“Leiden”). This suffering is caused by a lack of clarity (Para. 49). By its nature, a monad is an entity that conceives (“. . . ein vorstellendes Wesen . . .”; Para. 60). Since some perceive things better than others, some must “suffer” more than others. Thus the less enlightened one is, the more one suffers confusion. As in his New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz’s Monadologie presupposes the need for education, and education entails a lifelong process of intellectual and moral development. When we consider Leibniz’s treatise on monads in the light of the social-political context in which it was written, a number of problems begin to emerge that are characteristic of the German Aufklärung. By superimposing the political landscape of eighteenth-century Germany over Leibniz’s philosophical map and substituting the ruling monarch of an absolutistic state for the “Urmonade,” that is, God, it becomes apparent that Leibniz’s monadology reflects the social gradation that marks the nature of the eighteenth-century absolutist state — from the aristocracy to the nobility through the middle class down to and including the “fourth estate.” Each member of the state occupies a specific place in society and carries out a particular function. Rather than reform the state, Leibniz’s system would seem to have reinforced it. However, while this map exposes the problem of Leibniz’s political ideology, we should not miss the opportunity to observe in what ways Leibniz’s Monadologie could serve as a source of inspiration for the enlightenment movement. Most importantly, Leibniz’s description of the dynamic internal nature of the individual monad reflects the activity of Bildung, and the need to continue it. Leibniz’s theory of the monad thus discloses the intimate relationship between education and the formation and development of character. Education, in the fullest sense of the word, is a


49

necessary activity in which one strives to obtain an ultimately unattainable goal, the byproducts of which are expressions of the uniqueness of individual minds and therefore valuable in themselves. Most importantly, when taken together, Leibniz’s Monadologie (1714) and Theodizee (Theodicy, 1710) constitute a final attempt to preserve a metaphysically founded structure from Cartesian rationalism and Lockean sensualism. The blend of rationalism and Christian theology distinguishes the German Aufklärung from both the French and the English Enlightenment. Given the history of the north German states in particular since the Reformation, at the time of the German Enlightenment, rationalism was domesticated to the needs of the ruling states and Protestant churches.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) Lessing’s investigation of truth is as much a product of his activities as a writer who was searching for the appropriate form as it is an expression of the content of his thinking. Rather than to attribute to him a specific worldview in the hope of resolving any and all antinomies or, at the very least, fully account for them, perhaps it is more important to appreciate the writer’s open-minded approach to truth. Since, for Lessing, the search for truth is not synonymous with the search for certainty, his writing and thinking differ markedly from that of Descartes. Because the search for truth is infinite, Lessing’s universe is always open-ended. There is no better example of this, perhaps, than Lessing’s tendency toward polemics, a feature of his writing that is virtually absent in Descartes. As Lessing matured, he became less interested in formulating hypotheses than in challenging them. He did not care to generate a systematic explanation of the world; rather, he contented himself with what he called fermenta cognitionis, the yeast of knowledge. The influence of Locke’s philosophy on Lessing was not immediate. It is highly likely that Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn introduced him to the work of the English philosopher. In fact, it was through his study of a Latin translation of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding that Mendelssohn himself first entered the realm of modern philosophy.20 In turn, Lessing’s knowledge of the senses owes not so much to Locke’s epistemology as it does to Mendelssohn’s analysis of the sensations in Briefe über die Empfindungen (Letters on the Sensations, 1755). For example, he derived his ideas on the evocation of pleasure and displeasure in the theater from Mendelssohn. Unlike Locke, neither Lessing nor Mendelssohn believed that these experiences were either good or evil. Finally, for Locke, the mind’s “searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes great part of the

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pleasure” (xlv; emphasis mine). But neither Descartes nor Lessing conceived of the search for truth in this way. For Lessing, the pursuit was important because it determines the true value (“Wert”) of an individual’s character, but it was not always pleasurable. Lessing’s distinction between the necessity of reason and the contingency of (historical) fact in both his early and later work is clearly indebted to Leibniz. Leibniz distinguished between two kinds of truth. Reason, which determines the one, allows of no contradiction. Unlike the synthetic nature of reason, facts have the status only of possibilities that are variable, that is, contingent. The most direct expression of the same is found in Lessing’s essay, Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, 1777), where we read that accidental historical truths can never become the proof of necessary rational truths: “Zufällige Geschichtswahrheiten können der Beweis von notwendigen Vernunftswahrheiten nie werden.”21 Here, too, Aristotle’s differentiation between the truth of poetry and the contingency of history, in the Poetics, served as a source of inspiration. Lessing extends Leibniz’s distinction to his discussions of the difference between the Christian religion and Christ’s religion, as well as that between Christian spirituality and the history of Christianity (Ba 9: 72, 77). One of Lessing’s most characteristic statements reads as follows: “Der Buchstabe ist nicht der Geist, und die Bibel ist nicht die Religion.” 22 At this time, Lessing was impacted by the thought of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, some of whose works he edited, the most important being Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Defense of the Rational Admirers of God; first complete edition 1972). Since Reimarus explored the question of the historical Jesus and the apparent contradictions in the biblical record, Lessing’s publications of his works set into motion an intellectual-spiritual revolution that impacted Friedrich Schleiermacher’s and David Strauss’s writings on the life of Jesus, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. This tradition has also informed contemporary thinking in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (for example, the Jesuits). The Republic of Letters Lessing’s knowledge of the ancients and writers of the Enlightenment both abroad and at home was extraordinary. Even early in his career, Lessing’s contributions to such projects as the Theatralische Bibliothek (Theatrical Library, 1754–58) and Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Most Recent Literature, 1759–1765) demonstrated his awareness of most recent developments in European literature. Knowledge of the past served to expand his understanding of the present. Although he was not able to complete the project, his ambitious plans in the Beyträge


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zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (Contributions to the History and Reception of the Theater, 1750) called for translating works by modern foreigners (“Ausländer”) with whose work “Deutschland” was least familiar. Here, he wanted to make known the work of William Wicherly (1640?1716), Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), Colley Cibber (1671–1757), and William Congreve (1670–1729), as well as Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635) and other Spanish authors. Lessing wrote that although all of these men have their faults, “ein vernünftiger Nachahmer,” such as a German dramatist, can put them all to good use.23 It is not possible, he adds, to determine how any “Nation” excels particularly and what its special characteristics are (729). Already in 1750, Lessing suggested that “das Naturell eines Volks” can best be understood in its dramatic poesy (729). In addition to these examples of the practical work of the Enlightenment, Lessing published a number of collections of works by non-German writers that he edited, introduced, and translated, such as Des Herrn Jakob Thomson sämtliche Trauerspiele (The Collected Tragedies of Mr. Jacob Thomson, 1756), and Das Theater des Herrn Diderot. Aus dem Französischen (The Dramatic Work of Mr. Diderot. Translated from French, 1760) In the eighteenth century, translations established new lines of communication. In effect, they constructed bridges between the various cultures that defined the nature of the European Enlightenment. Lessing was a prominent member of that république des lettres that Pierre Bayle had introduced in his Nouvelle République des Lettres. The idea of a fraternity of intellectuals, however, dates at least as far back as Erasmus’s Antibarbari.24 During the eighteenth century, German intellectuals voiced their allegiance to this universal community. One of the most prominent examples is Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (The German Republic of Letters, 1774). However, in no other German writer of the time, save perhaps Moses Mendelssohn, is this international network of communication more at work than in the discourse of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. As Fritz Schalk has observed, “Die Tektonik des Gewebes, aus dem Lessings Werk geschaffen ist, spiegelt deutlich die methodischen Leitmotive wider, die der europäischen Aufklärung innewohnen.”25 Although Lessing remained a cosmopolitan who was still concerned about such concepts as “nation,” “Germany,” and “the Germans,” the flexibility and openness of his ever-searching mind transcend territorial and national boundaries.26 One prominent Germanist has thus concluded that “Der gelehrte Kosmopolitismus Lessings war von vornherein Funktion seines nationalen Ehrgeizes und ein Ferment zur Überwindung der ‘Trennungen.’ Oder wirkungsgeschichtlich gewendet: Je ‘nationaler’ der Autor Lessing sein wollte, desto ‘europäischer’ wurde er.”27 The more Lessing wanted to be a German national writer, the more European he became.

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Lessing’s Method of Enlightening: The Critique of Pierre Corneille (1606–1984) and the Appropriation of the Work of Denis Diderot (1713–1784) Lessing’s translations of English, French, and Spanish writings into German and his numerous critical, sometimes heated disputes with writers both German and foreign, present as well as past, attest to his commitment to the advancement of enlightenment. For one thing, Lessing knew that the predilection of German courts for French customs and manners at a time of entrenched absolutism worked against the formation of a more indigenous German literature. To be sure, he drew upon and critiqued the work of French enlightened philosophes to create greater room for the German Aufklärung. In his final entries to the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1769), for example, he maintains that one of his greatest tasks at the Hamburg National Theater had been to evaluate closely and critically several of the most exemplary works (“Muster”) of the French classical repertoire. Here, too, Lessing criticizes his countrymen for their gullibility in believing that to imitate the French is as noble an undertaking as imitating the ancients. By playing the ancients off against selected representatives of the French Enlightenment, Lessing created more space for creative productions in the German language, thereby contributing even more to the construction of German cultural identity.28 Two of Lessing’s most pragmatic modes of enlightening were the theater, the most public of literary genres, and the distribution of a wide range of materials to the reading public, including the work of foreign writers in German translation. The critique of Pierre Corneille in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie discloses several of the strategies that characterize Lessing’s project of enlightenment: 1. Combining polemical flair with philological precision, Lessing turns Corneille’s concept of reason against him by enlisting the support of the very authority (Aristotle) whom the French dramatist had claimed for himself.29 2. While in the process of rigorously cross-examining Corneille’s works, Lessing interjects several positive remarks concerning the work of a contemporary, Denis Diderot (1713–1784), whose bourgeois dramas Lessing greatly admired.30 Where, in the first instance, Lessing employs the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to reveal the French writer’s shortcomings, he now enlists a modern French writer as an ally against the French neoclassical tradition. However, he also adds a critical remark. “Nun war es klar, warum Diderot das Theater seiner Nation auf dem Gipfel der Vollkommenheit nicht sahe, auf dem wir [Deutsche] es


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durchaus glauben sollen; warum er so viel Fehler in den gepriesenen Meisterstücken desselben fand: bloß und allein, um seinen Stücken Platz zu schaffen.”31 To be sure, Lessing remained critical of some of the differences that his contemporary, Diderot, was drawing in his own analysis of Aristotle (see, for example, the end of the ninety-first entry). But the strategy is no less keen. 3. Lessing then moves from the particular case, namely, his rejection of Corneille’s interpretation of tragedy, to the general, and proclaims that the entire French nation’s view of tragedy is flawed! “Gerade keine Nation hat die Regeln des alten Dramas mehr verkannt, als die Franzosen” (Ba 6: 687). In this instance, Lessing seems to have employed his “shock” technique in order to awaken the Germans from the slumbers that owed to the entrenchment of French customs, manners, and values in their own social life. 4. In light of his experiences in Hamburg, Lessing’s statements in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie reflect the growing concern that the attempt to establish a German national theater was foundering. We do not have to wait until the final entries to this work (101–104) to see how Lessing’s critique of Corneille and his frustration over developments — or lack thereof — on the Hamburg stage are intertwined. Already in the eightieth Stück, for example, Lessing seems to derive some comfort in thinking that not only “wir Deutsche” but also “die Franzosen” have no theater (Ba 6: 581). This type of low-level criticism, however, reflects a dire situation in the progressive development of German literature. Curiously, already in 1760, in the eighty-first letter of the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, that is, at a time when Lessing was building support for a national theater, he had written: “Wir haben kein Theater. Wir haben keine Schauspieler. Wir haben keine Zuhörer.”32 In the Hamburgische Dramaturgie — and upon quoting Diderot — he now added, not without contradiction, that the French at least had a stage that was “das Vergnügen einer ganzen großen Hauptstadt,” whereas the German had hardly a booth (Bude) which was “der Spott des Pöbels” (Ba 6: 701). Personal disappointments aside, Lessing’s critical comments created room for future possibilities through his relegation of the French classicistic tradition to the past. However, given the knowledge that Lessing had acquired concerning the still unhappy state of German cultural affairs, the path to the advancement of an indigenous German literature via the refinement (Leibniz) and creative activation (Lessing) of the German language would have to lead away from the purely negative denunciation of the classical French heritage which, unlike in “Germany,” had developed in unison with the nation.

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5. The turn away from Corneille to Diderot is in fact part of a larger strategy. More than a decade before writing his dramaturgy, Lessing had implemented a practical feature of what may be termed a unique project of enlightenment with the writing and staging of Miß Sara Sampson (1755), the fictional location of which was England. In the course of the eighteenth century, George Lillo’s domestic tragedy, Diderot’s drame bourgeois, and Lessing’s bürgerliches Trauerspiel were successfully offsetting “high” tragedy and reshaping public taste. In the theater, the interests and heroics of the aristocracy were no longer being privileged. Instead, the Trauerspiel was now addressing the concerns with which the vast majority of (middle-class) theatergoers could identify. At the same time, the domestic theater cultivated, shaped, and reshaped the values of the German middle class. As we have seen, this did not occur in isolation but, rather, in public dialogue with representatives of the European Enlightenment. In the eighty-sixth through eighty-ninth installments of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Lessing is particularly impressed with two aspects of Diderot’s dramatic practice and argumentation. First, the Frenchman’s explanation of the serious comedy complements Lessing’s own creative production of Minna von Barnhelm (1767). Second, Lessing is persuaded by Diderot’s distinction between contrasted (“kontrastierte”) and truly different (“verschiedene”) characters (Ba 6: 612), the latter of which are most consistent with society as lived (“Gesellschaft im gemeinen Leben”; 612). The development of a new form of drama cultivated greater attentiveness to diversity. Even though Lessing is critical of Diderot on a number of points, the two dramatists share some common values. The dramatis personae resemble and represent both middle-class and lower-middle class members of society. In Minna von Barnhelm, Lessing expands the serious comedy (ernste Komödie) to include the nobility and lower nobility. Again in dialogue with Diderot, Lessing began to blur the sharp distinctions between tragedy and comedy, thus preparing the way for tragicomedy, for example, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (The Tutor, 1774). Most importantly, however, for both Lessing and Diderot, every character on the stage is defined by its own unique moral character (“ihren individuellen moralischen Charakter”; 611). In the end, as we have observed, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing engaged and, at times, went well beyond the thinking of numerous representatives of the European Enlightenment, by virtue of which he helped to put the German Aufklärung on the map of intellectual history and literary practice.


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Scholarship on Lessing and the European Enlightenment From the nineteenth to the the end of the twentieth century, there have been over 6,000 scholarly studies of Lessing and his works. In addition to journal articles, a number of excellent collections of essays have appeared over the past thirty years that should be consulted in order to gain greater insight into, and stimulus for future research on Lessing’s relationship to the European Enlightenment.33 In the 1977 volume Lessing in heutiger Sicht, edited by Edward P. Harris and Richard E. Schade, the lead articles by Horst Steinmetz and Armand Nivelle form a framework within which the voluminous scholarship on Lessing has tended to vacillate. Steinmetz seeks to liberate the writer from his “Status eines umstrittenen Klassikers” (29) by situating him squarely within the German Protestant tradition. The image of Lessing as a “second Luther,” that is, “der scharfsinnige und scharfzüngige Kritiker,” guaranteed him a place in the twentieth century.34 As Goethe conveyed to Peter Eckermann on October 12, 1825, “Ein Mann wie Lessing täte uns not. Denn wodurch ist dieser so groß als durch seinen Charakter, durch sein Festhalten! — So kluge, so gebildete Menschen gibt es viele, aber wo ist ein solcher Charakter!” (21) As Luther had become the great reformer, so Lessing has become the “Reformator der deutschen Literatur” (27). Here we are reminded of Friedrich Schiller’s characterization of Lessing in his seminal essay, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795–96), as “der gebildete Zögling,” and, importantly, “ein so wachsamer Richter seiner selbst.”35 Broadening the perspective, Nivelle views Lessing as a “Literaturkritiker” within the fuller context of European Enlightenment (90). However, in reviewing the profound impact of the work of numerous writers of the Enlightenment on Lessing’s works, Nivelle creates the impression that practically every one of the writer’s major achievements in the area of literary criticism is, in one way or another, dependent upon the insights of those who preceded him. Nivelle’s point, however, is that the sum total of the individual influences from abroad forms the cohesive unity of Lessing’s thought. Furthermore, Nivelle submits that the contradictions (“Widersprüche”) that characterize Lessing’s numerous undertakings owe to the unique interplay in his method of investigation. For Lessing was the first to employ consistently the “Gegensatz zwischen deduktiver . . . und induktiver Methode” (102), that is, in our own words, the opposition between Descartes and Locke with respect to the theory of knowledge.36 With regard to the possibility that Lessing’s contradictions stem, at least in part, from his polemics, Klaus Bohnen has attributed the writer’s polemics to his partisanship for Geist over Buchstabe, the privileging of

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spirit over the letter.37 Nivelle sees that, as an art and a science, Lessing’s polemics consists in a “geschickt und bewußt angewandte Methode der Diskussion fremder Ansichten zum Zweck der Darlegung eigener oder für sinnvoll und richtig gehaltener Meinungen, die hier im Selbstverständnis des Polemikers für den Geist gegen den Buchstaben eintreten” (105). For Steinmetz, Lessing’s polemic method consists in the “Einbeziehen des Lesers in den Denkprozeß” (110). In the end, Lessing’s masterful application of polemics in his disputes with both German and foreign writers expanded the limits of the discourse of the European Enlightenment. The 1986 collected volume Lessing and the Enlightenment, edited by Alexej Ugrinsky, contains remarkable contributions that illuminate the relationship between Lessing and the European Enlightenment. One of these, Thomas A. Kovach’s “Lessing, Oliver Goldsmith, and the Tradition of Sentimental Comedy,” includes references to La Chaussée and a note on Cibber (see esp. p. 50). Another is Gisela F. Ritchie’s excellent contribution, “Toward Emancipation with Wit and Heart: The Role of Women in Lessing’s Early Comedies” (129–38). Humanität und Dialog, a collected volume edited by Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Laurence G. Lyon and published in 1982, addresses two of the most characteristic aspects of the German Aufklärung, namely the call for humane humanity and the cultivation of enlightenment through dialogue, the latter being one of the main forms of communication in writings of the European Enlightenment. The collected volume Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang, edited by Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh and published in 1984, contains some of the most extensive and detailed accounts of Lessing and the European Enlightenment and, as such, is an indispensable source of knowledge that encourages positive, critical reflection on the writer and his work. No fewer than ten contributions are devoted to Lessing’s relationship to the works of writers outside of Germany. Wilfried Barner explores Lessing’s European orientation as a member of the res publica litteraria. One of the most challenging contributions is by Gonthier-Louis Fink, who takes a close, critical look at the problem of national character and prejudices in Lessing’s work.38 In Fink’s view, Lessing sought, with the assistance of negative stereotypes, to correct the all-too-positive view of France, in the process of which “die Vorurteile der deutschen Elite” were unmasked (107). As Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot had criticized France, so Lessing wished to assume the same role for his countrymen (107). In Nathan der Weise (1779), for example, he showed how religious and national prejudices endanger society in particular and humanity in general (114). As we saw earlier, cosmopolitanism counterbalanced any patriotism that Lessing may have registered. According to Fink, the two leading ideas for Lessing were tolerance and cosmopolitanism, which, by 1780, the writer had coupled with an exalted consciousness of self and anti-French patriotism (116). Nevertheless,


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Lessing underscored the need to recognize the human being in one’s fellow human being (117). It is important to add that Lessing introduced this idea already in the earliest phases of his career. In the twenty-sixth paragraph of Das Christentum der Vernunft (The Christianity of Reason),39 for example, Lessing advanced the idea of moral duty in the manner of Aristotle, namely to act in accordance with one’s own individual perfections. The statement clearly registers the impact of Leibniz’s concept of the monad on Lessing’s thinking. Whereas Barner attributes too little to Lessing, Fink expects too much. What has been missing is a more detailed account of Lessing’s own project of enlightenment. This enterprise consisted in building a greater sense of cultural identity among the Germans while, at the same time, profiting from and contributing to the European Enlightenment movement in unique, substantive, and even exemplary ways. To be sure, because Lessing considered himself to be a world citizen, he could be neither a fanatical patriot nor a narrow-minded and provincial scholar.40 In her excellent investigation of traces of French theater in Lessing’s works, Gisela F. Ritchie examines closely Lisette’s roles in the comedies of Philippe Néricault Destouches and Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux as compared to Lessing’s treatment of the same character in his dramatic writings. Ritchie suggests that Lessing tied both French writers to the development of a nation. The realization of political unification in Germany under a cohesive sense of “nation” would have to wait until the nineteenth century. As Ritchie observes, young Lessing was indebted to both Destouches and Marivaux for insight into the psychological makeup and spiritual components of his characters, irrespective of social standing. Unlike in the works of the two French writers, however, in Lessing’s comedies Lisette takes on her own unique manner (“ihre eigene Art”), becoming an equal in the cast of characters (124). As in the case of both Destouches and Marivaux, however, Lessing’s Lisette is “eine Menschenkennerin, welche alle anderen Charaktere mit scharfem Blick durchschaut und analysiert” (125). It is precisely the liveliness of such characters that lends Lessing’s dramatic works their progressive quality (122). Among the many other fine contributions in Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik, the student of Lessing and the European Enlightenment will find comparisons between Lessing and Pascal and Warburton (Nicholas Boyle), Nathan the Wise and Adam Smith (Helga Slessarev), Nathan der Weise and Candide (Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs), and problems associated with Lessing’s relationship to Voltaire (Ute van Runset). The original contribution here by Reinhard Lauer on Lessing’s reception in Russia anticipates the work on Lessing abroad that is now available in Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000).

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In his summary remarks Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik, Albert M. Reh pleads that scholarship on Lessing be brought into the contemporary European dialogue. He concludes: “In Wolfenbüttel hat man einen Ort, an dem man die europäische Aufklärung von Leibniz bis Lessing zu einem Programm gemacht hat, um auch unseren, den deutschen Anteil an der europäischen kulturellen Entwicklung, an der Genese Europas, darzustellen. In diesem Bemühen besitzt Lessing einen hohen Stellenwert. Er ist die zentrale Figur” (363). Through the work of the American Lessing Society and the Lessing Yearbook, however, Lessing is at home not only in Germany but in the United States, as well as abroad. As Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000) has made clear, over the centuries, Lessing has become a world citizen. In the light of the historical context in which he was working, however, Lessing’s experience was somewhat different. In revisiting Lessing’s journey to Italy, for example, Conrad Wiedemann arrives at the following conclusion: “Lessing gehörte, obwohl polyglott, europäisch gebildet und weltbürgerlich gesinnt, nicht zu den reisebegeisterten Leuten seines Jahrhunderts” (151). Whereas Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik pictures Lessing as an active member of the European Enlightenment, the 1993 collection Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings, edited by Wolfram Mauser and Günter Sasse, concentrates on his style, methods, and debates within the context of the German Aufklärung. Two exceptions must be noted, however. Armand Nivelle explores the close stylistic affinities between Lessing and Voltaire, and Wilfried Ziegler takes a first look at Lessing’s discussion of Dormont de Belloy’s Zelmire in the eighteenth and nineteenth entries of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie.

A Final Word Like so many other writers of the European Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing did not suffer from amnesia with respect to the ancient past. He understood that to be enlightened meant to be open to all sources of knowledge for the betterment of society and humankind. In the end, and with respect to the future, the more the moral character of the human being is emphasized, and the more members of society are educated, the more the individual and society can be transformed into something “higher” than what is possible when concentrating only on the reality of the present.

Notes 1

Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 4. Robert Anchor’s judgment the


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following year was even harsher. “It was this general abjectness of German society and the adaptation of the intelligentsia to it that gave the German Enlightenment its distinct character.” The Enlightenment Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 118. Happily, the second volume of Gay’s The Enlightenment, The Science of Freedom, contains an illuminating comparison, “Diderot and Lessing: Two Respectful Revolutionaries” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 249–90. Importantly, in his collection of primary works from the time of the Enlightenment, Gay stresses “the international quality of the Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1973), 13. In his concise study, The Enlightenment (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990), Roy Porter builds upon Gay’s insights. Porter directs the reader’s attention to the activities of more “common” men and, to a lesser degree, women, who in their own unique way numbered among the principal players of the period. In short, the book expands our knowledge of the diverse character of the historical Enlightenment. Approaching the Enlightenment in this way, Porter helps us appreciate the complexities of the questions that advocates of enlightenment raised and the problems they encountered when doing so. 2 In Mendelssohn’s essay, the concepts of theoretical and practical enlightenment are interrelated. “Aufklärung verhält sich zur Kultur, wie überhaupt Theorie und Praxis; wie Erkenntnis zur Sittlichkeit; wie Kritik zur Virtuosität. An und für sich betrachtet, (objektive) stehen sie in dem genauesten Zusammenhange; ob sie gleich subjektive sehr oft getrennet sein können.” Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift, ed. Norbert Hinske, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), 446. 3 In answer to the question what is the European Enlightenment?, Paulos Mar Gregorios suggests that one should focus on five elements, which he lists in his book, A Light Too Bright: The Enlightenment Today. An Assessment of the Values of the European Enlightenment and a Search for New Foundations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 29–30. Whereas Gregorios limits the concept to the eighteenth century, we underscore the fact that, as Immanuel Kant himself maintained, the eighteenth century was but one age, or step in the future realization of enlightenment. The “special focus” of the European Enlightenment was “understanding,” the study of which “transformed the way people all over the world perceive and understand” (31). The word “Enlightenment” has been capitalized when referring to the historical Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The lower-case spelling refers to the advancement of enlightenment over a broader span of time, to which Kant and others referred. 4

A major study of Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s project is Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979). See, as well, the outstanding collection of essays edited by Frank A. Kafker, Notable Encyclopedias of the Late Eighteenth Century: Eleven Successors of the “Encyclopédie” (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1994), which includes an extensive and highly informative contribution titled “The Deutsche Encyclopädie” by Willi Goetschel, Catriona Macleod, and Emery Synder, 257–333. 5

Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 6, Modern Philosophy, part 1, The French Enlightenment to Kant (New York: Image, 1964), 125.

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6 Hagen Schulze, Kleine Deutsche Geschichte, 4th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996), 67. 7

Schulze, Kleine Deutsche Geschichte, 67.

8

To be sure, knowledge of the numerous contributions by “common” individuals, or cultured people (gens de culture), to which Roy Porter and others have directed our attention, is likewise indispensable. See his cogent essay, The Enlightenment, esp. p. 6. 9

Stephen Toulmin, “Descartes in His Time,” in Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy: René Descartes, ed. David Weissman (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1996), 124.

10

Descartes, Discourse on Method, 94.

11

John Biro, “Hume’s New Science of the Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 37. 12

Toulmin, “Descartes in His Time,” 143. Toulmin also reminds us of the original meaning of “skeptical.” In brief, classical skeptics neither affirmed nor denied general doctrines (142).

13 In his concise study, Descartes: “Discours de la Méthode” (London: Grant & Cutler, 1984), David Curtis inquires into the nature of the autobiographical mode or “rhetorical weapon” of the piece (16). He argues that Descartes presents his life as a tableau, as “an ‘histoire,’ related with ‘franchise,’ which is also a ‘fable’ . . .” (16). That Descartes did not claim to be writing an autobiography, as Curtis points out (17), does not mean that the writing does not contain autobiographical elements. Quite the contrary. According to Curtis, “He [Descartes] is writing about the past to explain the present, and therefore describes how he became a Cartesian only when this ‘how’ can also be presented as a ‘why,’ a reason others can acknowledge as of general import” (17). Curtis’s insightful analysis of Descartes’s method and writing style (20–21) leads to a number of important conclusions. One of the most significant is that intuition and deduction define “the twofold activity of the mind in the Method”: “. . . as truth is perceived in the act of intuition, truth cannot be defined apart from that act” (30). 14

G. W. Leibniz: New Essays on the Understanding, eds. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 44. 15

The Works of John Locke. A new edition, corrected. In Ten Volumes (London, 1823. Reprinted by Scientia Verlag, Aalen, 1963), vol. 1: 21. 16 Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett point out that by comprehending the mind as a blank slate, “Locke does himself wrong, suggesting more passivity in the mind than he seriously believed it to have” (G. W. Leibniz: New Essays on the Understanding, xvi). 17

For a concise statement regarding the differences in Descartes’s and Locke’s approaches, see Nicholas Jolley, Locke: His Philosophical Thought (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 19–20. 18

This particular example is taken from Peter Remnant’s and Jonathan Bennett’s introduction to their edition, G. W. Leibniz: New Essays on Human Understanding, xv. Subsequent citations are in the text.


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19

Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: The Modern Library), 152.

20 As noted by Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, AL: U of Alabama P, 1973), 27. 21

G. E. Lessing, Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, in Gottfried Ephraim Lessing: Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), 8:441. Unless otherwise noted, all citations are from this edition (Ba).

22

G. E. Lessing, Axiomata, Ba 9: 63.

23

G. E. Lessing, Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, Ba 1: 729. Subsequent citations are in the text. 24 Roland Mortier, “Lessing und die französische Aufklärung des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 2 (1980): 201–10. 25

Fritz Schalk, “Lessing und die französische Aufklärung,” in Lessing und die Zeit der Aufklärung: Vorträge gehalten auf der Tagung der Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften Hamburg am 10. und 11. Oktober 1967 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 156.

26

Wilfried Barner, “Res publica litteraria und das Nationale. Zu Lessings europäischer Orientierung,” in Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang: Beiträge zur Internationalen Tagung der Lessing Society in der Werner-Reimers-Stiftung Bad Homburg v.d.H. 11. bis 13. Juli 1983, special volume of Lessing Yearbook, ed. Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh (Detroit: Wayne State UP; Munich: edition text ⫹ kritik, 1984), 79. Barner submits that Lessing embraced not only the vision of a modernized republic of scholars, as did Bayle, but one that contains within it the tendency toward a radical polemics in modern journalism.

27

Barner, “Res publica litteraria und das Nationale,” 88.

28

A recent definition of identity captures well what Lessing was trying to achieve. “. . . individuals may engage in strategic communicative work that permits them to interactionally foreground or suppress specific identities.” Paul V. Kroskrity, “Identity,” in Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 107. The article first appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1999). 29

In numerous entries in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, for example, Lessing draws upon Aristotle as an authority in order to disclose major flaws in the work of Pierre Corneille. For a discussion of Lessing’s use of epistemic authority, see my essay, “Authority and Criticism: Lessing’s Critical and Dramatic Procedure.” Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht, ed. Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris and Lawrence G. Lyon (Detroit: Wayne State UP; Munich: text ⫹ kritik, 1982), 143–53.

30 For a recent full-length study, see Johannes Friedrich Lehmann’s very interesting book, Der Blick durch die Wand: Zur Geschichte des Theaterzuschauers und des Visuellen bei Diderot und Lessing (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2000).

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31

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Ba 6: 607. Subsequent citations are in the text by volume and page number.

32

G. E. Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, Ba 4: 700.

33

Among these, and discussed below, are the following publications: Lessing in heutiger Sicht: Beiträge zur Internationalen Lessing-Konferenz, Cincinnati, Ohio 1976, ed. Edward P. Harris and Richard E. Schade, with the assistance of Richard T. Gray, Carolyn Smith, and Ilse Zingis (Bremen/Wolfenbüttel: Jacobi, 1977); Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht: Beiträge zum Internationalen Lessing-Mendelssohn-Symposium anläßlich des 250. Geburtstages von Lessing und Mendelssohn, veranstaltet im November 1979 in Los Angeles, Kalifornien, ed. Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Laurence G. Lyon (Detroit: Wayne State UP; Munich: text ⫹ kritik, 1982); Lessing and the Enlightenment, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), which contains the proceedings of the 1981 Interdisciplinary Conference in Commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the Death of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang: Beiträge zur Internationalen Tagung der Lessing Society in der Werner-Reimers-Stiftung Bad Homburg v. d. H. 11. bis 13. Juli 1983, ed. Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh (Detroit: Wayne State UP; Munich: text ⫹ kritik, 1984); Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings: Referate der Internationalen Lessing-Tagung der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg und der Lessing Society an der University of Cincinnati, Ohio/USA, vom 22. bis 24. Mai 1991 in Freiburg im Breisgau, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Günter Sasse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993); and Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): Proceedings of the Lessing Society Conference “Lessing International — Lessing Reception Abroad” held at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 28–31 October 1999, ed. John A. McCarthy, Herbert Rowland, and Richard E. Schade (Göttingen: Wallstein; Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001). In addition to numerous journal articles, the Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung are indispensable secondary sources. 34

For context and more detailed information on the intellectual-historical terrain of the early twentieth century with respect to Luther, see my book, Between Luther and Münzer: The Peasant Revolt in German Drama and Thought (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1988).

35

Friedrich Schiller. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 8: Friedrich Schiller: Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 783.

36

On this important point, the study by Leonard Wessell, also in Lessing in heutiger Sicht, “Das widersprüchliche Wesen der Lessingschen Auffassung von Theologie” (187–95), complements his thought-provoking book, G. E. Lessing’s Theology: A Reinterpretation: A Study in the Problematic Nature of the Enlightenment (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1977). In the area of religion, one should consult a still earlier, in-depth study by Henry A. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1966). See also Arno Schilson’s important works on the subject, e.g. “Lessing und die Aufklärung. Notizen zur Forschung,” in Theologie und Philosophie Vierteljahrsschrift 54 (1979): 379–405, to which Guthke refers in Humanität und Dialog, 10–11.


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37 Klaus Bohnen, Geist und Buchstabe: Zum Prinzip des kritischen Verfahrens in Lessings literarästhetischen und theologischen Schriften (Cologne: Böhlau, 1974). 38 Fink’s central thesis is that Lessing was not interested in the climate theories of eighteenth-century French philosophes which would have sensitized him to the differences between cultures. Rather, he was most interested in the psychological and sociological aspects of prejudice (Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik, 117). Only late in his career did Lessing register some understanding of the climate theories advanced by Dubos in Réflexions critiques, a work that Lessing had translated early on, and the Abbé d’Espiard’s L’Esprit des Nations, which he had reviewed already in 1753 in the Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung. In particular, Fink is especially critical of what he calls Lessing’s “Hohn und Bitterkeit” against France (105). However, on this score, we should keep in mind the work of any number of French writers to whom Lessing was indebted, such as Destouches, Marivaux, and Diderot. 39 Written circa 1752 and published posthumously in Theologischer Nachlaß, edited by Karl Lessing, in 1784. Actual date of appearance was Easter 1785. 40

Barner, “Res publica litteraria und das Nationale,” 81. Here, too, we should not forget Lessing’s sense of humor and comedic style, not simply in the writing of comedy but also in so many of his prose works as well. See also my articles “Comedy and Criticism: Lessing’s Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend,” in The Eighteenth-Century Book Review, ed. Herbert Rowland and Karl J. Fink (Heidelberg: Karl Winter, 1995), 73–84, and “Chaos and Comedy: Lessing’s Theory and Practice,” Lessing Yearbook 34 (2002): 21–33.

Criticism and Aesthetics

Lessing the Critic: Polemics as Enlightenment Klaus L. Berghahn

The Age of Criticism

T

HE SIGNIFICANCE OF Lessing for literary criticism can be justly compared to that of Kant for the Enlightenment’s critical method.1 Criticism became for both of them an activity to which all else must be subordinated, as Kant wrote in the preface of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781). Both used their critical arsenals to destroy old dogmas and new prejudices; they thought independently and wrote on behalf of a reading public. Between the compulsive systematization of rules and dogmatic Aristotelianism of Gottsched’s school on the one hand and a nascent theory of aesthetics by the disciples of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) on the other, Lessing developed a new literary criticism — one that did equal justice to both the principles of art and the emotional responses to it. This sort of transformation was wrought in the literary debates after 1750, and it has had consequences for literary criticism ever since. The critic reasons openly before the public and on its behalf, and he stimulates public discussions, the goal of which is to arrive at a consensus. To be sure, discussions on aesthetics and criticism in the eighteenth century were not just intellectual debates about art and taste, they also had indirect consequences for the development of a bourgeois public sphere in Germany, which explains their often polemical tone.2 Attentive contemporaries recognized early on that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s arrival marked the start of a new epoch of literary criticism. “Es ist hier ein neuer Criticus aufgestanden,” reported Johann Georg Sulzer in 1751 to Johann Jakob Bodmer in Zurich, “er scheint nur noch ein wenig zu jung.”3 At that time Lessing was still an unknown editor of the Berlinische privilegirte Staats- und gelehrte Zeitung (later Vossische Zeitung), in which he published a monthly supplement, “Das Neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes” (The Latest from the Realm of Wit). In it he reviewed the latest publications and established himself as an independent critic between Leipzig and Zurich. His famous seventeenth letter of the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Newest Literature, 1759) is

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well known, but this was not the first attack on Gottsched’s authority. Already in his supplement of 1751 one finds a scathing critique of the second edition of Gottsched’s Gedichte (Poems) that displays the unprecedented tone of Lessing’s criticism: “Der erste Teil is alt, und nur die Ordnung ist neu, welche der schärfsten Hofetiquette Ehre machen würde.” Gottsched’s numerous dedicatory poems are termed “Jubeloden” (Exultation Odes), and the evaluation of the poetical spirit of the Herr Professor closes on the same jeering note: “Die Gedichte kosten 2 Thaler und 4 Groschen. Mit 2 Thlr. bezahlt man das Lächerliche, und mit 4 Gr. ohngefähr das Nützliche.”4 This was indeed a new polemical tone that must have shocked both the literary pope of Leipzig and the reading public. By 1754 Lessing was already considered a “famous writer” whose critical judgments Leipzig and Zurich had to take into account, if only grudgingly. Johann Gottfried Reichel, a student of Gottsched, was of the opinion that contempt would be the best punishment for a young upstart like Lessing.5 However, such tactics were already inadequate as a means for getting at him; he and his Berlin “sect,” as Bodmer was forced to realize, already had the upper hand. By the late 1750s Lessing and his friends Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai had trumped the heritage of Leipzig and Zurich. With their new review journals they dominated contemporary criticism and began to shape the general taste. In his letters Briefe über das Publikum (1768) Justus Riedel (1742–1785) observed that the authors of the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend had eclipsed Gottsched and that they alone held the scepter while the other judges of art either were laughed at or they devoutly repeated the opinions dictated by their masters.6 At the end of the century Lessing’s writings were considered the yardstick for literary criticism. Whether it was Schiller, who called him the preceptor of criticism, or Goethe, who remembered how greatly Laokoon (Laocoön, 1766) had influenced the writers of the following generation, all admired Lessing’s critical judgment and the clarity of his style. In an obituary for Lessing in 1781, Herder summed it up best, noting that no recent writer had had such a salutary effect on the development of German literary taste as Lessing: “Kein neuerer Schriftsteller hat, dünkt mich, in Sachen des Geschmacks und des feineren, gründlichen Urteils über literarische Gegenstände auf Deutschland mehr gewirkt als Lessing.”7 But it was above all Friedrich Schlegel who wrote the most profound evaluation of Lessing’s literary criticism. When Schlegel edited a selection of Lessing’s works in 1804, he arranged them so that Lessing’s intellectual profile as the “eigentliche[r] Autor der Nation und des Zeitalters” would become evident to the reader. On this occasion he wrote a general introduction, “Vom Wesen der Kritik” (On the Essence of Criticism), which is still one of the best essays on criticism and on Lessing’s method that has been written. Everything Lessing

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did, he noted, can be summarized under the rubric of “criticism”: “Alles was Lessing getan, gebildet, versucht und gewollt hat, läßt sich am füglichsten unter dem Begriff der Kritik zusammenfassen.”8 In order to define his own understanding of literary criticism, Schlegel outlines a short history of criticism that begins with the Greeks. They are for him the inventors of criticism, which they soon developed into a “Wissenschaft.” This old criticism served fundamentally as the selection of classical authors and the treatment of various interpretations, in other words: the formation of a classical canon and a philological critique of the texts. Schlegel was convinced that without such a criticism no literature could sustain itself for long, because critical inquiry cultivates tradition and preserves its spirit. Germany suffered for centuries from the absence of erudition and critical sensibility, and when it was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, scholars lacked a sufficient “Kunstsinn.” They were content when poets imitated nature and followed a dogmatic system of rules, according to which they judged the works of art. This phase of pedantic criticism was shaken by the debate on taste, or as Schlegel put it, by the rediscovery of the “Kunstgefühl.” Yet, as long as scholars merely theorized about aesthetic sensations of art, this did not have many consequences for criticism, since critics had first to learn how to practice, apply, and cultivate aesthetic judgment. This modern criticism, which dealt with the effects of art as well as with the rules of its genres, found its “master” in Lessing. As a critic, he spoke for both the connoisseur and a reading public whose perception of and reaction to art he explained, inasmuch as he determined the limits of “poetische Gemälde” and delineated the traits of literature that are specific to each genre. For this critical endeavor, it was also necessary to combat dogmatic distortions, errors, and prejudices that hindered the development of modern literature and criticism. These refutations, which can be found in all of Lessing’s theological, antiquarian, and literary treatises, have a polemical tone that Schlegel considers a “sehr nahe verwandte Gattung” to criticism.9 There is still one more element which defines Lessing’s form of criticism: “Popularität.” This quality of his style aims at an “allgemeine Verständlichkeit,” which transcends the republic of scholars and sparks the interest of a broader reading public. Lessing’s “crushing eloquence” and his rhetorical feel for the public are essential characteristics of his criticism, qualities that make it as lively as it is combative. In this way Lessing gave literary criticism in Germany a “sichere Grundlage,” upon which successive generations could build. Friedrich Schlegel’s essay is paradigmatic for his own historical and comprehensive criticism, which he called “characterization.” Even if we no longer subscribe to his one-sided view of Lessing’s critical works at the expense of his literary production, Schlegel’s characterization of Lessing as critic is still exemplary. Since the days of Schlegel it has become customary

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in Lessing scholarship to praise Lessing as a brilliant critic. Yet, scarcely enough has been said on Lessing’s form of criticism and his polemics as a method.10

Primus sapientiae gradus est, falsa intelligere; secundus, vera cognoscere. This aphorism of the Church father Lactantius can be read as Lessing’s motto for his polemical criticism: Recognize and refute falsehood for the sake of truth. Thus, in an excursus on method, he advises the critic to find first of all someone with whom he can argue: “er suche sich nur erst jemanden, mit dem er streiten kann: so kommt er nach und nach in die Materie, und das übrige findet sich.” For this purpose, he freely admits, he has chosen French writers (“die französischen Scribenten vornehmlich erwählet, und unter diesen besonders den Hrn. von Voltaire”).11 This was not offered lightly or as an ad hominem attack, but simply as a polemical starting point; in fact, it perfectly captures Lessing’s approach, which is polemical, dialogic, and inductive. He seeks a veritable opponent who provokes him, and this leads him into the matter at hand; by refuting an erroneous opinion he clarifies his own viewpoint and develops his own argumentation. For Lessing, criticism was a sort of “Gymnastik des Geistes” (Mendelssohn) and polemics were the ideal method to gain new insights. “Man scheint vergessen zu wollen,” he once wrote, “daß die Aufklärung so mancher wichtiger Punkte dem bloßen Widerspruch zu danken ist, und daß die Menschen noch über nichts einig sein würden, wenn sie noch über nichts in der Welt gezankt hätten.”12 Enlightenment as criticism, and polemic as method; this is perhaps the most precise characterization of Lessing’s criticism. Even so, the polemical tone disturbed more tender minds, which feared that such criticism would destroy the enjoyment of art and harm the genius. Thus the first reviewer of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–69) offered the reproach that the German theater was “noch in einem viel zu zarten Alter, als daß es den monarchischen Zepter der Lessingischen Kritik ertragen könnte.”13 “But that is altogether wrong!” Lessing would have replied, for it was the intent of his criticism to promote the still developing German literature. As a critic, he dealt gently with young talents, encouraged writers of middling talent, and was implacable only against famous poets or those held to be such (LM 10:437). Lessing viewed his criticism — and that includes his polemics — as indisputably productive. Just a cursory look at some of his treatises, which begin unfailingly with polemical remarks, confirms that he was more interested in the matter


71

at hand than in the person he was dealing with. His Abhandlungen über die Fabel (Treatises on the Fable, 1759) are primarily a series of critiques of older definitions of the genre that lead him to his own. “Ich sehe eine Menge Fußtapfen vor mir,” he writes in the introductory paragraph, “die ich zum Theil untersuchen muß, wenn ich überall sichere Tritte zu thun gedenke.”14 To his criticism of Breitinger he added the reverent statement that he would have learned little from the great judge of art, “wenn er in meinen Gedanken noch überall recht hätte” (LM 7:431). Whatever the case may be, the authorities must be questioned, and the polemical criticism, which moved beyond the classroom, confirms the maturity of the critic. The rigor of Lessing’s argumentation was an act of enlightenment and of public reasoning. This is illustrated perhaps best in his famous, even infamous, seventeenth letter of the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, which damned Gottsched’s reforms: “Es wäre zu wünschen, daß sich Herr Gottsched niemals mit dem Theater vermengt hätte. Seine vermeinten Verbesserungen betreffen entweder entbehrliche Kleinigkeiten, oder sind wahre Verschlimmerungen.”15 What a merciless attack and condescending tone, which reads like a contemptible premature obituary. And yet, it is only the continuation of Lessing’s own understanding of modern drama, which he had articulated as early as 1756 in his letters on tragedy to Mendelssohn and Nicolai16 and which he brought to its final form eleven years later in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Even his treatise Laokoon, in which Lessing counters Simonides’ blinding antithesis that understands painting as mute poetry and poetry as verbal painting, has an underlying polemical tone. The impetus to address this issue came also from Winckelmann’s hymnic description of the Hellenistic Laocoön group. Through a critique of Winckelmann’s opinion that this Hellenistic statue expresses the noble simplicity and quiet sublimity of the Greek spirit, he was able to delve into the material and crystallize his own ideas about the limitations of the visual and literary arts. Typical for his arresting style, Lessing much later interrupts his argument and pretends that he has first to read the latest publication by Winckelmann: “Des Herrn Winckelmanns Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums ist erschienen. Ich wage keinen Schritt weiter, ohne dieses Werk gelesen zu haben.”17 What a game he is playing with the reader! To be sure, he was familiar with the book for some time as he worked on Laokoon, and Winckelmann served once again as a stimulus for his interrupted treatise. Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie is essentially literary criticism with a polemical edge. It is a collection of theater reviews, a fact that is often overlooked in light of their overall theoretical substance. “Diese Dramaturgie,” Lessing begins, “soll ein kritisches Register von allen aufzuführenden Stücken halten und jeden Schritt begleiten, den die

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Kunst, sowohl des Dichters, als des Schauspielers, hier thun wird.”18 However, Lessing was soon dissatisfied with his role as a mere chronicler of theater productions, and he proceeded to develop his own Aristotelian theory of drama by writing extensive reviews. His criticism anticipated a future national theater, a bourgeois drama, and an ideal public. This cumulative perspective sheds light also on Lessing’s polemics against the “französische Skribenten,” whom he attacked so aggressively. Yet his polemics against Voltaire and Corneille were directed primarily against the tyrannical rules that the French playwrights followed only outwardly without fulfilling their spirit.19 Above all, he criticized the formal and social obsolescence of French classical tragedies in order to undermine its structure as a paradigm. For he considered the imitation of French theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth century — as Gottsched had suggested — a mere import of a foreign culture which prevented the creation of a national theater. Therefore, Lessing polemicized against the faux Aristotelianism of Corneille and refuted his errors or misinterpretations in order to develop his own theory of drama. Lessing’s other campaigns against Gottsched, Goeze, Klotz, e tutti quanti need not be discussed further, since they are well documented and simply confirm his critical maxim: to recognize and refute what is false for the sake of truth.

Der Rezensent braucht nicht besser machen zu können, was er tadelt In this fragmentary essay of 1767 Lessing gives an outline of his understanding of art criticism: Tadeln heißt überhaupt, sein Mißfallen zu erkennen geben. Man kann sich bey diesem Mißfallen entweder auf die bloße Empfindung berufen, oder seine Empfindung mit Gründen unterstützen. Jenes thut der Mann von Geschmack: dieses der Kunstrichter. Welcher von ihnen muß das, was er tadelt, besser zu machen verstehn? Man ist nicht Herr von seinen Empfindungen; aber man ist Herr, was man empfindet, zu sagen. Wenn einem Manne von Geschmack in einem Gedichte oder Gemälde etwas nicht gefällt: muß er erst hingehen, und selbst Dichter oder Mahler werden, ehe er es heraussagen darf: das gefällt mir nicht? Ich finde meine Suppe versalzen: darf ich sie nicht eher versalzen nennen, als bis ich selbst kochen kann? Was sind die Gründe des Kunstrichters? Schlüsse, die er aus seinen Empfindungen, unter sich selbt und mit fremden Empfindungen verglichen, gezogen und auf die Grundbegriffe des Vollkommnen und Schönen zurückgeführt hat.


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Ich sehe nicht, warum ein Mensch mit seinen Schlüssen zurückhaltender seyn müsse, als mit seinen Empfindungen. Der Kunstrichter empfindet nicht blos, daß ihm etwas nicht gefällt, sondern er fügt auch noch sein denn hinzu. Und dieses denn sollte ihn zum Bessermachen verbinden? Durch dieses denn müßte er grade des Bessermachens überhoben seyn können.20

The man of taste uses his feelings to judge a work of art, while a critic uses reason. One should not be more reticent with rational conclusions than with feelings, Lessing argues; indeed, because the critic not only senses something displeases him, but also gives a reason for it, he should be exempted from the demand of having to create better art himself. The very title of this fragment is a provocation for all the tender connoisseurs of art who find either that the negativity of criticism and the polemics of the critic disturb the enjoyment of art or that they need to shelter the artist from the rebukes of the critic. All of them view the critic merely as a pedantic carper who reasons because he lacks the talent necessary to create his own art. The topos of this counter-criticism argues that if the critic knows better, then he should also be able to do better instead of just sitting on his high horse of criticism. Lessing answers these critics with the simple truth: one can say a soup is too salty without being a chef. One need not be a painter or poet to criticize literature or paintings when they do not please. It is enough if the critic can defend his judgment. “Kurz, wenn der Kunstrichter durch Tadeln beleidigt, so beleidigt er durch Bessermachen doppelt” (LM 15:64). Behind this simple truth lies a major shift in the history of literary criticism that manifests itself in two ways: it signals both the influence of the discussion on taste and also the shift of literary criticism from classicistic rule-bound poetics to the modern effect-based aesthetics. The task of the critic is not only to defend his judgment, but also to articulate the meaning of works of art to a lay audience and to establish a consensus. Criticism indicates the recognition of one’s displeasure. Either one can base this on mere feeling or one can justify one’s judgment with reasons: “Jenes thut der Mann von Geschmack, dieses der Kunstrichter” (LM 15:62). This differentiation is reminiscent of the beginning of the Laokoon essay, where Lessing had made the distinction between the connoisseurs, the philosopher, and the art critic: Der erste, welcher die Mahlerey und Poesie mit einander verglich, war ein Mann von feinem Gefühle, der von beyden Künsten eine ähnliche Wirkung auf sich verspürte. . . . Ein zweyter suchte in das Innere dieses Gefallens einzudringen, und entdeckte, daß es bey beyden aus einerley Quelle fliesse. Die Schönheit . . . hat allgemeine Regeln. . . . Ein dritter, welcher über den Werth und über die Vertheilung dieser allgemeinen Regeln nachdachte, bemerkte, daß einige mehr in der Mahlerey, andere mehr in der Poesie herrschten. . . .

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Das erste war der Liebhaber; das zweyte der Philosoph; das dritte der Kunstrichter.21

The first to compare painting and poetry was a man of fine sensibility, who noted that both arts had a similar effect on him. A second sought to penetrate to the essence of this enjoyment, and he discovered that in both cases it flowed from the same source. Beauty, whose concept we first derive from physical objects, has general rules. A third man, who pondered the value and the distribution of these rules, noted that some tended to be more dominant in painting, others more in poetry. The first man was a connoisseur in the true sense; the second, a philosopher, and the third was a judge of art. This passage demonstrates how far the judgment of art had removed itself from Gottsched’s standards of criticism. The arts were now to be judged according to their effects on the connoisseur and no longer by objectivistic rules. Thus, the sensualistic aesthetics of effects had triumphed over the classicist poetics of rules in Germany. But unlike the situation in France and England, where taste as common sense could already appeal to a bourgeois public, in Germany the layman’s judgment received a philosophical justification. Philosophers from Baumgarten to Kant supported with reasoned arguments the inwardness of aesthetic pleasure, inquired into the conditions for sensory knowledge, and established criteria by which the Beautiful might be judged. It was the critic who mediated between the emotional responses of educated laymen and aesthetic principles; it was he who applied himself to the individual case and universalized the subjective feeling in order to produce a consensus. In all this, the critic was both an advocate and an educator of the public. Lessing was less a theoretician of the arts and aesthetics than their attentive critic. He was more interested in the practical question of the possible effects the arts could have on the audience than in their systematic theoretical grounding. He followed the taste debate without taking part in it, just as he presupposed the results of Baumgarten’s school of aesthetics without studying them in detail. The various aesthetic theories — up to and including Kant’s — were too little occupied with the general theory of art; they scarcely concerned themselves with artistic practice and most definitely not with problems of genre. But precisely these questions were of interest to Lessing as a critic, one who inquired into the artistic possibilities of the different genres, their means and effects. At the time, however, the new concept of taste complicated the business of art criticism: matters of taste were suddenly up in the air and very contentious, which also explains the polemical nature of the debate. The validation of subjective judgment as a component of taste certainly challenged the authority of objective, rule-bound poetics of rationalistic criticism in the manner of Gottsched, Bodmer, and Breitinger. Since Gottsched could not feign ignorance of the influence of sensual aesthetics


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from abroad, he attempted to integrate personal taste into his system of poetics by neutralizing it with rules. Taste should align itself with reason. “Derjenige Geschmack ist gut,” he writes in the chapter on the taste of the poet, “der mit den Regeln übereinkommt, die von der Vernunft allbereit festgesetzt worden.”22 The Swiss critics bind taste to the rules of art even more rigorously and charge the art critic with the task of meting out punishment and examples like the police. The art critic becomes thus the lawgiver and enforcer for the poet, whom he tells how he can and must improve his work. Nothing could be further from Lessing’s mind! In his fragment of 1767 he rebukes only that which displeases him and substantiates his judgment with a “because.” “Durch dieses denn müßte er [der Kritiker] grade des Bessermachens überhoben seyn können” (LM 15:63). As a judge of art, Lessing is neither a legislator nor a disciplinarian of the poets. He examines the individual work to see whether it has achieved the effects belonging specifically to its genre. Lessing was more concerned with the effects of poetry, to which the formal aspects are subordinated, than with the normative demands of poetics. For this reason he dismissed, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Gottsched’s recipe for the drama, because, for him, the emotional purpose of this genre was more important: “Die dramatische Form ist die einzige, in welcher sich Mitleid und Furcht erregen läßt” (LM 10:123). While Gottsched reduced the function of the drama to the presentation of a moral lesson, Lessing countered that the theater would then not be worth the expense, since the Aesopian fable could accomplish the very same effect just as well. It did not suffice that a work had a noble intention; it had to generate also the effect “die ihm vermöge der Gattung zukommt” (LM 12:122). This and similar sections illustrate how far Lessing had distanced himself from Gottsched’s systematic poetics and how he had sought a standard for a new aesthetics of effect. The result of this paradigm shift in literary criticism and the list of those who fell victim to Lessing’s fiery polemics that accompanied it are sufficiently well known. Therefore, what is of interest here is to observe how Lessing proceeds in justifying (or substantiating) the response of the art critic and then relating it to the specific effects of the genre. That Lessing relieves the critic of the know-it-all task of performing as the artist’s conscience is clear from the title and content of this brief fragment. It simultaneously rejects the deductive method of normative criticism, if for no other reason than that Lessing proceeds from the emotional responses. The critic goes beyond the intuitive responses of the layman’s judgment by establishing philosophical grounds for his feelings and communicating them generally: he is the master with the right to say what he feels. He imputes his judgment to the public, on whose behalf he speaks, and thereby stimulates public discussion. In brief, as a critic he assumes the standpoint of a shared aesthetic sense that needs to be made a reality.

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Fermenta cognitionis Lessing understands his criticism as “the yeast of knowledge,” meant to stimulate contemplation and independent judgment. He wants neither to dictate to the poet how he should write nor to manage the public. As a critic he mediates between work and public, but not in the pedantic schoolmaster fashion that ordains the meaning of a work once and for all; instead he argues from the standpoint of the public in order to stimulate a discussion. Lessing does not empathize with the author or the work of art as do Herder and the Romantics, who sought to understand the Genie and the ideal of his intent. Instead he speaks for the public, whose feelings he explains and makes communicable. In contrast to the hermeneutic and creative literary criticism of Romanticism, Lessing had to deal with different problems: he spoke for an immature public, whose art-sense was hardly developed, and he criticized a classicistic dogmatism that had forced the Genie into the Procrustean bed of rule-bound poetics. The public had to be guided and enlightened, and classicism in the manner of Gottsched had to be criticized. Evidently it was easier for Lessing to build up his own opinions out of antithesis than to develop a theory systematically. That makes the reading of his critical writings both entertaining and edifying, but sometimes also difficult. It is characteristic for Lessing’s polemical criticism to proceed inductively rather that deductively, in dialogue rather than dogma, in popular discourse rather than pedantic dictation, in short: critically rather than systematically. This already annoyed the initial reviewer of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, who would have preferred a concise and systematical instruction in Aristotelian fashion to Lessing’s polemical approach.23 That is exactly what Lessing did not want. Even if his theoretical treatises on literature and art seemed to indicate otherwise, he was no systematizer of aesthetics or poetics. Neither his Laokoon nor the Hamburgische Dramaturgie are systematic theories in the sense of Enlightenment-era philosophy or critical poetics in the manner of Gottsched. Thus he reminds his reader at the end of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in which he indeed actually expounded a theory of the drama, that “diese Blätter [sollen] nichts weniger als ein dramatisches System enthalten” (LM 10:187). Therefore he did not feel obliged to supply a ready answer for every problem or to clarify all contradictions. For him it sufficed if his thoughts stimulated others to think for themselves. In contrast to Gottsched, Lessing did not employ a normative poetics, upon which every work of art would be measured. Instead he preferred to make concessions to the Genie, rather than bind him to rules. Lessing was neither lawgiver nor teacher of poets, and he especially did not want to be their schoolmaster. However, he did want to be a critic and polemicist. As a critic he judged only whether a work of art evoked the appropriate effect for its


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genre; in Laokoon he made an “Anwendung auf den einzeln Fall” (LM 9:3). It is the duty of the critic, he writes in the 105th Literaturbrief, that whenever he plans to judge a work, he should limit himself to that specific work alone (LM 8:237). He articulates the perceptions of the educated layman, whom he places in contact with aesthetic principles. Without binding himself to the inductive method, he still distinguishes himself sufficiently from classicistic deductive criticism. The latter relies on a normative system, while the former speaks of the feelings that an artwork evokes and substantiates them. How the critic comes to his judgment, however, is not mentioned. A section in the fragment “Der Rezensent braucht nicht besser machen zu können, was er tadelt” helps illuminate this. “Was sind die Gründe des Kunstrichters?” he asks and answers laconically: “Schlüsse, die er aus seinen Empfindungen, unter sich selbst und mit fremden Empfindungen verglichen, gezogen und auf die Grundbegriffe des Vollkommnen und Schönen zurückgeführt hat” (LM 15:63). This formulation remains close to those of rationalistic aesthetics yet reflects Lessing’s inductive method and practice. After all, comparison and differentiation make up the foundation of judgments of taste. An inductive and comparative approach brings Lessing to his verdict, which formulates an ideal, and he presents this ideal as a model to his contemporaries. One can characterize Lessing’s structure of criticism as dialectic: “Diese zielt auf das prägnante Beispiel, das zur Grundlage des kritischen Vergleiches und Urteils gemacht wird.”24 The fundamental concepts of completeness and beauty, of which Lessing speaks, are naturally informed by the traditions and discussions of his day. If these also prejudice Lessing’s theory, he still criticizes them when they are based on authorities of the past or on foreign models, but he uses them if they are in harmony with nature and reason. “Zwar mit dem Ansehen des Aristoteles wollte ich bald fertig werden,” he writes in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie and continues in his typical rational manner, “wenn ich es nur auch mit seinen Gründen zu werden wüßte” (LM 10:97). In this sense he criticizes French Classicism, which follows the tyrannical rules without fulfilling their spirit, or French tragedy, if its courtly tone of conversation conflicts with naturalness (LM 10:32). Even when Lessing rests firmly upon tradition, as with Aristotle’s Poetics, he still manages to analyze its compatibility with the ideals of modern literature and bourgeois taste. In this respect Lessing is a typical member of the Enlightenment in that he criticizes classical tradition to make it useful for modern literature. This is quite often overlooked when one stamps Lessing as Aristotelian. Certainly he was a classical philologist and a lover of antiquity like almost all of his contemporaries, but he was neither an antiquarian nor a schoolmaster. Philological text criticism was not foreign to him; on the contrary, he could be just as pedantic as an old-school philologist or

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scholar of antiquity, but he expanded beyond the limits of specialization inasmuch as he brought the classical heritage into contact with contemporary literature. “Das Klassische behandelte er oft mit der Leichtigkeit und Popularität, in der man sonst nur von dem Modernen zu reden pflegte,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “und das Moderne prüfte er mit der Strenge und Genauigkeit, die man ehedem nur bei Behandlung der Alten notwendig fand.”25 This creative familiarity with antiquity enabled him to judge modern literature critically. Nothing was more contemptible to him than pedantic, know-it-all scholars who claimed brazenly to be the guardians of culture. Impertinent professorial geese and pastors such as Gottsched, Klotz, and Goeze made Lessing’s blood boil and aroused his desire to clash. He begins his Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (How the Ancients Visualized Death, 1769) with the humorous and unusual line: “Immer glaubt Herr Klotz, mir auf den Fersen zu sein,” and he continued no less sarcastically, “Aber immer, wenn ich mich, auf seyn Zurufen, nach ihm umwende, sehe ich ihn, ganz seitab, in einer Staubwolke, auf einem Wege einherziehen, den ich nie betreten habe.”26 What polemical derision of an opponent in a scientific dispute. “Seriös im Sinne der Zunft ist das nicht” noted Walter Jens casually,27 but it is characteristic of Lessing’s polemical tone. This Christian Adolf Klotz was not only Professor der Beredsamkeit in Halle, that is, in contrast to Lessing’s rather insecure position a guaranteed one, but also the editor of the Deutsche Bibliothek der Schönen Wissenschaften (German Library of the Beautiful Sciences), a journal which aimed its critical attacks at the “enlighteners” in Berlin and above all against Lessing. Both editor and journal are known now only through Lessing’s polemical attacks. After all, when Lessing was attacked, he pursued and refuted his adversary in every aspect, including the footnotes. In this regard, the Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts (Letters of Antiquarian Matters, 1768/69) are, according to their motto, a “Kampfschrift” directed at Klotz’s “zusammengestoppelte Gelehrsamkeit, den Alltagswitz und Schulblümchen” (LM 10:430). Whenever he found an error, imprecision, or sloppiness in Klotz’s work, he exposed it happily so as to pummel him with satire and ultimately undermine his amassed authority. One example demonstrates Lessing’s tactics and style. Some scholars at the time claimed that the Greeks gained knowledge of sculpture from the Egyptians. Hr. Klotz, der die Quellen gebraucht zu haben versichert, verweist uns desfalls auf Nattern. Natter ist keine Quelle; aber die Quellen werden sich bey dem Natter finden: gut. Ich schlage also Nattern nach. [. . .] Ein Stern verweiset mich unter den Text; und da stehen wirklich einige von diesen Gelehrten genannt: Plinius, Stosch und Mariette. Aber Stosch und Mariette gelten ebensoviel als Natter und Klotz: und alles beruht folglich auf dem Plinius.28


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Here Lessing demonstrates that Klotz has neither looked up nor read the relevant lines from Pliny, because they do not exist. Klotz relied exclusively on another scholar, Natter, without verifying it for himself, and Lessing emphasizes that with a triumphant quod erat demonstrandum: “Wie gefällt Ihnen das? Was sagen Sie zu einem solchen Quellenbraucher, der aus der ersten der besten Pfütze schöpft, ohne sich zu bekümmern, was für Unreinigkeiten auf dem Grunde liegen?” (LM 10:286). What an extravagant blow to refute the despised Klotz once more! One is almost tempted to say with Lessing: to kill a mosquito, don’t set the haystack on fire. Evidently this literary feud over theories of philology, art, and poetics, as well as philosophy and theology was about more than mere self-promotion or bruised egos, and the polemical form is more than just a method or style. If one considers the severity and radical nature of Lessing’s critical and polemical approach not as simply a literary phenomenon of improving taste, but rather weighs this against the larger context of bourgeois Enlightenment, then Lessing’s public use of reason wins significance that extends beyond the limited confines of literary criticism.

Supplement to the Laws This is how Lessing defined the function of the theater in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (LM 9:210), and Schiller would radicalize this declaration further when he proclaimed in his essay “Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet” (The Stage as a Moral Institution, 1784): “Gerichtsbarkeit der Bühne fängt an, wo das Gebiet der weltlichen Gesetze sich endigt.”29 The theater as a moral institution presents civic virtue, and it criticizes the political morality of despotic absolutism that oppresses the bourgeoisie. Reinhardt Koselleck has interpreted this relationship between criticism and crisis as a concealed dialectical process of morality and politics. Enlightenment criticism excluded itself from the political sphere of the state and established itself as a moral institution “um dann gerade auf Grund dieser Aussparung sich scheinbar neutral auf den Staat auszuweiten und ihn dann seinem Richterspruch zu unterwerfen.”30 The theater becomes, as the lines from Lessing and Schiller demonstrate, the antipode of the existing power structure. Its critical potential manifests itself in literary criticism and persuades the public to desire a change that would topple the absolutist State in a crisis. While Koselleck raises no doubts as to how skeptical he is vis-à-vis this enlightened criticism, Jürgen Habermas defends the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Change of the Public Sphere, 1962) that has occurred since the eighteenth century.31 In the “Zeitalter der Kritik,” literary criticism developed into an instrument with which intellectuals sought to test and expand the realm of intellectual pursuits under absolutism.

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Between the private sphere of the powerless minions and the political realm of state power in the eighteenth century, there was a literary public in which the bourgeoisie discussed its opinions about philosophy, morality, and art. One pondered primarily topics that were deemed apolitical in order to build a consensus among rational human beings and ultimately to influence absolutism, which considered itself enlightened. Thus the public use of reason served a process of collective enlightenment, at the end of which state power would have to legitimize itself before the bourgeois political public. Through literature and criticism, the emerging bourgeois society not only ascertained its own values and lifestyle, but the institution of criticism also helped form political opinion. Under the given power structure though, this remained a compensatory activity, which in part explains the polemical severity of the criticism and debates. Lessing’s criticism can be seen as an example of this form of compensatory thinking: it represents the critical literary public in statu nascendi. In his criticism of the Ständeklausel, a requirement that tragedy deal only with royalty and stately affairs, Lessing remarked in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie that the state is “ein viel zu abstrakter Begriff für unsere Empfindungen” (LM 9:239) and could therefore not move the audience. The burghers were alienated from the state not only because they were mere obedient subjects excluded from politics, but also because they were no longer interested in dramas about affairs of state that evoked horror and awe, but not empathy. Even more radical in the same context is the statement that indeed one could have sympathy with kings, but this would be with them as people, not as royalty (“mit ihnen als mit Menschen, nicht als mit Königen”) (LM 9:239). This sentence, which sounds harmless today, was a political invective under the veil of dramaturgy. In the age of absolutism that meant nothing less than stripping the sovereign of the majesty and supremacy that elevated him above all other mortals and legitimized his authority. If one considers that the French revolutionaries tried the king as a man and not as a sovereign, then the radical substance of these lines becomes evident. For the bourgeois tragedy, these developments meant that the sovereign and the nobility entered the stage not only as men, with all of their flaws and weaknesses, but also as criminals, against whom the “dagger of the tragedy” was directed. This is the bourgeois antithesis to the “Ständeklausel,” which concealed the political issue in the theory of the drama. The same tendency to address moral and political issues under the veil of theory surfaces time and again in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in which Lessing laments the lack of national consciousness of the Germans, who have not succeeded in creating their own national theater. “Ich rede hier nicht von der politischen Verfassung, sondern bloß von dem sittlichen Charakter,” he protests in the sense of a moral criticism in order to conclude sarcastically: “Fast sollte man sagen, dieser sey: keinen eigenen haben zu wollen” (LM 10:213).


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Lessing refrains from political criticism of the fractured state of German lands and its effect on national pride, which would have caught the attention of the censors anyway, and limits himself to moral criticism that was intended nonetheless politically. The opponents of the Enlightenment recognized this indirect attack and called for censorship. We know how the Hamburg pastor Goeze muzzled his opponent with the help of the Braunschweig authorities. Yet this was only the most flagrant case in Lessing’s literary career. Less well known is the temporary censorship of his Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend in 1762, because the journal was characterized as “ein Buch wider die Religion und den Staat.” This was preceded by a denunciation from Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, who wanted to inform “Seine Königl. Majest. in Preußen” with this “untertänigsten Anzeige” that “die Verfasser der Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend, mit Außerachtsetzung der Censur-Gesetze, [mißhandeln] die berühmtesten Gelehrten in allen Landen auf die unhöflichste und unverantwortlichste Art.”32 What the composer of this lettre de cachet failed to mention is the fact that, in addition to works from Voltaire, Rousseau, Gottsched, and the Danish court preacher Cramer, his own novel was shredded by Lessing, which makes his zeal all the more understandable. One other aspect of this smear letter is of interest: Justi complains that this “abgeschmackte Spöttereien” did not shy away from the subject of religion, for which “ein gewisser Jude names Moses” is responsible. Meant here is naturally Moses Mendelssohn, who in addition to Nicolai and Lessing, was a co-editor of the journal. The situation for him, as a protected Jew, was more precarious than for Nicolai or Lessing, and he had to justify himself before the Generalfiskal von Uhde, who ended the affair with an ominous warning.33 Nicolai, who waited until 1807 to report on this episode, called the actions of Lessing and his associates to promote and defend freedom of thought heroic.34 Such evidence should suffice to illuminate the relationship between criticism and the public sphere and to underscore the meaning of criticism for the process of enlightenment.

The Dialectics of Polemical Criticism The fact that its practitioners not only derive pleasure, but can also cut into their own flesh is yet another aspect of polemical criticism. The rhetorical triumphs often come at a price. What comes to mind is not so much the de facto defeats in literary wars, like those with Goeze, because we can thank that for the serious comedy Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), which even Lessing would regard as a gain. No, there should be no more talk about the intellectual conquests and victorious battles, but rather of the psychological and physical costs to Lessing that were certainly not

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minimal. When discussing the idealized seeker of truth, one often neglects the dark side of his polemical personality. But who, besides Lessing, requires that we say that the polemical critic, even when he bases himself on Aristotle, is the best? Whoever praises Lessing only as a polemicist takes the easy road. Actually, the problems merely begin here: but it is certainly easier to say something pleasant about him than to criticize him. Lessing’s polemical criticism is without a doubt the purest expression of Enlightenment thinking: enlightenment as criticism and polemics as method. His character and temperament might explain Lessing’s polemical criticism, but it is better seen as a facet of his critical spirit, which combated errors, prejudices, and blasé attitudes of his contemporaries. His polemics turned against complacent thinking that submits to obsolete or foreign models in questions of taste; against the prejudiced theoretician, whose thinking is abstract, determined by stereotypes, and who thinks he knows everything better; against the narrow-minded thinker who is unable to see issues from another perspective. Kant conceptualized these deductive modes of thought in the methodological discussions of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781). He elaborates on this term: “Unter dem polemischen Gebrauche der reinen Vernunft verstehe ich nun die Verteidigung ihrer Sätze gegen dogmatische Verneinungen derselben.”35 What he says about the necessary defense of the principles of pure reason is also valid for principles of taste. The only difference is that taste cannot be defended and proven with the same degree of generally accepted validity, which only makes the polemical conflict that much sharper. Errors can be refuted, abstract generalities of prejudices can be criticized by specific and concrete counter-examples, but judgments of taste, which claim only a subjective generality, will spark a discussion in art criticism that results, at best, in a “sensus communis aestheticus” (Kant). Actually, this process does not need polemics, since — apart from the petty disputes of vanity or selfpromotion on the part of the critics — discussions about art aim for a consensus among connoisseurs. However, before this can be reached, war and polemics prevail, under which the truth suffers, and which reason, as judge, cannot decide. That would require critical self-reflection, as suggested by Kant in his methodology and later practiced by the Romantics. Lessing’s great passions were contradiction, quarreling, and polemics. His contradiction addressed any form of dogmatism, pedantic professors riled his quarreling spirit, and his polemics aimed at falsehoods even when authorities defended them. Lessing’s numerous argumentative publications cost him much time and energy, and one often wonders if expense and result do not stand in a disproportional relationship. His polemical quill was directed at many individuals, whom he immortalized, even if the person or the issue did not deserve so much attention. Because he entered the field of journalism to support his meager salary as a freelance writer, he failed to address many more important issues: in his polemic against Gottsched he


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missed the opportunity to write more in depth about Shakespeare; rather than becoming annoyed at the lyrical poet Dusch, he could have devoted more time to Klopstock — or the young Goethe for that matter; fewer polemics against Klotz would have given him more time for Winckelmann; and as interesting as the controversy surrounding the fragments are, a treatise on Spinoza would have been more important. Lessing’s lack of lasting consequences, as lamented by Peter Demetz,36 most likely results from his polemical nature, since it distracted him from more important questions of the era that thinkers such as Winckelmann, Kant, and Schiller addressed. It might be that criticism was a “Gymnastik des Geistes” (Mendelssohn) for Lessing and that polemics gave him the impetus to deal with the material. But sometimes one cannot avoid the impression that Lessing simply had a sinister desire to destroy his opponent in his search for truth. “Kein Kopf war vor ihm sicher,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “ja, manchen Schädel hat er sogar aus Übermut heruntergeschlagen, und dann war er dabei noch so boshaft, ihn vom Boden aufzuheben und dem Publikum zu zeigen, daß er inwendig hohl war.”37 Even when fighting for just causes, one can be shockingly brutal, that is to say: the truth-seeker Lessing, who fights polemically against dogmas, prejudices, and stupidity, can become also inhumane, specifically when he makes his opponent a victim of his polemics. His argumentative pathos is essentially the expression of a desperate struggle for order and harmony. Perhaps the polemicist Lessing compensated for his own misfortunes in life as he battled for just causes and truth. But these are only new suppositions that open up new questions. If one were to pursue these further, one might shed more light on Lessing’s polemical literary criticism. Certainly it would be worth the trouble to ask: what did Lessing compensate with polemics? Perhaps then a darker side of the noble Lessing would emerge — a side that one prefers to avoid.

The Pathos of Limits Lessing proceeded inductively and unsystematically in his criticism, and his critical writings are characterized by the fact that they are corrections, limitations, or fragments of ideas. His polemical writings are an emphatic expression of a creation of order that is directed against misinterpretations and ambiguities. Unlike the systematic order of Gottsched, which was normative and static, Lessing aimed at a new order that determined the function of art. This was served by his strict definition of the limits of the visual and literary arts and his understanding of the various functions of different literary genres. Thus the subtitle of his treatise Laokoon indicates his focus on these limitations. Lessing determined the limits of painting and literature, inasmuch as he separated the selection of their objects as well as various media used for their mimetic production.38 Moreover, the

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concealed intent of this theoretical maneuver is also a new hierarchy of the arts: From this point forward the drama became the highest form of art because it linked in an ideal manner the sensual appearance of a corporeal image in space with the intellectually moving statement in time, thereby guaranteeing the best possible effect on the spectator. While he limited the artistic potential of the visual arts, which is in itself controversial, he elevated the dramatic form to the highest form of literature, where it remained for the next hundred years — founded upon his authority. Lessing then bolstered this claim in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which also had the goal of propagating morality as the social virtue of compassion. “Bessern sollen uns alle Gattungen der Poesie,” he wrote in the 77th piece, “aber alle Gattungen können nicht alles bessern” (LM 10:114). The function of the tragedy is to evoke passions in order to cultivate our compassion, because “der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch, zu allen gesellschaftlichen Tugenden der aufgelegteste,” as he wrote in 1756 to Nicolai.39 He elaborated on this sentence twelve years later in his famous re-interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, which — despite much protest — became the foundation of bourgeois theater. This order-creating pathos of defining limits, sometimes pedantically rigorous in Lessing’s polemics, seems flexible enough in other contexts to allow the Genie to mix elements of dramatic and epic forms. In the textbooks one should separate them as much as possible, Lessing writes, but when a Genie, on account of loftier aims, allows them to flow together in the same work, then one forgets the textbooks and simply examines whether he has achieved these lofty aims (LM 9: 390). The Hamburgische Dramaturgie is no normative book of rules in the sense of Gottsched; the formal elements of the drama are subordinated to the function and effect of the genre. This makes Lessing’s poetics adaptable so that he can defend the Genie from doctrinaire attacks. “Das Genie lacht über all die Grenzscheidungen der Kritik,” because “es hat die Probe aller Regeln in sich” (LM 10:190). This permissiveness remains, however, within the bounds of traditional poetic license. Matters became more difficult when writers of the Genie-epoch doubted the claims of theory, and the cult of the Genie threatened the literary order that Lessing had just constructed. Indeed, the concept of Genie, which Lessing used as a weapon against the dogmatism of French classicism, was turned then against his criticism, which seemed too demanding. His stern criticism, it was claimed, impaired the Genie, which needs understanding, encouragement, and freedom instead of reasoned arguments.40 Grudgingly, Lessing recognized this “Gärung des Geschmacks” which threatened the gains of his criticism, and protested against it: “Wir haben, dem Himmel sey Dank, itzt ein Geschlecht von Critikern, deren beste Critik darinn besteht, — alle Critik verdächtig zu machen. ‘Genie! Genie! schreien sie. Das Genie setzt sich über alle Regeln hinweg! Was das


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Genie macht, ist die Regel’ ” (LM 10:190). Even worse: this antagonism toward criticism turned the Genie into his own lawgiver and degraded the critic to a mere interpreter of the work of art. Lessing set himself vehemently against this demotion of the critic in the name of the Genie-cult. The state of literary criticism at the onset of the Sturm und Drang period is for him only the edge of another abyss, a chaos that threatens art and questions radically the order of art theory and the institution of criticism. The thought of having to choose between the two extremes of Gottsched’s pedantry and the anarchy of the Genie-movement seemed to Lessing an unbearable imposition, and he insisted on the controlling and mediating function of criticism. In this position, his pathos of defining boundaries becomes in effect a polemical defense of the order of art against tastes that aim at the self-abolition of criticism. However, Lessing’s worst fears were not realized. Yet this polemic at the end of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie signaled one of the first crises of criticism, from which a new understanding of literary criticism developed: polemical literary criticism evolved into a generic and historical criticism of understanding. —Translated by Matthew Lange

Notes 1

This essay is based on the following previously published articles: “Der kritisierte Kritiker. Zur Leseerwartung, historischen Bedeutung und Form von Lessings Hamburgische Dramaturgie,” in Humanität und Dialog, ed. E. Bahr et al. (Munich: 1982), 155–66; “From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism,” in A History of German Literary Criticism, 1730–1980, ed. P. U. Hohendahl (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988), 13–98 (440–49); “Lessing’s polemische Literaturkritik,” in Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Günter Sasse (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 176–83; “ ‘Zermalmende Beredsamkeit’: Lessings Literaturkritik als Polemik,” Lessing Yearbook 24 (1992): 25–43; and “Criticism,” in vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Allan C. Kors (Oxford: Oxford UP 2003), 312–17.

2

Rene Wellek also emphasizes this transformation in his monumental history of European criticism in A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1955), 1:151–75. However, he is more interested in Lessing’s poetics than in his “practical criticism.” That Wellek neglects the “professional critic” (1: 158) in favor of his literary theory can be explained by his viewpoint that “practical criticism” is the interpretation of a single work, whereas “true criticism” is literary theory. True to the dogma of New Criticism, he also neglects the social and historical changes which influenced literary criticism in the eighteenth century.

3 4

Richard Daunicht, Lessing im Gespräch (Munich: Heimeran, 1971), 42.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, 3rd ed., ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen, 1886–1924; reprint Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 4:301–2. Unless otherwise indicated, this edition will be quoted in the notes as LM

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with volume and page numbers. Following first citation of a work in the notes, parenthetical references appear in the text. Whether earlier reviews of Gottsched’s works, which appeared between 1748 and 1750 in the Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung, can be attributed to Lessing has been debated many times, for example by Karl S. Guthke, “Der junge Lessing als Kritiker Gottscheds und Bodmers,” in Guthke, Literarisches Leben im 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland und der Schweiz (Bern: Francke, 1975), 24–71. 5

Letter to Johann Christoph Gottsched, 9 July 1754.

6

Justus Riedel, Briefe über das Publikum (Leipzig: n.p., 1768), 168–69.

7

Cited by Horst Steinmetz, ed., Lessing — ein unpoetischer Dichter (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1969), 123.

8 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Hanser, 1964), 390. 9

In the introduction to the third part of Lessing’s works, “Vom Charakter des Protestanten,” Schlegel writes: “Daß Lessings Tendenz durchaus polemisch war, seine ganze schriftstellerische Laufbahn vom ersten Versuch bis zum letzten Bruchstück, was auch der Stoff oder die äußere Form war, durchaus polemische Farbe und Richtung hatte, und wie geringschätzig er von denen dachte, denen die Polemik weder eine Kunst noch eine Wissenschaft ist, das liegt in allem, was wir von ihm erhalten haben, so klar zutage, daß es überflüssig sein würde, noch ein Wort darüber zu verlieren” (Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, 430).

10 On this, see Horst Steinmetz, “Der Kritiker Lessing,” Neophilologus 52 (1968): 30–47, and Walter Jens, “Feldzüge eines Redners. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,” in Jens, Von deutscher Rede (Munich: Piper, 1969), 46–70. 11

Hamburgische Dramaturgie, LM 10:84.

12

Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet: Eine Untersuchung, LM 11:5.

13

Steinmetz, ed., Lessing — Ein unpoetischer Dichter, 74.

14

Abhandlungen über die Fabel, LM 7:420.

15

Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, LM 8:41.

16

See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ed., Lessing, Mendelssohn, Nicolai: Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel (Munich: Winkler, 1972). 17

Laokoon, LM 9:156.

18

Hamburgische Dramaturgie, LM 9:183.

19

See Klaus Bohnen, Geist und Buchstabe: Zum Prinzip des kritischen Verfahrens in Lessings literarästhetischen und theologischen Schriften (Cologne: Böhlau, 1974).

20

“Der Rezensent braucht nicht besser machen zu können, was er tadelt,” LM 15:62–63.

21

Laokoon, LM 9:3.

22

Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1751), 118–20.

23

See Steinmetz, Lessing — ein unpoetischer Dichter, 74.


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24 Ernst Keller, Kritische Intelligenz: Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel, Börne (Bern: Lang, 1976), 78. 25

Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, 398.

26

Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, LM 11:5.

27

Jens, “Feldzüge eines Redners,” 61.

28

Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, LM 10:285–86.

29

Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich: Hanser, 1960), 5:823.

30

Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 81.

31

Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962). 32

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, ed. Wolfgang Bender (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), 344–50.

33

See in this regard M. K. Torbruegge, “On Lessing, Mendelssohn and the Ruling Powers,” in Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht, ed. Erhard Bahr et al. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1982), 305–18. 34

See Nicolai’s report in Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift XVIII (December 1807).

35

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1956), 678. 36

Peter Demetz, “Die Folgenlosigkeit Lessings,” Merkur 25 (1971): 727–35.

37

Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Hanser, 1976), 5:586.

38

See David Wellbery’s re-interpretations of Laokoon, in which he too stresses Lessing’s “pathos of the limit” and his polemics. David E. Wellbery, “The Pathos of Theory: Laokoon Revisited,” in Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Arts from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 47–63.

39

Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Nicolai: Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel (Munich: Winkler, 1972), 55.

40

Steinmetz, Lessing — Ein unpoetischer Dichter, 74.

Lessing and the Fable John Pizer

K

ANT’S SEMINAL DEFINITION of the Enlightenment in the essay “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (What is Enlightenment?, 1784) envisions the emergence of an ethically mature citizenry, whose members base their opinions on accurate observation and readily develop codes of behavior independently of the dictates of church and state. Such maturity presupposes an educational program for citizens that would enable the establishment of a strong moral and rational foundation in each individual. Though written toward the historical end of the Enlightenment and three years after Lessing’s death, “Was ist Aufklärung?” articulates the period’s pedagogical optimism, its belief that the impetus to reasoned, rational, virtuous conduct can be inculcated through judicious, exemplary teaching and role modeling. Since the age of Aesop, the fable had been regarded as among the most effective genres for guiding the individual in developing rational and moral discernment. Because the Enlightenment first took root in France toward the end of the seventeenth century, it is not surprising that the fable’s revival at that time was primarily achieved at the behest of French authors such as Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) and René Le Bossu (1631–1680). Early in the eighteenth century, their lead was followed in Germany by such figures as Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708–1754), Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769), and Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766). To be sure, there was a fundamental difference between the goals of fable writers and theorists in France and Germany. The French fabulists were less concerned with the education of mature, self-responsible citizens than with inculcating decorum and propriety (“bienséance”) in young people of means and title. This is the circumstance that largely motivated Lessing’s refutation of French fable theory and practice. In Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811–1822), Goethe described the constellation of issues that popularized the fable during his youth, when Lessing was a key figure in German Enlightenment discourse. In the seventh book of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe summarized the period’s aesthetic grounding in the mimetic ideal; the painter imitates, strives to reproduce nature, and the writer should follow this model. However, such complete reproduction would cause one to include too much extraneous detail.

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Thus, one is forced to choose what elements in nature are worthy of mimetic representation. “The Swiss” Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1776) were inspired by this dilemma to equate what is most meaningful with what is most novel, and found the marvelous (“das Wunderbare”) to be more novel than anything else. In order for the marvelous to relate meaningfully to humanity, it must be imbued with morality. Among the poetic genres, Bodmer and Breitinger determined that the Aesopian fable most effectively combined the attributes of the marvelous with ethical volition. Though Goethe judges this line of reasoning to be rather eccentric, he attributes the German Enlightenment obsession with fable theory and practice to its “decisive influence.” The circumstance that authors such as Gellert and Lessing dedicated so much of their time and talent to the fable indicates the confidence (Zutrauen) this genre was able to garner during the period.1 This brief prefatory detour through Kant, La Fontaine, Le Bossu, and Goethe (and, by way of Goethe, through Bodmer and Breitinger) was taken to establish a historical foundation for Lessing’s preoccupation, in both theory and practice, with the fable. Lessing himself recognized his overarching predisposition toward this genre. In the seventieth of the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (Letters on Contemporary Literature), dated November 23, 1759, Lessing casts himself in the fictive cloak of external reviewer of his own Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen mit dieser Dichtungsart verwandten Inhalts (Fables: Three Books. Accompanied by Treatises with Content Related to this Genre, 1759). He reiterates at the outset of this “review” a comment made in the preface to the Abhandlungen, namely, that no poetic genre had ever received more of his attention than the fable.2 To be sure, Lessing wrote these lines almost a decade before the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–1769) was published, and it is safe to say that the drama attracted more of his sustained attention than the fable in his later years. Nevertheless, the fable was an object of Lessing’s interest throughout the course of his adult life. As early as his Leipzig student days he wrote fables published in various journals, and also wrote, in 1749, a review of the Fabularum aesopiarum libri duo (Two Books of Aesop’s Fables), written by a Leipzig professor, Johann F. Christ, whose lectures Lessing attended. The late 1750s marked Lessing’s most intensive work with the fable genre as commentator, translator, editor, theorist, and creative writer, culminating in the Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen. But Lessing also pursued his interest in the fable as librarian in Wolfenbüttel, where he wrote essays on the German fables from the days of the Minnesänger.3 These are primarily polemics directed against previous editorial practices involving this group of works.4 The focus of the present essay will be the fables and fable treatises published collectively as Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen mit dieser Dichtungsart verwandten Inhalts in 1759. Though we will touch on earlier

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works in order to examine Lessing’s development as a fabulist, the 1759 work deserves the bulk of our attention, for it is justly regarded as Lessing’s most cogent and coherent work with respect to fable practice and theory. Before doing so, however, we should consider why Lessing was preoccupied with the fable genre, for Goethe doesn’t tell the whole story. In his capacity as both critical and creative writer, Lessing was first and foremost a pedagogue. No other significant man of letters was more intent than Lessing on furthering the educational ideals later elucidated in “Was ist Aufklärung?”; his primary goal in life was the inculcation of morallygrounded reason in the individual, through which the individual could attain the maturity to make ethical, rational decisions along the lines advocated by Kant in his essay. This educational spirit is evident even in such aesthetic treatises as the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, and the ineluctable link between education and reason on the one hand, and individual development and maturation on the other, informs much of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1780). As Goethe noted in the previously cited passage from Dichtung und Wahrheit, Enlightenment thinkers embraced the fable because they regarded it as a fundamentally educational genre, written throughout the diachronic range of its history with the goal of moral utility in mind. Moral utility is always in the foreground of Lessing’s own oeuvre, so the attractiveness to him of the fable genre as it was broadly defined during the Enlightenment age in Germany becomes obvious. Additionally, many fable theorists, especially in our times, have stressed the historical role of the fable as a vehicle for social commentary, and, as we will see, Lessing drew upon this dimension of the fable genre as well. Lessing’s 1749 review of Christ’s Fabularum aesopiarum libri duo, which first appeared in the Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung (Berlin Privileged Newspaper), is interesting because Lessing here praises this professor for what he would later condemn and condemns earlier fable collectors for what he would later praise. While Christ’s predecessors had tended to abridge the classical fables, a procedure Lessing equates with mutilation, Lessing’s Leipzig mentor is lauded for narrating fables in the manner of poets in the golden age of the Latin language.5 What Lessing terms mutilation was to receive a positive valence as prose terseness and concision in his later fable theory and practice. Ronald M. Mazur has argued that this later view “opposes empty abstractions, ornate design, gratuitous levity, and auctorial intrusions,” and thus overcomes the predilections of Enlightenment poetics.6 However, all of the putative Enlightenment literary vices cited by Mazur as antithetical to Lessing’s theory and practice tend to be on display in his early fables. Lessing did not articulate for himself and his readers a discrete concept of the fable until the 1759 Abhandlungen. The cogent, differentiated character of this concept sustained its dynamic volition through a sustained polemic with poetic and theoretical predecessors such

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as La Fontaine, Gottsched, Gellert, and Charles Batteux (1713–1780). Because he had not worked out his oppositional stance in the early 1750s, the youthful fables are rather derivative, and this is why they evince some of the negative attributes Mazur associates with the early Enlightenment. These early efforts were first published collectively under the title Fabeln in 1753. In this collection, Lessing consistently employs rhymed poetic verse, though the rhyme and metric schemes vary even within the individual fables. An example worthy of consideration is provided by “Der Hirsch und der Fuchs” (The Deer and the Fox), because it contains every weakness (or putative weakness) listed by Mazur. It consists primarily of a dialogue between the two eponymous animals. The fox accuses the deer of completely lacking courage. The fox attempts to instill this quality in his fellow creature by pointing out the deer’s strength and power; his antlers could kill the biggest dog with one blow. While foxes are too weak to resist their foes, animals stronger than their foes should never retreat. The deer resolves to follow this advice, and never to flee from hunter and hound, but barking dogs from Diana’s nearby party put both the feeble fox and the redoubtable deer to flight. Auctorial — or at least first-person narrative — intrusion is manifest in the initial couplet: “Hirsch, wahrlich, das begreif’ ich nicht,” Hört’ ich den Fuchs zum Hirsche sagen.7 Abstractions such as strength, weakness, and courage are mentioned by name rather than evoked by allegorical example. Ornate design is in evidence through an alternating rhyme scheme, which begins with an a,b,a,b sequence and continues with rhyming couplets. The “gratuitous levity” characterizing the rather frivolous concluding hasty retreat is somewhat blunted by the epimythium (a concluding summary of a fable’s moral lesson): “Natur thut allzeit mehr, als Demonstration” (LM 1:159). However, Lessing tends neither here nor elsewhere in these early fables toward overt pedagogy or sententious moralizing. Instead, the focus is on amusing imagery. After the somewhat ponderous dialogue, the picture of the weak fox and powerful stag put to rout by dog barks echoing in the forest entertains through an ironic contrast between word and deed, so that reason seems overcome by instinct. Lessing had praised Christ for maintaining, and not bowdlerizing, the rich elegance of Phaedrus’s Latin, and Lessing’s own early fables are more reminiscent of Phaedrus’s courtly diversions than of Aesop’s terser, straightforward didacticism. Nevertheless, Lessing is quite capable even in these early efforts of employing his allegorical skills toward social satire. In “Der Tanzbär” (The Dancing Bear), the captive beast named in the title, having broken free of his chains, performs his circus antics for his forest fellows, bragging of the art (“Kunst”) he has learned in the world. An older bear claims such art is


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nothing but a reflection of an enslaved spirit. In the extended epimythium following this exchange, a clear parallel is inferred between the bear’s unnatural stunts and the behavior of courtiers, who substitute obsequiousness and cunning for wit and virtue. However, the closing lines of this fable’s epimythium employ Socratic indirection rather than didactic Aesopian bluntness, for they are posed in the form of a question concerning how the courtier is to be regarded: Ein solcher Mann, ein großer Hoffmann seyn, Schließt das Lob oder Tadel ein?8 Though the answer may seem obvious, the employment of a rhetorical question dilutes the epimythium’s polemic character by inviting the reader to come to his or her own conclusion. It enhances the fable’s playful, ironic, largely non-pedantic resonance, a tenor that is also evident in the other early fables despite their occasional abstractions and ornate metrics. La Fontaine’s famous motto, “diversité c’est ma devise,” could easily apply to the early fabulist Lessing as well. As we will see, the open-ended hermeneutic dimension inherent in the rhetorical structure of “Der Tanzbär” is evident in the content of Lessing’s later fables. In the Abhandlungen, Lessing asserts that La Fontaine was responsible for turning the fable into a “charming poetic plaything.” However, as Karl August Ott has written, Lessing’s characterization is intended as a form of censure, for Lessing believed that La Fontaine’s focus on diversion had dissipated the genre’s efficacy as a vibrant means to instill the reader with certain convictions. This loss of rhetorically constellated moral suasion did not occur because of any moral lapses in La Fontaine’s own oeuvre, but because, in Lessing’s view, the Frenchman wanted to replace Aesopian pithiness with levity and cheerfulness.9 Precisely these latter attributes predominate in Lessing’s early fables, and combined with a tendency toward classical diction and mythic allusion, they approximate the courtly quality evident in much of La Fontaine. Uwe-K. Ketelsen has asserted that the goal of the eighteenth-century fabulists was the propagation of normative rational behavior in society,10 and while this purpose is certainly evident in a number of the fables in the 1759 publication in which Lessing draws a distinction between his approach and that of La Fontaine, early tales such as “Der Hirsch und der Fuchs” imply that instinct is stronger than, and will overrule, reason, when a perceived crisis is at hand. What explains Lessing’s transition from a fabulist whom one might associate with the school of La Fontaine to one more in tune with Aesopian pithiness and didacticism? A plausible explanation is offered by Mazur, who notes that when Lessing translated Samuel Richardson’s Aesop’s Fables in 1757, and composed Anmerkungen über Äsop (Notes on Aesop) and Anmerkungen über den Phader (Notes on Phaedrus) in the

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following year, his thereby deepened familiarity with the Greek pioneer of the genre convinced him that Aesop rather than La Fontaine should serve as the model for contemporary fable theory and practice. Mazur claims that Lessing’s view of Aesop’s concision was somewhat exaggerated, since it was based on the thirteenth-century monk Maximus Planudes’ “collection of excerpts written in terse prose form.” Mazur concedes, however, that Lessing’s rejection in the Abhandlungen of poetic verse was based on personal moral and aesthetic considerations; Lessing believed that a writer who focused on meter and rhyme could damage the fable’s moral unity. Mazur accurately notes that Lessing’s fabulist “practice is quite closely in keeping with his theory,”11 and because an understanding of Lessing’s theory thus illuminates his practice, my overview of the Abhandlungen will, for the most part, precede an examination of some of the fables that accompany it. The governing epistemological paradigm operative in Lessing’s mature fable theory is Christian Wolff’s concept of intuitive cognition, and an awareness of this circumstance further explains Lessing’s newfound insistence on Aesopian concision in fable practice. As David E. Wellbery has noted, Lessing believed the genre should be able to illustrate broad moral postulates through the narration of specific events. In this way, universal principles are transformed into localized instances, and thus are capable of being comprehended through intuitive cognition. In the fable, “symbolic cognition” becomes intuitive cognition “through the representation of an individual instance which, when imaginatively attended to by the reader, immediately manifests the moral truth in question.”12 In Lessing’s later view, poetic rhyme and meter, and/or a lengthy narrative, can only interrupt and retard this process in the fable. As John McCarthy has recently indicated, the relationship between philosophy and literature in the German Enlightenment was particularly intimate. Lessing’s use of Wolffian intuitive cognition as a guiding principle in his definition of the fable can be cast in terms of a translation project. A broad philosophical tenet or abstract ethical mandate is crystallized into a sensual poetic illustration and thereby grasped intuitively by the reader or auditor when concise, vivid representation becomes the goal of fabulist technique. Aesthetic figuration is used to translate philosophic rationality and broad-based moral suasion into a concrete image. This relationship between philosophy and literature can also be cast in mathematical terms, as McCarthy has done: “The combination of philosophy and literature in the project of the Aufklärung amounts basically to a kind of messy mathematics: rigorous logic is coupled with explanatory metaphor. The supreme example of this is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s early theory of the fable, and its reincarnation in his final plea for religious and cultural tolerance in the fairy-tale-like parable of the three rings situated at the centre of his didactic play, Nathan der Weise (1779).”13 Though McCarthy’s language


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captures quite well the imprecision in the equation “philosophy through literature ⫽ intuitive cognition,” he himself is imprecise with respect to genre in presupposing a continuum between fable and “fairy-tale-like parable” in these “messy mathematics.” For it is essential to Lessing’s definition that the fable narrates what is aesthetically perceived as an actual event, in contrast to the parable, which narrates an episode that only might be real to the reader’s perception. The ring parable exemplifies this latter definition in that the judge mediating among the three sons leaves in doubt which of the three rings is authentic, or if indeed one son truly possesses the genuine article. The ability to perceive the fable as an actual event is what enables direct intuitive cognition, the translation of “rigorous” logic into concrete perception through immanently “explanatory metaphor.” The immanently allegorical dimension in Lessing’s fable definition also allows it to be differentiated from the fairy-tale genre, as we will see. Lessing opens the Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen by revealing, in the preface, his initial inclination, after examining his earlier works with a critical eye, to dismiss them out of hand. He claims that consideration of his many friendly readers has mitigated this drastic decision; however, he notes that he has decided to include from his early efforts in the genre only the six works composed in prose. He would like to have transformed his verse fables into prose compositions, but felt this would have been too odd a thing to do.14 These rather extreme strictures reveal the degree to which Lessing’s exploration, mediated by Richardson and Planudes, of the genre’s Aesopian origins have altered the aesthetic preferences informing his fabulist practice of less than ten years earlier. The theoretical portion of the 1759 publication consists of five treatises: “Von dem Wesen der Fabel” (On the Essence of Fables), “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel” (On the Use of Animals in the Fable), “Von der Eintheilung der Fabeln” (On the Classification of Fables), “Von dem Vortrage der Fabeln” (On the Presentation of Fables) and “Von einem besondern Nutzen der Fabeln in den Schulen” (On a Special Use of Fables in Schools). The initial essay on the essence of the fable consists in large measure of polemics directed against various earlier theories. However, Lessing opens this treatise with a two-part classificatory scheme. Simple (“einfache”) fables allow one to grasp a universal truth from a narrated event, while compound (“zusammengesetzte”) fables somewhat reverse this process; the truth to be intuitively conveyed is applied to an event presented as real. In order for this to occur, two fables are combined, and this combination of two cases confirms the truth of one maxim (LM 7:418–19). The issue of allegory is central here; in the seventieth Literaturbrief, Lessing summarizes the distinction between simple and compound fables by asserting that only the latter are allegorical.15 Indeed, his polemic

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against Antoine Houdar de La Motte in the first Abhandlung consists largely in a refutation of the French writer’s position that fables are fundamentally grounded in allegory (LM 7:420–27). At best, Lessing’s position is precious and overly refined here. I am largely in agreement with Thomas Noel’s view in this regard: “The relationship of allegory to the fable remains a confusing point throughout Lessing’s discussion. He unmistakably eliminates pure allegory, such as the personification of abstract qualities; but the mere use of animals and other non-human characters, all of them endowed with speech, reason, and other human attributes, suggests that allegory is an unavoidable element of the fable.”16 Michel Beaujour notes that allegory links “a sensual signifier” to “an ethical meaning,”17 which would make this device an essential tool in the fabulist arsenal, particularly given Lessing’s ideas on intuitive cognition. As Beaujour remarks, Lessing abhorred “description” as a “servile, inanimate, inferior paradigm.”18 In his polemic against La Motte, Lessing seems to assume that allegory presupposes a need for relatively overt narrative description in linking an animal’s moral attributes to its character because, in Lessing’s view, the semiotics of allegory are derived from a similarity between an animal and its perceived abstract qualities, whereas, in a simple fable, such associations are directly intuited. In this view, a fabulist would have to describe a fox as cunning, a dog as faithful, a rooster as proud, if this fabulist was allegorically inclined. One can see why such description would be inferior from Lessing’s perspective; it would block the intuitive cognition of a moral truth by not allowing the reader’s imagination to do its own work. This process of intuitive cognition is at the core of Lessing’s famous summary definition of the fable, which closes the first treatise. This definition also presupposes the perception of the narrated event as real,19 a perception that detailed description, given its “inanimate” quality, can only obscure. In “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel,” Lessing disputes Breitinger’s claim that the representation of animals as endowed with human qualities renders them “wunderbar,” since these anthropomorphic qualities are to be perceived as self-evident in fables. Further, fables are to eschew detailed characterization, to forego third-person descriptions of the animals’ personality traits, because the ages-old connection between man and beast has led to innate associations already; humans inherently see foxes as cunning, dogs as faithful, roosters as proud, etc. Thus, Lessing’s classificatory semantics to the contrary, he really views fables as immanently allegorical; to draw once again on Beaujour’s terms, certain beasts are seen to sensually signify certain ethical meanings automatically, without need of descriptive explication. This allows a useful distinction to be drawn between fables and fairy-tales, for fairy-tales populated with animals almost never operate at an immanently allegorical level. Even wolves, the most common cipher for evil in fairytales, may or may not combine lust with their voracious gluttony (one sees


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this combination in Charles Perrault but not in the Brothers Grimm). In “Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten,” innate allegorical links are altogether absent; the dog does not signify faithfulness, the rooster does not signify pride, the donkey does not signify stubbornness or laziness. In fairy-tales as well, at least in their French peasant origins, the “moral lesson” is almost always the same; one must use a maximum degree of cunning to survive in a hostile world. Lessing himself does not draw distinctions between the fairy-tale and the fable, but given the popularity and usefulness of these genres in intermediate language and beginning literature classes, his discussion on the use of animals in fables provides a means for contemporary instructors to point out this distinction. The third treatise, “Von der Eintheilung der Fabeln,” underscores Lessing’s view that fables must be imbued by a credible realism, that the semiotics of intuitive cognition only function when the reader finds the narrative entirely realistic. Ironically, however, it is precisely Christian Wolff, the progenitor of the principle of intuitive cognition, against whom Lessing polemicizes in elaborating on his own classificatory scheme. In his Philosophia practica universalis (Universal Practical Philosophy, 1739), Wolff had argued that vivid cognition is only achieved in the fable when moral truths attain credibility through immediate (intuited) perception. In order for this to occur, there must be complete harmony between sensual/imaginative apperception on the one hand, and reason on the other; examples grounded in common personal experience must adroitly link these two planes in a convincing manner.20 This view clearly influenced Lessing’s core belief in the necessity of verisimilitude in the fable, and he therefore rejects the distinction Wolff made, based on his reading of Aphthonius (a Greek rhetorician who lived in the fourth century A.D.), between reasonable (“vernünftige”), moral (“sittliche”), and mixed (“vermischte”) fables. For Wolff, moral fables are those in which character attributes are implausible, and reasonable fables are those in which character attributes correspond to the authentic natural order. In practical terms, moral fables use anthropomorphized animals, reasonable fables have human agents, and mixed fables combine the two. Precisely because he believed that intuitive cognition must be operative in the fable’s semiotics, Lessing reconfigured these categories so that both reasonable and moral fables are, or can be, plausible (“möglich”). Reasonable tales are inherently plausible irrespective of their narrative cast — animal, human, or inanimate. Moral fables are only plausible when certain presuppositions are taken into account. Mythical (“mythische”) moral fables contain characters such as ghosts, gods, and allegorized persons, while “hyperphysical” (“hyperphysische”) fables are populated by figures with heightened human qualities, such as the ability to prophesy. Such fables, whether reasonable, mythic, hyperphysical, or mixed, should possess enough internal logic to be perceived as real by the reader. In Lessing’s reading of Wolff, moral

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fables are not informed by reality. Thus, Lessing was at pains to modify Wolff’s classifications. For according to Lessing: “Diese Wirklichkeit ist der Fabel so unentbehrlich, daß sie sich eher von ihrer Möglichkeit, als von jener etwas abbrechen läßt” (LM 7:459). Because the final two treatises, “Von dem Vortrage der Fabeln” and “Von einem besondern Nutzen der Fabeln in den Schulen” are focused on practical issues — respectively, compositional style and pedagogical application — and do not examine the broad generic and epistemological issues which were the focus of the first three essays, Lessing’s theory here can be directly illuminated by his fabulist practice. In the essay on formal presentation and style, Lessing embraces pithiness above all other goals. As Max Staege has noted, this fourth treatise completes Lessing’s break with La Fontaine and the French seventeenth-century’s wordy, highly ornamental approach.21 Lessing contrasts La Fontaine with Aesop and Phaedrus, ancients for whom, as Noel puts it, the fable was “a philosophical instrument, not a poetic genre.”22 Lessing’s desire to blend anew the domains of philosophy and literature by drawing upon the authority of the ancients, a standard Enlightenment strategy, illustrates on an ideological level a typical penchant of this age’s discourse, for, as McCarthy notes, “the actual praxis of doing philosophy in the eighteenth century was not very far removed from composing literature. Philosophers wrote literature; writers engaged in philosophical discourse.”23 By stressing the fable’s utilitarian moral function and diminishing its character as imaginative entertainment, Lessing wishes to revitalize this genre as the locus where the border between philosophy and poetry virtually disappears. The ethical dimension of eighteenth-century philosophy was dominant to such a degree that, for this period, moralizing and philosophizing were two sides of one coin. Thus, when Gerhard Bauer describes Lessing’s (generic) fable as a “Darstellungsform, die nach seinem Verständnis zwischen Dichtung und Moral steht und an beiden teilhat,”24 he supports the assertion that, for Lessing, the boundary between philosophy and literature is essentially dissolved in the fable. An example is provided by “Der Fuchs und die Larve” (The Fox and the Mask), from the second of the three fable books published in conjunction with the Abhandlungen. It is terse enough to be quoted in its entirety: Vor alten Zeiten fand ein Fuchs die hohle, einen weiten Mund aufreissende Larve eines Schauspielers. Welch ein Kopf! sagte der betrachtende Fuchs. Ohne Gehirn, und mit einem offenen Munde! Sollte das nicht der Kopf eines Schwätzers gewesen seyn? Dieser Fuchs kannte euch, ihr ewigen Redner, ihr Strafgerichte des unschuldigsten unserer Sinne!25


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This pithy tale is devoid of all but minimal rhetorical embellishment. It uses prosaic discourse such as one might find in eighteenth-century philosophical illustrations employed to underscore a particular hypothesis, and constitutes an example of the use of poetic imagery prescribed by Breitinger to turn “a staid treatise on right and wrong, truth and deception, good and evil into popular art.”26 From Lessing’s perspective, one could say that the fable’s realism is established not only by its unadorned discursive style, but also by the unmediated association readers will make between cunning insight and the animal who embodies this trait, the fox. The fable’s style even thematizes its message, one later to be repeated in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie; actors should avoid contrived, flowery, overly rhetorical modes of expression, just as “Der Fuchs und die Larve” does. The fifth treatise, “Von einem besondern Nutzen der Fabeln in den Schulen,” underscores Lessing’s view that fables operate on an intuitive epistemological level that allows a moral truth to be derived from a specific narrated episode. However, Lessing’s focus here is not on the fable’s moral, but rather on its “heuristic” pedagogical value. The pupil’s powers of reason can be developed when he learns how to discover disparate moral truths in the same fable, and then to compose his own fables. The process is described as a transition from “Finden” to “Erfinden.”27 By way of illustrating how one can transform fables to elucidate multiple moral meanings, Lessing points to his own “Die Pfauen und die Krähe” (The Peacocks and the Crow) in book two of the Fabeln. The Aesopian fable, cited in the original by Lessing, ends simply: “The jackdaw was again a jackdaw” (LM 7:478)28 after the peacocks plucked out the fallen peacock feathers with which the jackdaw had adorned himself. In Phaedrus’s adaptation as well, the jackdaw is merely stripped of his false plumage after attempting to insinuate himself into the group of the peacocks. When he attempts to return to his own tribe, he is rebuffed, and a fellow jackdaw remarks that being content with his own station in life would have allowed him to avoid this double humiliation.29 As an Enlightenment thinker, Lessing did not see servile acceptance of one’s own class status as a valuable moral lesson. In his adaptation, the peacocks pluck out not only the false plumage natural only to their own species, but also some of the crow’s (Lessing uses “Krähe” rather than “Dohle,” German for “jackdaw”) own most splendid feathers. The peacocks remark, when the crow protests, that such feathers could not possibly belong to her.30 In altering the fable, Lessing has altered the moral to indicate that plagiarism can ultimately cause the world to believe that even the plagiarist’s own genuine accomplishments are pirated (LM 7:478). Thus, Lessing’s endorsement of a heuristic, educational application of fables has a subtle dimension not overtly mentioned in the fifth treatise; through Lessing’s pedagogical approach, the pupil will be steered away from the moral lessons found in the original exemplars from Antiquity, and toward ethical precepts more appropriate to his own, enlightened age.

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This impulse also led Lessing to compose — or better, recompose — fables with sociocritical dimensions of contemporary relevance. An example is “Die Esel” (The Donkeys) in the second book of the Fabeln. In this tale, the donkeys complain to Zeus that their human masters are treating them harshly. The heavy burdens imposed upon them cause the weaker animals to collapse, but the humans add to their misery by beating the donkeys in an effort to make them move faster. They want to serve the humans because it appears (“scheinet”) that Zeus has created them for this purpose, but they want the beatings to cease. While Zeus sympathizes with their plight, he cannot conceive of a way to make the humans believe that the animals’ naturally slow pace is not a sign of laziness. Thus, he alleviates their suffering by hardening their skin, making it impervious to pain. The donkeys are delighted by this solution.31 Because of its obvious allusion to human class relationships, this fable has drawn much critical attention. Citing “Die Esel” as well as “Das Schaf” (The Sheep), an animal who takes servility to an even greater extreme by having his shepherd sacrifice him because he has nothing to offer Juno and Jupiter as a gift,32 Gerhard Bauer finds that Lessing intends for his middleclass readers to take a critical distance from these animals and intuit that their behavior should not serve as a model. Nevertheless, Bauer finds Lessing’s personal stance on these animals’ internalization of their subjection is ambivalent. Though Lessing sympathizes with these downtrodden figures, his “Lutheran inheritance” suggests, in Bauer’s inference, a certain acceptance of the peasant status quo as reflected in the fable.33 The Marxist Hans-Günther Thalheim regards “Die Esel” as an attack on the principle of divine omnipotence rather than an Enlightenment confrontation with human servility.34 Pointing to the ambivalence of the word “scheinet,” which could signify not only that the donkeys appear to be created for service, but also that this appearance is deceptive (“scheinhaft”), Wolfram Mauser believes the tale focuses on the cynical misuse of power exemplified by Zeus’s rule.35 Because Lessing concludes the Abhandlungen with the remark that he has his “Jupiter” provide a more dignified response than the somewhat vulgar words which Aesop put in his mouth, and draws upon this work as an example of creative pedagogical engagement with fables (LM 7:479), it seems unlikely that Lessing was engaging in an overt social or theological critique. Rather, I would agree with Bauer that seemingly sociocritical fables like “Die Esel” and “Das Schaf” are consistent with Lessing’s overall fabulist pedagogy; fables should be written so that the reader intuitively perceives a moral model of how to behave or how not to behave. As is evident from these conflicting views on “Die Esel,” interpretative closure tends to be blocked in Lessing’s later fables despite his view that a “general moral precept” constitutes, as Klaus Grubmüller puts it, the “Essenz einer Fabel.”36 Although this essence implies a clear ethical lesson, and despite the circumstance that the concise, even terse, rhetorically


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unembellished style favored by Lessing in his mature theory and practice adds to his fables’ seeming simplicity, their hermeneutic thrust frequently remains ambiguous. Another example of this is provided by “Herkules,” also in the second book of the Fabeln. When Hercules is admitted to heaven, he first greets Juno, his great enemy. He explains to the astonished Elysian denizens that he shows her this honor because her persecutions gave him the opportunity to perform deeds that secured his admittance to Olympus, an answer that garners everyone’s approval, as well as Juno’s reconciliation.37 Does this signify that all humans should be grateful for their onerous burdens because these burdens spur them to good works, or does it simply indicate that gracious behavior toward one’s foe is a mark of elevated propriety? In the fifth Abhandlung, Lessing cites this fable as an example of the genre’s heuristic pedagogical value, posing as a question whether Hercules’ behavior toward Juno represented the most decent choice available (LM 7:478). I believe that Lessing’s embrace of fables as a heuristic vehicle for inventiveness, creativity, and the development of independent powers of reason in young people represents his most valuable contribution to fable theory. His most interesting contribution to fabulist praxis was his related tendency, during his mature years, to write fables terse in style and length but imbued with ambiguous meanings, open-ended enough to allow for multiple interpretations.38 Because Lessing’s popular image is, quite justifiably, that of an opinionated pedagogue, these dimensions of his thought tend to be overlooked, though they are key to his Enlightenment educational ideals, the inculcation of the idea that individuals are responsible for their own actions and for their own maturation as social beings, as later articulated by Kant. Prior to Lessing’s Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen, even the most ornate, rhetorically embellished fables transmitted unequivocal moral and/or behavior-centered messages,39 a directness often enhanced through the use of epimythia.40 Though Lessing himself had a strong moral streak, and believed that fables must be imbued with a “general moral precept,” he showed original wisdom in arguing and poetically demonstrating that a fable’s ethical core must be discovered, perhaps even rewritten, by a hermeneutically active reader, and not be presented on a silver platter, no matter how polished or ornate that platter’s silver might be.

Notes 1

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, vol. 27 (Weimar: Herman Böhlau, 1889), 78–79.

2

All citations of Lessing in this essay are from the Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, 3rd ed., 23 vols. (Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen, 1886–1924, reprint Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1968), subsequently cited as

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LM with volume and page number. Here: Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, LM 8:185, and, Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen, LM 7:415. 3

Most of the information in this chronological overview is derived from Wilfried Barner, Gunter Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, and Martin Kramer, eds., Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung, 3rd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1977), 192–93.

4 See Lessing, “Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel. Erster Beytrag, 1773,” LM 11:317–51, and Lessing and Johann Joachim Eschenburg, “Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel. Fünfter Beytrag, 1781,” LM 14:3–33. 5

See Lessing, “Aus: Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung. Im Jahre 1749.” LM 4:27.

6

Ronald M. Mazur, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Fables: Theory and Practice,” in Lessing and the Enlightenment, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 57.

7

Lessing, “Der Hirsch und der Fuchs,” LM 1:158. Subsequent citations are in the text.

8

Lessing, “Der Tanzbär,” LM 1:158.

9

Karl August Ott, “Lessing und La Fontaine. Von dem Gebrauche der Tiere in der Fabel,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 40 (1959): 235–36.

10 Uwe-K. Ketelsen, “Vom Siege der natürlichen Vernunft: Einige Bemerkungen zu einer sozialgeschichtlichen Interpretation der Geschichte der Fabel in der deutschen Aufklärung,” Seminar 16 (1980): 210. 11

Mazur, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Fables,” 53, 54.

12

David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s “Laocoon”: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 192, 193. 13

John A. McCarthy, “Criticism and Experience: Philosophy and Literature in the German Enlightenment,” in Philosophy and German Literature 1700–1990, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 14.

14 Lessing, Fabeln: Drei Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen, LM 7:415–16. Subsequent citations are in the text. 15

Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, LM 8:186.

16

Thomas Noel, Theories of the Fable in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1975), 87 (Noel’s italics). I do not completely share Noel’s perspective; while Lessing wants to eliminate “the personification of abstract qualities” as allegorical, he assumes that fables, at least “simple” fables, achieve this personification without allegorical assistance.

17

Michel Beaujour, “Some Paradoxes of Description,” Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 32.

18 19

Beaujour, 48–49.

“Wenn wir einen allgemeinen moralischen Satz auf einen besondern Fall zurückführen, diesem besondern Falle die Wirklichkeit ertheilen, und eine Geschichte daraus dichten, in welcher man den allgemeinen Satz anschauend erkennt: so heißt diese Erdichtung eine Fabel” (LM 7:446).


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20

See Max Staege’s discussion of Wolff’s fable theory in his Die Geschichte der deutschen Fabeltheorie (1929; reprint: Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1970), 22–23.

21

Staege, Geschichte der deutschen Fabeltheorie, 42.

22

Noel, 94.

23

McCarthy, “Criticism and Experience,” 15.

24

Gerhard Bauer, “Der Bürger als Schaf und als Scherer. Sozialkritik, politisches Bewußtsein und ökonomische Lage in Lessings Fabeln,” Euphorion 67 (1973): 24. 25

Lessing, “Der Fuchs und die Larve,” LM 1:212.

26

McCarthy, “Criticism and Experience,” 39.

27

Lessing, “Von einem besondern Nutzen der Fabeln in den Schulen,” LM 7:47. Subsequent references are in the text.

28

My thanks to my colleague Richard Warga for providing this translation.

29

Ben Edwin Perry, ed., Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965), 194–97. 30

Lessing, “Die Pfauen und die Krähe,” LM 1:209.

31

Lessing, “Die Esel,” LM 1:210.

32

Lessing, “Das Schaf,” LM 1:215–16.

33

Bauer, “Der Bürger als Schaf und als Scherer,” 38–41.

34

Hans-Günther Thalheim, Zur Literatur der Goethezeit (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1969), 33–34. 35 Wolfram Mauser, “Weisheit und Macht. Zu Lessings Fabel ‘Die Esel,’ ” in Exile and Enlightenment: Studies in German and Comparative Literature, ed. Uwe Faulhaber, Jerry Glenn, Edward P. Harris, and Hans-Georg Richert (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1987), 55–65, esp. 59. 36

Klaus Grubmüller, Meister Esopus: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Funktion der Fabel im Mittelalter (Munich: Artemis, 1977), 177. 37

Lessing, Herkules, LM 1:207.

38

See Jörg Villwock, “Lessings Fabelwerk und die Methode seiner literarischen Kritik,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 60 (1986): 60–87. Villwock notes that the punchline (Pointe) of Lessing’s fables often brings about the volatile destabilization of hasty, falsely self-confident judgments (77).

39 See P. M. Mitchell, “Aspekte der Fabeltheorie im 18. Jahrhundert vor Lessing,” in Die Fabel: Theorie, Geschichte und Rezeption einer Gattung, ed. Peter Hasubek (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982), 119–33, esp. 121 and 133. 40 All such epimythia, and fables in general, are socially coded, a circumstance which necessitates a historically aware hermeneutic engagement on the part of the modern reader. See Laura Gibbs, “ ‘Endomythia’ and the Morals of Aesopic Fables,” 29 December 1998 ⬍http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/98mtg/ abstracts/gibbs.html⬎.


The Laocoon group. Roman copy, perhaps after Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes. Marble, 1st century A.D. Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photo credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

Lessing’s Poetics as an Approach to Aesthetics Beate Allert Dasjenige aber nur allein ist fruchtbar, was der Einbildungskraft freies Spiel läßt. Je mehr wir sehen, desto mehr müssen wir hinzu denken können. — Lessing, Laokoon1

I

1766 LESSING published his treatise Laokoon: Oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoön: Or on the Limits of Painting and the Poetic Arts2). It discussed the famous statue in the Vatican collection depicting the Trojan Priest of Apollo, Laocoön, and his two sons, in the process of being attacked by snakes.3 The story was popular in Classical times, existing in at least three separate versions, the most familiar being that of Vergil in the Aeneid (Book II: 13–249). The statue was discovered in 1506 just outside of Rome and then installed by Pope Julius II in the Belvedere Courtyard of the Vatican, where it remains today. There it was seen by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) during a visit to Rome in 1760. His response to the statue is found in Gedanken über die Nachahmung Griechischer Werke in Malerei und Skulptur (1755, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture). This work raised a number of issues which would continue to be debated for the rest of the century, with Goethe entering the fray in 1798.4 In 1757 Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) published an essay which was to greatly influence Lessing. In this essay, “Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” (Reflections on the Sources and the Links between the Belles-Lettres and the Sciences),5 Mendelssohn raises the issue of the relationship between the visual and the verbal arts. Lessing followed this approach in his Laokoon, exploring the broad fields of art theory and what we would now call “aesthetics” through the lens of his own perspective as a writer and poet, making use of poetic language in drawing attention to the importance of imagination and silence as artistic devices. In his essay, which is composed of numerous dialogues and digressions, Lessing tries to comprehend the complexities of the various disciplines of art by focusing on “Poesie,” that is, the poetic art that he claims is at the center of all literary N

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endeavor. It is through his concept of “Poesie” in his Laokoon that Lessing makes his contribution to art and art theoretical discussions that have continued down to the present. In 1730, the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) first proposed that the word “aesthetics” be given to the knowledge derived from the senses, specifically the sense-perception of beauty, as opposed to knowledge exclusively acquired in a logical fashion through reason, and he treated this matter much more fully in the two volumes of his Aesthetica (1750–58).6 It was this insight that was developed much more extensively by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790, Critique of Judgment). Lessing too tries to understand a set of rules or a theory for the Beautiful, but he responds more to the rules laid out in Mendelssohn’s essay than any insights on the part of Baumgarten. Lessing never uses the word “Ästhetik,” and Baumgarten is only mentioned once in Laokoon, in the preface, and then somewhat dismissively.7 Therefore, it will be more useful to attempt to approach Lessing’s “aesthetics” (in the modern sense, that is, philosophical theorizing on the fine arts and the Beautiful) through an investigation of his “poetics,” that is, his attempt as a critic to expound and explicate the rules of “Poesie.”8 Baumgarten was only one of a large number of thinkers who made attempts, as the eighteenth century progressed, to theorize the Beautiful. Lessing enters this debate by claiming that poetic art (“Poesie”) and painting (“Malerei”) both produce pleasure in the individual, and that it is the philosopher (Mendelssohn) who recognizes that the source of this pleasure is “Schönheit,” which has “allgemeine Regeln, die sich auf mehrere Dinge anwenden lassen” (Laokoon, “Vorrede”; Ba 5/2, 13).9 It is the “Kunstrichter” (art critic, that is, Lessing) who notices that some of these rules apply more to painting and others more to the poetic arts. Lessing then sets out to explore the nature and distribution of these rules as others have interpreted them. He challenges the tradition of ut pictura poesis (“as painting, so poetry”) by questioning the traditional superiority of the visual over the verbal arts and by establishing equal rights among the socalled “sister arts,” painting and poetry, without ignoring their differences. In doing so, Lessing shifted importance not simply from the visual to the verbal, or from one genre to another; he commented upon and experimented with the visual, making it too play a major role within the verbal, such as for example when using metaphors, metonymies, and other poetic strategies. For Lessing, it was “Poesie” or the perspective of the poet (a position that included all the genres of the art of writing) that lay at the core of any such broader investigation. It was via this particular and central medium of writing, via reflections based on the poetic in language, that Lessing approached all the other questions on aesthetics (in the modern sense), whether they included the Beautiful or not. Lessing uses the word “Poesie” in his theoretical writings neither as matter of cognition, as

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Baumgarten would have it, nor merely as a genre, as Aristotle presented it in his Poetics;10 rather Lessing gives “poetic art” a new position in art theory and sees in it the vital force that connects all art. Similar to Mendelssohn, Lessing concentrated his intellectual efforts on attempting to understand “Poesie” and in his theoretical writings on poetics, this was a subject that he located not only next to the visual and plastic arts, but also next to music. Ein poetisches Gemälde ist nicht notwendig das, was in ein materielles Gemälde zu verwandeln ist; sondern jeder Zug, jede Verbindung mehrerer Züge, durch die uns der Dichter seinen Gegenstand so sinnlich macht, daß wir uns dieses Gegenstandes deutlicher bewußt werden, als seiner Worte, heißt malerisch, heißt ein Gemälde, weil es uns dem Grade der Illusion näher bringt, dessen das materielle Gemälde besonders fähig ist, der sich von dem materiellen Gemälde am ersten und leichtesten abstrahieren lassen. Nun kann der Dichter zu diesem Grade der Illusion, wie die Erfahrung zeiget, auch der Vorstellungen anderer, als sichtbarer Gegenstände erheben. Folglich müssen notwendig dem Artisten ganze Classen von Gemälden abgehen, die der Dichter vor ihm voraus hat. Drydens Ode auf den Cäcilienstag ist voller musikalischen Gemälde, die den Pinsel müßig lassen. (Laokoon, ch. 14–15; Ba 5/2, 113–14)11

Lessing made evident that not only what we read or observe in art deserves to be understood and questioned, but also how we read and observe the signs that the poet and painter leave us.12 Throughout his life he was concerned with finding the truth, its representation, beauty, and other notions related to art and aesthetics in general. More specifically, he was interested in the relationships among all the disciplines of art; however, since he placed the poetic in the center, all the other disciplines had to be approached via this one. To this extent, then, Lessing may be said to have a “theory of the Beautiful,” that is, an “aesthetics.” His claim is far more modest; he is not a philosopher attempting to establish the rules of a theory of Beauty, but only a critic concerned with exploring the applicability of rules that have been suggested might make up such a theory. According to Lessing, the goal of “Poesie” (poetic art) is not only to elevate the mind of the audience and to promote a cleansing of emotions (catharsis), as Aristotle had formulated it, but also to educate the audience and to promote tolerance, respect, and love for others. One of the ways it does this is through the evocation of compassion (“Mitleid”), an insight adopted in part from Aristotle’s Poetics.13 Again, Lessing’s approach has some innovative features. Whereas Aristotle conceptualized compassion and fear as two polarized and equally important terms, Lessing placed “Mitleid” in the primary position and interpreted fear as subordinate to compassion. Lessing combines poetics with ethics and at the same time tries to liberate

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the imagination of the audience; he is careful not to issue imperatives but instead to leave conclusions open. He was careful to avoid labels, prescriptive or finalizing terms, preferring images, metaphors, and metonymies, and while the basis for his approach was in Enlightenment reasoning, his writings nevertheless reflect many differences with the dominant Enlightenment discourse.14 Also in contradistinction to Aristotelian poetics, he was prepared to discuss the ugly in the arts; for him beauty was a matter of plurality, conceptualized as diversity in unity (“Ein einziger unschicklicher Teil kann die übereinstimmende Wirkung vieler zur Schönheit stören. Doch wird der Gegenstand darum noch nicht häßlich” [Laokoon, ch. 23; Ba 5/2 164]).15 Lessing approaches “Poesie” in various ways throughout his career, but it is possible to distinguish three separate yet related phases. The earliest is that found in his Fabeln (Fables), which appeared in 1759, the second is that of the Laocoön treatise of 1766, and the third is found in the parables that appeared separately in 1778/79. In 1759 Lessing published his Fabeln: Drey Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen (Fables: Three Books. With Treatises).16 This is a collection of brief narratives that convey general statements through specific examples or representations of truth. The fables are often didactic, but in contrast to the fable tradition before him, Lessing omits the explicit moralistic conclusions that usually follow the main narratives, as for example in the fables of Aesop and of La Fontaine, and leaves it up to his readers to form their own moral from the story. For Lessing the poetic and the ethical alike dwell within the territory of the fable: “Es gefiel mir auf diesem gemeinschaftlichen Raine der Poesie und Moral.”17 The fable aims for an “anschauende Erkenntnis” (“Abhandlungen I; Ba 4, 351: visual knowledge), a type of cognition based on sense perception and seeing. Fables lead, as Lessing further explains, to a type of understanding capable of connecting something specific and concrete with something abstract. Lessing adds that fables use a language that is clear on its own (Ba 4, 372: “von sich selbst klar”). He comments that whereas symbolic language borrows its clarity from that of the visual (372: “Die symbolische entlehnet ihre Klarheit von der anschauenden”),18 fables are to be characterized by a sense of immediacy. Lessing distinguishes their kind of visuality from the allegorical and comments: In der Fabel wird nicht eine jede Wahrheit, sondern ein allgemeiner moralischer Satz, nicht unter die Allegorie einer Handlung, sondern auf einen einzeln Fall, nicht versteckt oder verkleidet, sondern so zurückgeführet, daß ich nicht bloß einige Ähnlichkeiten mit dem moralischen Satz in ihm entdecke, sondern diesen ganz anschauend darin erkenne. (Ba 4, 369; emphasis in the original)19

Since the language of the fable is self-evident, it does not hide or represent things in and through allegory, but rather simply shows things as they are,


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both in terms of narrative and moral. As Lessing explains in his many comments on the fables, this is a genre of fiction that serves as the basis for more complex narratives. The fable is a kind of fiction that claims not to refer to something via the use of symbols, but via that type of the poetic that is, as he claims, “anschaulich,” that is, clear or concrete. He explains that parts signify more than themselves and he introduces metonymic pars pro toto (part for the whole) relations. Meanings as they are established in a fable are, he claims, obvious or evident even without lengthy explications or additional allusions to external texts or other media. Since their understanding depends not only on what is said but also on what remains unsaid, everything necessary is already communicated. The fable helped Lessing establish his key notion of communicating a truth via fiction, and Helmut Koopmann identifies Lessing’s fables therefore as the paradigmatic genre for all literature.20 Lessing turned to the fable for an “anschauliche Darstellung einer Wahrheit” or a visual presentation of a truth.21 The suggestion of action, including moments of silence, not pictorial description, gives a fable its strength. Lessing does not imply a rejection of images for the sake of texts, as some recent critics have claimed.22 Visuality and sense perception are not cancelled out in Lessing’s poetics, and his fables work with such features as reduction, condensation, pars pro toto relations, and contiguity. Though Lessing was an expert on Aesop’s Fables,23 he created a new type of visuality within the genre’s conventions of verbal representation. Lessing himself composed “Der Besitzer des Bogens” (The Owner of the Bow), the first fable of the third book. It deserves to be read closely for its presentation of what might be called a minimalist aesthetics that is nevertheless visual in its implications: Ein Mann hatte einen trefflichen Bogen von Ebenholz, mit dem er sehr weit und sehr sicher schoß, und den er ungemein wert hielt. Einst aber, als er ihn aufmerksam betrachtete, sprach er: “Ein wenig zu plump bist du doch! Alle deine Zierde ist die Glätte. Schade! — Doch dem ist abzuhelfen; fiel ihm ein. Ich will hingehen und den besten Künstler Bilder in den Bogen schnitzen lassen. — Er ging hin; und der Künstler schnitzte eine ganze Jagd auf den Bogen; und was hätte sich besser auf einen Bogen geschickt, als eine Jagd? Der Mann war voller Freuden. “Du verdienest diese Zierraten, mein lieber Bogen!” — Indem will er ihn versuchen; er spannt, und der Bogen — zerbricht. (Ba 4, 329)24

Lessing’s fable here is obviously a plea for simplicity rather than baroque extravagance. A man has a powerful and accurate bow that is made of ebony. He values it highly, but convinces himself that the best artist could improve it by carving pictures into it to make it look better, because the only ornament it has is its sheen. An artist carves pictures of a hunting scene into the bow. The owner is pleased, but when he tries to use

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the bow, it breaks. The fable may be regarded as ridiculing images. They seem to be only secondary or ornamental features, which, according to Lessing, in the tradition of the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744), would render them unnecessary. By the same token, if applied to language, the fable may imply a rejection of that notion of metaphor as defined by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (ca. 35–95), whose notion of metaphor as shortened simile or derived secondary language structure had already been challenged by Vico, a challenge that would later be picked up by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and subsequently by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825). Lessing here anticipates his German colleagues in his presentation of a new approach to metaphor that considers it no longer as a secondary language structure, but a primary one, seeing metaphors, then, as something unavoidable and essential, as the shortest possible way to express precisely what they mean. Lessing’s “Poesie” has no ornamental or additional images added to a main structure in order to embellish it; instead metaphors and metonymies are for Lessing at the core of meaning, which can be immediately understood despite an apparent lack of explanation. Lessing’s idea was to be much later developed in greater detail by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who said that “Wahrheiten” (truths) were also “Metaphern” (metaphors) and “Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, daß sie welche sind” (Illusions that have ceased to be recognized as such).25 Nietzsche compared these metaphors to coins whose faces have become worn down but are nevertheless still valid as legal tender. It is the ways they are used and the ways they are interpreted in the processes of reception that gives them their meaning. Lessing is critical of images that are only rhetorical features but add nothing to the dynamics and basic purpose of the bow or to its efficiency. Lessing’s fable indicates that effectiveness is much more important than appearance. And obviously the lack of pragmatic wisdom on the part of the owner of the bow leads him to add the engravings, which cause the bow to break. The owner was not content with the simple yet effective bow he had. He wanted what he considered would be a more beautiful object, but art in this sense is associated with artificiality. In his attempt to “beautify” the bow, the owner weakens and destroys it. It is obvious or “anschaulich” in Lessing’s sense that the addition of an ornamental engraving of an entire hunting scene to the bow does not make it more beautiful. The bow was already beautiful in terms of its hue, its sheen, its smoothness, and in terms of its utility. Lessing indicates that if images belong to a second order of surplus features they should be omitted. So, superficially, this fable could be read as an example of Lessing’s criticism of the image at large. But clearly there is more at the core of visuality. Lessing values simplicity over redundancy and rejects features that are purely decorative. The fable relies on an “anschauende Erkenntnis,” a sense-related cognition, and on a sense of


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the beautiful that is closely connected with metaphor and an understanding of the specific. Lessing links “Poesie” with this sense of the beautiful and draws attention to the importance of ethics in the context of “Poesie” and all the other arts. Beauty is less central to his argument than action, that is, both outer and inner action, as he will later elaborate in his theory of the drama, because action includes emotions and thoughts. Furthermore, Lessing associates such actions with pity and compassion in the interaction between the members of the audience and what goes on on stage. Implicated are not only the visual but also the tactile features of cognition.26 Whereas in the above example the bow appears to be plain, its pragmatic efficiency defines it as perfect (and beautiful). No comparison or metaperspective is needed. Lessing’s fables are not only didactic but they promote a notion of free interaction and multifaceted dynamics, developing, as Bennett puts it, “a poetics from within” (120), one that validates whatever beauty this bow may have in the first place. Lessing promotes a style of freedom from external criteria, something that can be regarded as a kind of rational minimalism. “Die eherne Bildsäule” (The Statue of Brass),27 another one of Lessing’s original fables, at the beginning of the second book of the Fabeln, also deserves attention in this light: Die eherne Bildsäule eines vortrefflichen Künstlers schmolz durch die Hitze einer wütenden Feuersbrunst in einen Klumpen. Dieser Klumpen kam einem anderen Künstler in die Hände, und durch seine Geschicklichkeit verfertigte er eine neue Bildsäule daraus; von der erstern in dem, was sie vorstellete, unterschieden, an Geschmack und Schönheit ihr gleich. Der Neid sah es und knirschte. Endlich besann er sich auf einen armseligen Trost: “Der gute Mann würde dieses, noch ganz erträgliche Stück, auch nicht hervorgebracht haben, wenn ihm nicht die Materie der alten Bildsäule dabei zu Statten gekommen wäre.” (Ba 4, 315)28

This fable is about two statues. The first one is created by an artist and it is considered without comment as “vortrefflich” (excellent). This statue is destroyed in a fire that reduces it to a shapeless lump of metal. This residue gets into the hands of another artist, who then creates a second statue from it. In terms of subject matter, it is completely different from the first, but it is considered, at least according to the narrator, to be its equivalent in terms of taste and beauty. Everything of the first statue has been destroyed, except for a visual residue in the public memory. A lump of metal has become the raw material for something entirely new but qualitatively equivalent. At work in this narrative is something that could perhaps be described as an informed public opinion; art as it is always related to memory and other artworks of distant times and places interacting as part of a critical discourse.29 It should be noted that there is no indication of whether or not the second artist was aware of the original statue. What is important in this

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context is the opinion of the spectators who label and evaluate it. The opinion of only one such observer is revealed through the voice of “Envy,” who can only be considered as a partial participant in the statue’s reception. He is preoccupied with his own view of things, his own self-related perspective. While he seems content that the first artist should have been held in excellent esteem, he would rather deny any positive judgment to the newcomer. He has no generosity, but at the same time cannot deny that the new artwork holds some power. He admits no more than that it is “noch ganz erträglich.” Perhaps he is a traditionalist who thinks that outstanding artworks are a thing of the past. He does not want to believe that the beauty of this second statue is entirely the work of a contemporary artist. He attempts to diminish the surprising yet obvious dynamic of the new artwork.30 What is important is the reception of the work as it stands on its own merits. Each work has its own immanent features that determine its importance in a similar way to metaphors, the meanings of which are specifically designated by the context in which they are applied. In the Laokoon treatise from 1766, Lessing draws attention to the relations between the visual arts, music, and “Poesie.” He raises the problem of temporality in art by positioning on one side of the spectrum sculpture and painting, on the other side music, with “Poesie” in between. Whereas sculpture and painting exist in space, music exists only in time and has the advantage of simultaneity, while “Poesie” partakes of both the spatial and the temporal. Lessing tries to deal with the problem of temporality in his own interpretation of the Laocoön statue by proposing such notions as “der fruchtbare Moment” (the fruitful moment), “der prägnante Moment” (the pregnant moment), and “der stumme Schrei” (the silent scream). These poetic concepts have had far-reaching theoretical consequences for later theorists, even those working with quite different media.31 Lessing argues that since a painting can only depict one single moment in time, such a select moment must be chosen very carefully so that the implied potential of the entire action can be seen in a nutshell. The painter must think of the most pregnant moment without giving away too much and thereby restricting the imagination. Himself a master of brevity, Lessing rejects what he calls “Schilderungssucht” (descriptive mania, Laokoon, “Vorrede”; V/2, 15). For him one of the foremost principles of art is not to specify descriptions so thoroughly that the imagination’s free reign is restricted, and in the parables he wrote towards the end of his life, Lessing will open up specific avenues to infinite meanings and endless abstractions. In antiquity, the Greek lyric poet, Simonides of Keos (ca. 556–468 B.C.) had — according to Plutarch — made the equation “painting (is) silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks.”32 Horace (65–8 B.C.), in his De arte poetica, wrote the famous phrase “ut pictura poesis” (as painting so poetry).33 Later these commonplaces were isolated from the ancient rhetorical tradition and used in a normative sense in Europe during the


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eighteenth century. The sentence “ut pictura poesis” gained new momentum with the Swiss critics Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1776), who in their periodical Die Discourse der Mahler (The Discourse of Painters, May 1721–January 1723) discussed poetry as if it were a branch of painting. This position is made even clearer in Bodmer’s Critische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (Critical Observations on the Poetic Paintings of Writers, 1741), which had a foreword by Breitinger.34 The two critics gave mimetic representation a new currency and considered a “painterly” or “descriptive” style most desirable. Clarity was for them, unlike for Lessing, associated with flowery language, with a high degree of verbalization or expressiveness in the narrative. Significant too in establishing painting and plastic art as the exemplary models for the writing of literature were the works by the Frenchmen Jean-Baptiste Dubos (Abbé Dubos, 1670–1742)35 and Anne Claude Philippe de Tubières, Comte de Caylus (1692–1765), as well as that by the Englishman Joseph Spence (1699–1768).36 Lessing distances himself from Caylus and Spence in his discussion of the Laocoön statue, while at the same time drawing upon their insights and comparisons.37 Lessing explicitly rejects the “Schilderungssucht” that had become popular in his time as a consequence of Bodmer’s and Breitinger’s approach to visuality.38 Lessing argues instead that pictures and texts are indeed different genres and that the ideals of painting must no longer be adopted for writing. The poetic has much to do with imagination and does not need everything shown or said via flowery language. He prefers brevity in style and points out that the viewer or reader should have an active role in interpretation. While he liberated the poet from subordination to the painter, he drew attention to new types of visuality as they exist in the realm of the verbal, such as via metaphor and metonymy where silences also matter. Lessing is not an advocate of allegorical writing in the same vein as it used to be mainly practiced among his contemporaries; he critically refers to it as “Allegoristerei” (allegorializing). Meanings of such allegories are overdone according to Lessing’s taste and must unfortunately rely on pre-established meanings outside of the immanent medium. He wants to see the meanings of images and texts more independent from each other (Laokoon, “Paralipomena” 3; Ba 5/2, 217–19). Whereas the Enlightenment discourse to which Lessing’s work mainly belongs is known for its encyclopedic efforts and a tireless quest to name all things in order to know them,39 the Enlightenment also gave preference to thinking or reflecting over simply imitating given patterns or following any pre-established norms. And this is where in Lessing’s “Poesie,” a critique of the tradition of mimesis (according to which the writer had to imitate the painter and art had to reproduce reality in its given form), and a new appreciation for silence have their place. Lessing was very much interested in “Anschaulichkeit,” and an alternative visuality that can be achieved via poetic language as explored in

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his writings. He claims that “Poesie” must correlate the visual and the acoustic, the spatial and the temporal. The need for mediation as well as for moments of silence must be taken into consideration when evaluating Lessing’s critical and creative use of rhetorical strategies.40 Lessing favored performance over mere description, and even when he theorizes, as he does in the Laokoon essay, he offers a performance citing various perspectives and voices and eventually relying on readers who are able to draw the conclusions for themselves. At the core of Lessing’s approach to the visual is his notion that the more one sees, the more one should think about it. In other words, according to Lessing, there must always be room for imagination and thought when reading or viewing literature or art. Lessing shares with many of his contemporaries an intense interest in the eye and in visual perception. He was perhaps more conservative than Jean Paul, who literally transferred optical techniques (such as enlargement, displacement, dissection, etc.) into the poetic realm.41 Lessing did not accept the traditional hierarchy among the senses as established by Leibniz and maintained by Baumgarten, which favored the eye over the ear and further subordinated the other senses, nor did he idolize painting and sculpture as representing normative ideals, as did Winckelmann and to some extent Herder, although the latter shifted attention from the eye to the ear. By focusing first on “Poesie” in approaching the visual arts and music, Lessing proposes a non-hierarchical discourse about the senses and about the various disciplines of art. Even though he focuses on poetic art (“Poesie”), he places it on the same level as painting and music. At the same time he recognizes some important distinctions among these art forms without ignoring some of their shared basic features and their interactive dynamics. Even if it may be said that Lessing liberates the verbal from the visual, as suggested here, it is necessary to mention again that he does not dispense with images and visuality in general, but only with a certain tradition concerning them. In addition to being critical of allegorical excesses, he is also critical of those images for which signs were considered “natural” in a rather naive pictorial sense.42 Goethe also noticed the departure Lessing had made from earlier positions and commented enthusiastically in Dichtung und Wahrheit: Man muß Jüngling sein, um sich zu vergegenwärtigen, welche Wirkung Lessings Laokoon auf uns ausübte, indem dieses Werk uns aus der Region eines kümmerlichen Anschauens in die freien Gefilde des Gedankens hinriß. Das so lange mißverstandene: ut pictura poesis, war auf einmal beseitigt, der Unterschied der bildenden und der Redekünste klar, der Gipfel beider nun getrennt, wie nah ihre Basen auch zusammenstoßen mochten.43

Lessing had a great appeal for the young, and inspired many new directions of intellectual activity. He provoked critical thinking and


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avoided simplistic equations or parallels between painting and poetry. His approach to the value and distribution of what he saw as the general rules governing the idea of Beauty was welcomed and appreciated by some, but criticized by others who mistakenly paid little attention to his careful process-oriented approach that shifts importance to interactive features and to what Bennett succinctly characterizes as “the poetics” of reading or seeing.44 In this context, Bennett also makes an argument that poetry is where “language differs significantly from itself, which makes an adequate terminology for literary criticism unattainable” and he states: “If we are not prepared to argue that a text operates to expand the limits of its language, to conquer new verbal territory, we are not treating that text as poetry” (118). By questioning what the limitations between the visual and the verbal are, and also by attempting to determine what exactly is the distinction between poetry and poetics, Lessing not only tried to draw dividing lines between them respectively but inserted new meanings into the discussion and made reflection the key to all understanding. The consequences of Lessing’s discussion of the Laocoön statue can be compared to implications drawn from the second of the statues in the fable of “Die eherne Bildsäule” discussed above, where Lessing indirectly asserts that there is no plagiarism in using the same material as others have used before. In his discussion of the Laocoön statue, he is much indebted to others who wrote on the same monument as a springboard for developing their own ideas on the meaning of this ancient artifact and on art and beauty in general. Lessing demonstrates how the process to establish meaning and the process of reception are inseparably intertwined and that the way the material is shaped, for example, the poetic features of a text, are integral to its meaning. He suggests new readings of this artwork by drawing attention to potential expression, incomplete meanings, thus evoking imagination and compassion. Winckelmann had commented that the mouth of Laocoön — who is entwined in the coils of the dangerous serpents and has already been bitten — is only slightly ajar and not, as might be expected in real life, open and screaming. Winckelmann explains this in terms of the attributes he associates with Laocoön, who for him had come to represent the Classical ideals of “edle Einfalt” (noble simplicity) and “stille Größe” (silent grandeur).45 Lessing shifts attention away from the statue per se to its reception by the spectators, and argues that the artist must be aware of the medium being used, in this case, sculpture, and insists that it is the effect of what is being seen that matters. He invites his readers to think about the “silent scream,” and reflects upon it, but not in terms of the signified, the historical Laocoön, as Winckelmann had emphasized, but rather in terms of the signifiers, the attributes of the work of art, the medium of sculpture, and the process of reception: “Er mußte Schreien in Seufzen mildern; nicht weil das Schreien eine unedle Seele verrät, sondern weil es das Gesicht auf ekelhafte Weise verstellet.”46 Lessing recommends a

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mental experiment: “[M]an reiße dem Laokoon in Gedanken nur den Mund auf, und urteile. Man lasse ihn schreien und sehe.”47 The thing itself or the person represented in an artwork does not carry any predetermined meaning; what it is about comes rather from the interaction with the observer. Lessing insists that the imagination of the spectators must under all circumstances have free range. A silent scream is more powerful than a wide open and distorted mouth for that matter.48 An artwork should not force or impose its meaning but leave possibilities open. It should communicate or convince by means of its own ability to represent a truth through fiction. The observer must see more in the work of art than what is given in the fruitful or pregnant moment it presents. Lessing stresses in Laokoon that the process of production of meaning detaches itself from the intentions of the artist and becomes instead a matter of reception. Timing is crucial in these pars pro toto relations and requires the choice of the most “pregnant moment” for the scene the work of art represents. The painter and the sculptor can only choose one moment in time to depict, and this moment must be the most fruitful one, the one that will most engage the imagination of the viewer.49 Lessing points out in the subsequent passages that it takes time for the spectator to observe and reflect upon an artwork with care and attention while at the same time having imaginative interaction with it. The artist should not interfere with this future process nor cut it short in advance. He asks how the most pregnant moment might be chosen and how the best effect might be achieved, mentioning ways of representation in painting and in poetic writing that could promote the greatest openness for the sake of “freies Spiel” (ch. 2; Ba 5/2, 32; “free rein,” McCormick 19). Lessing does not simply declare that there is polarity or an unbridgeable gap between painting and poetic writing.50 He writes: Wenn es wahr ist, daß die Malerei zu ihren Nachahmungen ganz andere Mittel, oder Zeichen gebrauchet, als die Poesie; jene nemlich Figuren und Farben in dem Raume, diese aber artikulierte Töne in der Zeit; wenn unstreitig die Zeichen ein bequemes Verhältnis zu dem Bezeichneten haben müssen: So können neben einander geordnete Zeichen, auch nur Gegenstände, die neben einander, oder deren Teile neben einander existieren, auf einander folgende Zeichen aber, auch nur Gegenstände ausdrücken, die auf einander, oder deren Teile auf einander folgen. (Laokoon, ch. 16; Ba 5/2, 116).51

Lessing distinguishes between the means by which the visual and poetic signify, drawing a line between “figures and color in space” and what he calls “articulated sounds in time.” He indirectly questions what he calls “suitable relations” or “comfortable relations” between signs and signified, thus entering the realm of more uncomfortable, less predictable, and more complex semiotic relations. He draws attention to a gap in the signification


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process and asserts that bodies exist in space and time: “Doch alle Körper existieren nicht allein in dem Raume, sondern auch in der Zeit” (Ch. 16; 5/2, 116).52 Here Lessing seems to question his earlier argument that the temporal and the spatial belong each to a different order. He brings them together by using the word “bodies” in a figurative sense. He shifts the level of his own discourse by drawing attention to the fact that language can go beyond its own limits and that meanings are never entirely given. Lessing goes even further and raises the question of what is visible and what is invisible.53 Since painting and the visual arts must be content with the visible, there is a problem, he argues, in that “die Körper” or the figures in space continue to have meaning beyond that limit of visibility: Sie dauern fort und können in jedem Augenblicke ihrer Dauer anders erscheinen, und in anderer Verbindung stehen. Jede dieser augenblicklichen Erscheinungen und Verbindungen ist die Wirkung einer vorhergehenden, und kann die Ursache einer folgenden, und sonach gleichsam das Centrum einer Handlung sein. Folglich kann die Malerei auch Handlungen nachahmen, aber nur andeutungsweise durch Körper. . . . Die Malerei kann in ihren coexistierenden Compositionen nur einen einzigen Augenblick der Handlung nutzen, und muß daher den prägnantesten wählen, aus welchem das Vorhergehende und Folgende am begreiflichsten wird.54

The continuation of movements is what changes meanings constantly. Since each appearance and each moment of an impression can become the center of a new action, the artist must choose among all the possible coexisting compositions that may be implied. The most pregnant moment would suggest as many possibilities as possible. Since the choice of such an apparent frozen image out of the flux of time is not a way to control real time, it is a way to use fiction in order to make sense of a complex and changing reality which, nevertheless, as Lessing is fully aware, always depends on processes of reception, not only of production. Some critics have noticed in Laokoon a “concession” to time, an attempt to allow temporality and simultaneity of meaning not only in music but also in poetic texts. Lessing appears to indicate that images or pictures are also to some extent poetic and that they cannot, as other critics have argued, be banned from the verbal.55 Some critics have therefore interpreted this as a move to combine the visual and the verbal and to allow all aspects of temporality in the verbal and visual arts, not as any sort of concession but as one of Lessing’s most important discoveries.56 Laokoon is, however, most often debated as if Lessing were asserting a strict dividing line determining the boundaries between painting and literature, the visual and the verbal. On the other hand, if understanding imagination and images means transposing them into a narrative, then visual art and metaphor must first be translated into discursive language before their

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meaning can be deciphered. However, Lessing does not necessarily propose a translation between media, a textualizing of the statue into narrative. Visualization of an artwork may be simulated by reading about it, yet there is no friction-free transfer of the visual into the verbal. In Laokoon, chapter 14, Lessing points out that a poetic picture is not necessarily something that can be converted into a material painting.57 There is a residue, something that is not entirely translatable in the process. Metaphors, metonymies, and elements of ekphrasis remain unconverted. On the other hand, the poet makes the subject so concrete for us that we become more conscious of the subject referred to than of his words. Benjamin Bennett’s reading of Laokoon as a poetics shows how Lessing goes “beyond theory” by initiating moments of reflection. These cannot simply be reduced to a comparison of painting and poetry, and instead they allow us an experience of multiple senses best achieved by poetry, including music, and dance.58 Carol Jacobs has emphasized the significant “performative” features of Lessing’s essay that depend primarily on the attentiveness of readers and spectators. In her interpretation, Lessing’s Laokoon is not only an art-theoretical treatise; it also invites interaction and experience.59 There are indeed features of Lessing’s text that seem to subvert or to undercut his major argument about the borders between painting and poetry, because Lessing inserts more than one layer of meaning to his arguments, drawing attention to the exceptional, and thus suggesting multiple sense perceptions and multiple relationships between painting and poetry. In 1778–1779, towards the end of his life, Lessing produced two texts to which he gave the designation “Parabel.” The first, “Eine Parabel. Nebst einer kleinen Bitte, und einem eventualen Absagungsschreiben an den Herrn Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg” (A Parable, Along with a Request and a Possible Refusal to the Parish Priest Herr Goeze of Hamburg, 1778), appeared anonymously and was one of his defensive pieces in his ongoing quarrel with Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786), the “Hauptpastor” of Hamburg.60 The parable concerns what appears to be a burning palace; it stages a fire that turns out to be an optical illusion. It nevertheless ridicules the inappropriate action of those onlookers who, instead of bringing water or doing something more productive, keep quarreling about some lost ground plans that would indicate what the architect had in mind when he had the burning building constructed. This parable has mostly been interpreted as a commentary on the religious battle between the orthodox Protestantism of the time and Lessing’s more open-minded plea for tolerance and Enlightenment. The palace cannot only be seen, as most interpreters have done, in terms of “the house of God” or as a commentary on theology exclusively, but it can also be seen as a depiction of the house of language and as a reflection on communication within poetic language.61 The palace is characterized by fewer windows than expected, but, as the narrator adds, it


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possesses many more doors than the usual two portals. This may indicate an invitation to the readers not just to enter and to leave the building, that is, to read Lessing’s text from beginning to end and then to leave it, but to come to the text from various perspectives and to reach various conclusions as appropriate for each specific situation: Man begriff nicht, wozu viele und vielerlei Eingänge nötig wären, da ein großes Portal auf jeder Seite ja wohl schicklicher wäre, und eben die Dienste tun würde. Denn daß durch die mehrern kleinen Eingänge ein jeder, der in den Palast gerufen würde, auf dem kürzesten und unfehlbarsten Wege, gerade dahin gelangen solle, wo man seiner bedürfe, wollte den wenigsten zu Sinne.62

Lessing points out that one must enter the building in order to comprehend it, and that the architecture is so complicated that it makes only complete sense when one moves about within the building. Entry is required in order to grasp its beauty and to enjoy its purpose. The parable is a narrative about communication but is also itself part of a communication. The narrator cites voices in the text but does not offer a metaperspective on it. The parable offers insight into the mechanisms of language, which are articulated from many perspectives and cannot be summarized by any of them detached from it. The building does not lack any decoration (“Reichtum and Schmuck”), since it has its own cohesive rationale and effectiveness (as did the bow in the fable). The narrator remarks that all those who do their work in the palace are pleased with it. What is specific to this building is that despite its complex structure there is “von innen überall Licht und Zusammenhang” (42). A quarrel breaks out over the lost ground plans of the original building at exactly the time when a fire is being reported and when indeed action and participation on the part of the audience is needed rather than a debate about origins and sources. The act of entering logos, the house of language, is a poetic move that involves imagination and participation and not an erasure of the figurative or of the image. Clearly, seeing a burning building is not enough. One must take action to extinguish the fire; observation alone will not do it. The search for the presumed ground plans resembles the motif of an apparently lost ring in the second parable by Lessing from this period, his “Ringparabel,” included in act 3, scene 7 of his drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779). Here attention is also shifted to the present and future for the sake of a different search, away from mimetic reconstruction of past intentions, away from historic plans, toward new meanings that are interactively created on another level of discourse where truth is measured by such qualitative concepts such as peace, love, and tolerance. In the parable, Nathan tells the Sultan, Saladin, a story.63 A father of three sons had a marvelous ring with a precious opal in it. He was supposed to give it to the son he loved best, to designate him as his heir and successor.

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Since he could not decide which son he loved most, he went to an artist, a jeweler, and had identical rings made. Before he died, he gave each of his sons a ring, and each believed he had the exclusive rights and privileges associated with his father’s ring. None of the three sons knew about the brothers’ rings. Each assumed that he was in possession of the true ring and struggled to defend its prerogatives. But it turns out that, according to the judge in Lessing’s narrative, none of them had the original ring: “Eure Ringe / Sind alle drei nicht echt.”64 The original ring is lost, at least for the time being, as none of the sons demonstrates the behavior characteristic of one who possesses the true ring: love and tolerance. There is another condition that must be met by the true bearer of the ring: “Der rechte Ring / Besitzt die Wunderkraft beliebt zu machen / Vor Gott und Menschen angenehm.” Freedom and peace are required in order for the people to love their future king, but as long as the three sons fight, none of them can, as the judge indicates, expect that vote of confidence. All three remain fools, and none of them can be the legitimate heir of their father, as long as they fight with each other over the ring. When the judge delivers his verdict to the three sons he breaks the narrative frame and broadens his comments to include everyone in the audience: Es eifre jeder seiner unbestochnen Von Vorurteilen freien Liebe nach! Es strebe von euch jeder um die Wette, Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ring’ an Tag Zu legen! Komme dieser Kraft mit Sanftmut, Mit herzlicher Verträglichkeit, mit Wohltun, Mit innigster Ergebenheit in Gott, Zu Hülf’! Und wenn sich dann der Steine Kräfte Bei euern Kindes-Kindeskindern äussern: So lad’ ich über tausend tausend Jahre, Sie wiederum vor diesen Stuhl. Da wird Ein weisrer Mann auf diesem Stuhle sitzen, Als ich; und sprechen. Geht! — So sagte der Bescheidne Richter. (Ba 9, 559–60)65 Lessing’s “Ringparabel” has been mostly interpreted as a statement on truth, world religions, and tolerance. Those claiming the ring of truth without being loved by the people cannot legitimately own the ring. In the broader context of the drama Nathan der Weise, the world religions Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are represented by characters that are in fact related. Lessing’s “Ringparabel” can also be considered as a commentary on the metaphoric quality of specific meanings, the transfer of attention from an isolated object to a relationship; in other words, from


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a fixed material thing (the ring or its stone, the opal) to metaphoric and interactive concepts: love, peace, and tolerance. The ring was once believed to symbolize the father’s love, and it then had the power to make the carrier loved by the people. Now we are looking for attributes that have become detached from the initial object and must be established elsewhere via metaphor. The original ring seems to be lost, but certain conditions must be met, and the trace of the initial ring must be imitated and recreated so that it can be associated with convincing ethical action. None of the sons in the parable is in possession of the original ring; otherwise they would not be fighting each other. The desired object that will guarantee power and leadership must yet be found in the future. As long as the sons keep fighting, all answers are postponed; a solution is not reached. Lessing turns to the parable in his drama for the ultimate “Anschaulichkeit” despite the fact that answers are not given in the present tense of the narrative. At the end of the parable the search for the ring continues, and ethical action is presented as the necessary response to art and metaphor. What is important is the “Bescheidenheit” of the judge, his modesty and willingness not to impose premature answers. The questions about truth and the rings ultimately no longer depend on a mono-causal explanation and will remain unanswered until the conditions are met as stated above. Whether the power of the ring and its meaning can be restored remains an open question, one that will have to depend upon the audience of the future. In the Fabeln, “Poesie” was defined in terms of simplicity, brevity, metonymy, and wit. In Laokoon, Lessing made a move from seeing to action, from images to thoughts (see the epigraph to this essay), from nouns to actions. Finally, in the parables the move is made away from the descriptive and narrative to staging simulation for the sake of new insights. The apparent fire is needed to show that seeing is not enough; the physical rings are rejected as inauthentic in favor of a ring that can be perceived only as a result of its ethical consequences. There are intertexts in Lessing’s work, texts that interact with each other, and that deny any metaperspectives or any rule that would claim to unravel the often complex and dynamic text-image relations.66 Painting and poetry cannot be conceptualized only in terms of linearity or parallelism. The processes of reception continue, and Lessing’s writings are interwoven into various layers of meaning that shed new light on each other, thus leading to a mutual illumination. Deciphering them will require not only “Besonnenheit” or a meditative thoughtfulness in the processes of perception, but also humor, wit, and reflection from a variety of perspectives. In this sense Lessing is not a philosopher constructing the general rules for a theory of beauty, but remains, as he claimed, the art critic trying to understand the working of such rules.

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Notes 1

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon. Werke und Briefe, ed. Wilfried Barner et al., 14 vols. in 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-), ch. 3; 5/2, 32 (“But only that which gives free rein to the imagination is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine” [McCormick 19]). All subsequent citations throughout my essay will be from this edition with volume and page numbers presented in the following manner: Ba 4, 17 (volume 4, page 17). To assist those using other editions, chapter numbers will also be given. The translations to Laokoon are from: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. with Introduction and Notes, Edward Allen McCormick, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), cited as “McCormick.” All other translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise indicated. Lessing’s treatise is entitled Laokoon, but when referring to the character or the statue the form “Laocoön” is used. Other authors use other spellings, which are followed in titles and quotations. 2

While the term “Poesie” is often translated as “Poetry,” that term in English is too restrictive, as it is clear from the text that Lessing includes lyric, epic, and drama under that heading. Therefore the term is translated here as “poetic arts.” 3

See Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000, 44–45. 4

Goethe, “Über Laokoon,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hendrik Birus, et al., 40 volumes in 45 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), vol. 18, Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, ed. Friedmar Apel (1998): 489–500, 1253–58; Simon Richter, “The End of Laocoon: Pain and Allegory in Goethe’s ‘Über Laokoon,’ ” Goethe Yearbook 6 (1992): 123–41. On related debates in the broader context, see Gunter Gebauer, ed., Das Laokoon-Projekt: Pläne einer semiotischen Ästhetik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984); David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984); Wellbery, “The Pathos of Theory in Laokoon Revisited,” in Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 47–63; Wellbery, “Das Gesetz der Schönheit: Lessings Ästhetik der Repräsentation,” in Was heißt “Darstellen,” ed. C. L. Hart Nibbrig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 175–204; Gwen Raaberg, “Laokoon Considered and Reconsidered: Lessing and Comparative Criticism of Literature and Art,” in Lessing and the Enlightenment, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 67–110; Thomas Koebner, ed., Laokoon und kein Ende: der Wettstreit der Künste (Munich: text ⫹ kritik, 1989); Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992); Brilliant, My Laocoön 50–61; Monika Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000), 216–41. 5

Published anonymously in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, volume one, part two, 1757, 231–68. Reprinted in Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, 24 vols. in 35 (Stuttgart: Friedrich


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Frommann Verlag [Günther Holzboog], 1929 [1971]–2005), 1: 165–90. This essay was revised as “Über die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften” and published in Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Schriften, 2 vols. (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß, 1761; rev. ed. 1771), 2: 95–152. Reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, 1: 425–52. 6

“§. CXVI. Sunt ergo noe¯tá cognoscenda facultate superiore obiectum logices, asthe¯tá epise¯me¯s aisthe¯tike¯s siue AESTHETICAE.” Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Halle: Literis Ioannis Henrici Grunerti, 1739), 39. Reprint, Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holtner, ed. and trans., Reflections on Poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1954): “Therefore things known are to be known by the superior faculty as the object of logic; things perceived [are to be known by the inferior faculty, as the object] of the science of perception, or aesthetic” (78); Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Trajectum cis Viadrum, i.e., Frankfurt an der Oder: Johann Christian Kleyb, 1750; part 2, 1758; reprint, 1961, Hildesheim: Olms, 1986). Baumgarten’s “aesthetica” is a neo-Latin coinage. For a brief history of the issues involved, see Alan Goldman, “The Aesthetic,” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 181–92. See also Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Development of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Laoiza (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993); rev. ed. Le Sens de beau: aux origins de la culture contemporaine (Paris: Cercle de l’Art, 1998). 7

Lessing asserts that he will draw the evidence for his arguments from the original texts, and not, like Baumgarten did in his Aesthetica, rely on a dictionary of quotations.

8

Such an approach has already been suggested by Benjamin Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), especially chapter 3: “Lessing’s Laokoon: The Poetics of Experience,” 116–61, esp. 154–58.

9 “Beauty” which has “general rules applicable to a number of things” (McCormick 3). 10

In the Poetics, Aristotle had commented upon various forms and genres of poetry ranging from epic poetry to tragedy and comedy to dithyrambic poetry, as well as considering the music of the flute and of the lyre, characterizing all of these as genres of poetry and as modes of imitation. He associated them not only with various senses but also with various media.

11

“A poetic picture is not necessarily something that can be converted into a material painting; but every detail, every combination of details by which the poet makes his subject so palpable to us that we become more conscious of the subject than of his words, is picturesque, is a picture. This holds true because it brings us closer to that degree of illusion which the material painting is specially qualified to produce, and which for us can best and most easily be drawn from the material picture. As experience shows, the poet can raise to this degree of illusion the representation of objects other than those that are visible. Consequently, whole categories of pictures which the poet claims as his own must necessarily be beyond the reach of the artist. Dryden’s Song for St. Cecelia’s Day is full of musical pictures which leave the painter’s brush idle” (McCormick 74–76).

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12 See Inge Baxmann, Michael Franz, Wolfgang Schäffner, eds., Das LaokoonParadigma: Zeichenregime im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), for a detailed debate on signs in Lessing’s writings. The volume begins with the important sentence “Lessings Laokoon weist über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie hinaus” (Lessing’s Laocoön points far beyond the limits of painting and poetry), ix. 13 On this see Wilfried Barner, Gunter E. Grimm, Helmut Kiesel, Martin Kramer, Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung, 5th edition (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987), 196–97. 14 See, for example, many of the essays in Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Günter Sasse (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), including Beate Allert, “Pluralisierung der Ringe oder Ringverlust? Lessings Beitrag zur Metaphorisierung und/oder Politisierung der Sprache,” 113–20. 15 “The harmonious interaction of many parts which produces beauty can be destroyed by a single unfitting part, without, however, making the object ugly” (McCormick 212). This insight initiates a discussion of the role of ugliness in poetry and painting. Lessing modifies his Aristotelian approach by insights that have their beginning in the seventeenth century: see Ulrike Zeuch, “Sensus communis, imaginatio und sensorium commune im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Hans Adler and Ulrike Zeuch, eds., Synäthesie: Interferenz — Transfer — Synthese der Sinne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 167–84. 16

On the fable in German literature see: Max Staege, Die Geschichte der deutschen Fabeltheorie, Sprache und Dichtung 44 (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1929); Peter Hasubek, ed., Die Fabel: Theorie, Geschichte und Rezeption einer Gattung (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982); Monika Schrader, Sprache und Lebenswelt: Fabeltheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Germanistische Texte und Studien 38 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1991); Theo Elm and Peter Hasubek, eds., Fabel und Parabel: Kulturgeschichtliche Prozesse im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 1994). The most interesting book on Lessing’s fables is Sieglinde Eichner, Die Prosafabel Lessings in seiner Theorie und Dichtung, Bonner Arbeiten zur deutschen Literatur 25 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974). See also Günter Jahn, Lessings Fabelabhandlungen: Ein Elementarbuch der Didaktik und Methodik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000) and Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 181–99. 17

Fabeln: Drey Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen, Ba 4, 295–411 at 298. Subsequent citations are in the text. 18

See also Schrader, Sprache und Lebenswelt, 95.

19

“In the fable, not every truth, but a general moral sentence, is neither hidden or camouflaged, but thus deduced, not under the allegory of a story, but of a specific example, so that I not only discover some similarities with the moral sentence in it, but also understand it fully just by looking at it.” 20 Helmut Koopmann, “Lessing: Das Allgemeine im Besonderen. Aufklärung als Denkfigur und Fabeltheorie,” Elm and Hasubek, eds., Fabel und Parabel, 51–63; here 57. 21 22

Schrader, Sprache und Lebenswelt, 100.

See Beate Allert, “Lessing im Kontext kunsttheoretischer Debatten,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 371–87, esp. 371–74.


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23

See Hans-Lothar Markschies, “Lessing und die äsopische Fabel,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig. Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 4.1/2 (1954–1955): 129–42.

24

“A man had had a splendid ebony bow with which he shot very far and very accurately and which he considered of tremendous value. One time, however, when he looked at it attentively, he said: “You are a little bit too inelegant, aren’t you! Your only ornament is your sheen. Too bad! — But that can be remedied, it occurred to him. I will go and have the best artist carve pictures on the bow. — He went and the artist carved an entire hunt on the bow, and what could have been more suitable on a bow than a hunt? The man was full of joy. ‘You deserve these embellishments, my dear bow!’ — As he wishes to try it out, he draws it, and the bow — breaks.”

25

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn,” Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (1954–1956, reprint Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 3:309–22, esp. 314. 26

This is worked out in more detail in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (first published in book form 1769). Cf. “Erstes Stück” and “Drittes Stück,” Ba 6, 187, 201. 27

There is clearly an echo here of the wondrously decorated “zwei eherne Säulen” made by Hiram of Tyre for King Solomon’s temple (I Kings 7:13–22). For a rhetorical analysis of this fable, see Eichner 207–8.

28

“The brass statue of an outstanding artist melted through the heat of a raging conflagration into a lump. This lump came into the hands of another artist, and through his skill he created a new statue from it, different from the first in what it represented, but equal to it in taste and beauty. Envy saw it and ground his teeth. Then he thought of a paltry compensation. ‘The good man would not have produced this rather tolerable piece, had not the stuff of the old statue played a role in it.’ ”

29

This is very much the point of Brilliant’s My Laocoön.

30

Envy tries to undercut the beauty of what he sees by resorting to a “paltry consolation,” a kind of murky Thomism that denies the artist’s ability to create anything new. See Joseph Margolis, “Medieval Aesthetics,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 27–36, esp. 31–35. 31

Among them the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and the art theorist Roland Barthes (1915–80). See Beate Allert, “Lessing im Kontext kunsttheoretischer Debatten,” 371–87 and “Reconceptualizing a Pictorial Turn: Lessing, Hoffmann, Klee and Elements of Avant-Garde Language,” in Breaking the Disciplines: Reconceptions in Culture, Knowledge, & Art, ed. by Martin L. Davies and Marsha Meskimmon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 187–222, esp. 195–200. 32 “Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens” (De Gloria Atheniensium 3.347e). Translation from Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966, rpt. London: Pimlico, 1992), 42. It should be noted however that Plutarch (45–127) was writing a century after the death of Horace. 33

See Niklaus R. Schweizer, The Ut Pictura Poesis Controversy in EighteenthCentury England and Germany (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1972) and Monika Fick,

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Lessing-Handbuch, 225–28. Yates remarks that the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) links this dictum of Horace’s with one of Aristotle’s as preserved in the Latin tradition: “Intelligere est phantasmata speculari,” “to understand is to speculate with images,” The Art of Memory, 248; see also 405. 34

Critische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (Zurich: Conrad Orell; Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Gleditsch, 1741). 35 See Abbé Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 2 vols. (Paris: Jean Mariette, 1719; 4th ed., corrected and enlarged by the author, 3 vols., Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1740). In the earliest drafts to Laokoon Lessing takes the distinction between natural and arbitrary signs (“natürliche und willkürliche Zeichen”) from Dubos (“Paralipomena,” 1, 3; Ba 5/2: 209, 219); see Bennett 126. 36

Comte de Caylus, Tableaux tirés de l’Illiade, et de l’Odyssée d’Homère, et de l’Eneide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume (Paris: Tilliard, 1757); Joseph Spence, Polymetis: or, An enquiry concerning the agreement between the works of the Roman Poets, and the remains of the ancient artists: Being an attempt to illustrate them mutually from one another. In ten books (London: R. Dodsley, 1747).

37

On Caylus in Laokoon, see chs. 7, 11, 24; Ba 5/2: 72, 94, 172; and on Spence, chs. 2, 7, 9, 22, 28; Ba 5/2: 25, 68, 87–90, 160, 200 and Donald T. Siebert, Jr., “Laocoön and Polymetis: Lessing’s Treatment of Joseph Spence,” Lessing Yearbook 3 (1971): 71–84.

38

Laokoon, “Vorrede,” Ba 5/2, 15.

39

In the introduction to Laokoon, Lessing ironically comments on this approach: “An systematischen Büchern haben wir Deutschen überhaupt keinen Mangel. Aus ein paar angenommenen Worterklärungen in der schönsten Ordnung alles, was wir nur wollen, herzuleiten, darauf verstehen wir uns trotz einer Nation in der Welt” (Ba 5/2, 15) (“We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions” [McCormick 5]). Furthermore, Lessing will not, as Baumgarten had done, take examples from a dictionary and then apply them regardless of context. Rather, Lessing wants his examples to “mehr nach der Quelle schmecken” (Ba 5/2, 15), that is, they should taste more like the source. 40

See Thomas Althaus, Das Uneigentliche ist das Eigentliche: Metaphorische Darstellung in der Prosa bei Lessing und Lichtenberg (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1989); Beate Allert, “Pluralisierung der Ringe oder Ringverlust?”; Beate Allert, “Lessing, Novalis, Schiller: Romantisierung und Medienspiel,” in Ethik und Ästhetik: Werke und Werte in der Literatur vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wolfgang Wittkowski, ed. Richard Fisher (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), 223–45.

41

At the beginning of his Vorschule der Aesthetik (Preschool of Aesthetics, 2nd ed., 1813), Jean Paul states a preference for “Bilderschrift” as he called it (the writing of images) over “Buchstabenschrift” (the writing of letters or fixed terminologies). He argued that images precede the language of fixed terminologies. It is via


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metaphor that those images that are not completely textualized enter the realm of poetic language. Such verbal images occur not only in the language that poets use but also that of children, who expand their worlds of experience by transposing and recombining known words for unknown things. This is how we learn and contribute to the growth of language. Expansion of human experience would not be possible without the poetic in language, and he asserted the idea “fictio supra naturam” (fiction over nature) (Vorschule 193), characterizing fiction as a way to better understand nature or to better approach reality. He acknowledged that he was very much inspired by Lessing, and praised him for his “geniale Freiheit und Besonnenheit” (the freedom and thoughtfulness of a genius). He found that Lessing’s “allseitiger Scharfsinn,” or all-around wit, had more of an ability to dissolve and to question things than his wisdom had to establish things and to affirm them (Vorschule 53). Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller et al., 1st–3rd ed., 10 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1960–85), vol. 5, 3rd ed. (1973): 1–456, 1197–1251. For an English translation see: Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School of Aesthetics, translated and with an introduction by Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1973). See also the essays in Claudia Albes and Christiane Frey, eds., Darstellbarkeit: Zu einem ästhetisch-philosopischen Problem um 1800 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003). 42

“Die Malerei sagt man, bedienet sich natürlicher Zeichen. Dieses ist überhaupt zu reden wahr. Nur muß man sich nicht vorstellen, daß sie sich gar keiner willkürlichen Zeichen bediene” (Laokoon, “Paralipomena” 23; Ba 5/2 304) (“One says painting uses natural signs. This is generally speaking true. However, one should not imagine that it would not also use arbitrary signs”). See also “Paralipomena” 8.3.1; Ba. 5/2 262.

43 “One must be a young man in order to realize what an effect Lessing’s Laokoon had on us, whereby this work swept us away from the region of a meager gaze to the free fields of thought. The long misunderstood ut pictura poesis was abolished all of a sudden, and the difference between the visual and the verbal arts became clearer. The peaks of both were now separated no matter how their bases might adjoin each other.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Karl Richter et al., 21 vols. in 33 (Munich: Hanser, 1985–1998), vol. 16 (1985): Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Peter Sprengel, 341. Also see Lessing, Laokoon, “Kommentar. Lessing 1778–1780”; Ba 5/2, 725–49 at 733–34; Bennett 119. 44

Some traces of Lessing’s non-intrusive and open-ended poetics can also be found in Goethe’s Farbenlehre as well as in Goethe’s commentary on the Laocoön sculpture. See Beate Allert, “Hidden Aspects of Goethe’s Writings on Color, Seeing, and Motion and Their Significance for a Feminist Visual Theory,” in Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture, ed. Laura Doyle (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001), 144–91.

45

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst, 2nd enlarged ed. (1756), reprinted in Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, complete German text ed. and trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 32.

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46 G. E. Lessing, Laokoon, ch. 2; Ba 5/2, 29. “The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting manner” (McCormick 17). 47

Laokoon, ch. 2; Ba 5/2, 29. “Simply imagine Laocoön’s mouth forced wide open, and then judge! Imagine him screaming, and then look!” (McCormick 17). See Reinhart Meyer-Kalka, “Schreit Laokoon? Zur Diskussion pathetischerhabener Darstellungsformen im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Von der Rhetorik zur Ästhetik: Studien zur Entstehung der Moderne Ästhetik im 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gérard Raulet (Rennes: Centre de Récherche Philia, Université de Rennes 2, 1995), 67–110.

48

This may not necessarily be the case, as demonstrated by the counter-examples in Astrid Guderian-Driesen, Die Stimme in der Kunst (Bad Rappenau: Kulturhaus “Forum Fränkischer Hof,” 1989), esp. “Der Schrei,” 86–107.

49

Laokoon, ch. 3; Ba 5/2, 32.

50

Peter Utz, Das Auge und das Ohr im Text: Literarische Sinneswahrnehmung in der Goethezeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1990). In summarizing what he refers to as Lessing’s aesthetics in chapter 3 (39–53), Utz draws upon the words of the Templar in Nathan der Weise as he addresses Nathan’s daughter, Recha: “Wie ist doch meine Seele zwischen Auge / Und Ohr geteilt” (Act 3, sc. 2; Ba 9, 545) (“How indeed is my soul split between eye and ear”). Utz connects this splitting of the senses with the historic division of labor in the nascent industrial age and also associates Lessing’s Laokoon with a “Territorialisierung der Künste” (42) (“territorializing of the arts”) and “eine Kolonialisierung des Körpers” (42) (“a colonizing of the body”).

51

“[I]f it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive” (McCormick 78).

52

“However, bodies do not exist in space only, but also in time” (McCormick 78).

53

This question was much later raised again and developed further by the painter Paul Klee (1879–1940); see Beate Allert, “Reconceptualizing a Pictorial Turn,” 186–222. 54

Laokoon, ch. 16; Ba 5/2, 116–17. “They persist in time and in each moment of their duration they may assume a different appearance or stand in a different combination. Each of these momentary appearances and combinations is the result of the preceding one and can be the cause of the subsequent one, which means that it can be, as it were, the center of an action. Consequently, painting too can imitate actions. . . . Painting can use only a single moment of an action in its coexisting compositions and must therefore choose the one that is most suggestive and from which the preceding and the succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible” (McCormick 78). On the implications of “der prägnanteste Augenblick,” see: Norbert Christian Wolf, “ ‘Fruchtbarer Augenblick’ — ‘prägnanter Moment’: Zur medienspezifischen Funktion einer ästhetischen Kategorie in Aufklärung und


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Klassik,” in Prägnanter Moment: Studien zur deutschen Literatur der Aufklärung und Klassik: Festschrift für Hans-Jürgen Schings, ed. Peter-André Alt, et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 373–404. 55 See further Beate Allert, “Lessing im Kontext kunsttheoretischer Debatten,” 378–79; Jeoraldean McClain, “Time in the Visual Arts: Lessing and Visual Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44 (1985): 41–58; Michael Cohen, “Lessing on Time and Space in the Sister Arts: The Artist’s Refutation,” in Lessing and the Enlightenment, 13–23. 56

Peter Burgard, “Schlangenbiß und Schrei,” Streitkultur, ed. Mauser and Sasse, 194–202. Burgard’s reading involves an equation, a textualizing of the visual.

57

Laokoon, ch. 14; Ba 5/2, 112.

58

Bennett 128.

59

Carol Jacobs, “The Critical Performance of Lessing’s Laokoon,” Modern Language Notes 102:3 (1987): 483–521.

60 On this quarrel, the so-called “Fragmentestreit,” see William Boehart, Politik und Religion: Studien zum Fragmentestreit Reimarus, Goeze, Lessing (Schwarzenbeck: Rüdiger Martienss, 1988) and Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 344–75. 61

Beate Allert, “About a Burning Building in Eco and Lessing, or: How to Process Messages,” Lessing Yearbook 29 (1997): 57–86; Barbara Fischer, Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von “Nathan der Weise” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000), 56–57. 62

“One did not comprehend for what reason so many and various entrances would be necessary, where a large portal on each side would have been the more conventional and have served just as well. Only a very few wanted to accept that through these various small entrances, anybody who was summoned to the palace, should be able to go directly to where one was required, by the shortest and most infallible way.” “Eine Parabel. Nebst einer kleinen Bitte, und einem eventualen Absagungsschreiben an den Herrn Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg,” Ba 9, 41–44; here 42. Subsequent citations are in the text. 63

Saladin is based on the historical figure S·ala¯h· al-D¯n ¯ suf ibn Ayyu¯b ¹ Yu (1137/38–1193), the renowned Muslim military leader, who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. The Western attempt to reverse this led to the Third Crusade (1189–1191). In 1192 a three-year truce was signed between S·ala¯h· al-D¯n ¹ and Richard the Lionhearted, and the play is assumed to be set in the time between the signing of the truce (September 2) and the death of S·ala¯h· al-D¯n ¹ the following year (March 4, 1193).

64 65

Nathan der Weise, Act 3, sc. 7; Ba 9, 559. Subsequent citations are in the text.

“Everybody strive for his uncompromised love, free of prejudices! Each one of you vies to bring the power of the stone in your ring into the daylight. Assist this power with humility, with heartfelt peaceability, with good deeds, with deepest devotion to God. And when the powers of these stones make themselves felt by your children’s children’s children: then I will again invite you over a thousand thousand years later before this seat. There will a wiser man than I sit in this seat; and speak. Go! — So said the unassuming judge.”

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66 By “text-image relations” is meant the interaction between text and pictures, not exclusively as the interaction between discrete media, but also as a series of discrete relationships. As a field of study, text-image relations has evolved through and been defined by a number of important conferences. The following proceedings are perhaps the most important: Wolfgang Harms, ed., Text und Bild, Bild und Text: DGF Symposion 1988, Germanistische Symposien Berichtsbände 9 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990); Klaus Dirscherl, ed., Bild und Text im Dialog, PINK 3 (Passau: Wissenschaftsverlag Rothe, 1993); Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer, eds., Beschreibungskunst-Kunstbeschreibung: Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Fink, 1995); Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb, eds. Text into Image: Image into Text, Internationale Forschungen zur Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 20 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Heinz J. Drügh and Maria MoogGrünewald, eds., Behext von Bildern? Ursachen, Funktionen und Perspektiven der textuellen Faszination durch Bilder, Neues Forum für allgemeine und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 12 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001). See also Monika SchmitzEmans, Die Literatur, die Bilder und das Unsichtbare: Spielformen literarischer Bildinterpretation vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Vergleichenden Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft 7 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999).

Philosophy and Theology

Lessing and Philosophy H. B. Nisbet

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a philosopher. But philosophy is a recurrent presence in his works. Whether or not his scattered references on the subject reflect a consistent philosophical viewpoint is, however, debatable. Thomas De Quincey could declare in 1826: “In the works of Lessing as a whole, there is one defect which has often been complained of, viz. that his philosophy is fragmentary, too much restrained to particular applications, and incapable of combination or perfect synthesis.”1 These words remain valid today to the extent that few would now claim to reduce Lessing’s assorted pronouncements to a unified philosophical system; but conversely, few would now echo De Quincey’s view that this is necessarily a defect to complain of. De Quincey identifies one of the reasons why Lessing’s philosophy is not systematic, namely its occasional character; for Lessing employs different philosophical approaches in different works as he engages with different problems in ethics, aesthetics, and religion or speculates freely in his later years on metaphysics and on the past and future history of humanity. But other factors also contribute to the unsystematic character of his thought. In the first place, he was not exclusively influenced by any single school of philosophy — and even if he had been, his temperamental distrust of authority would soon have led him to question it. Instead, he was exposed from the start to numerous currents of European thought, and like many of his German contemporaries, he was happy to draw on several of them as the need arose. Secondly, the posthumous publication of major works by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) in the later 1760s, together with Lessing’s increasingly relativistic attitude towards religious truth after he encountered Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s (1694–1768) critique of revelation in those same years, led him to adopt a perspectival approach to philosophical and religious questions during the last decade of his life. And finally, growing ever more distrustful of all dogmatic claims as the religious controversies of his last years intensified, he developed a distinctive mode of tentative, self-subverting, yet richly suggestive utterance in his later works, simultaneously proclaiming and questioning a vision of human progress throughout history. The following discussion will examine each of these factors in turn, beginning with the diverse philosophical ESSING WAS NOT

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currents to which Lessing was exposed in his formative years. It will conclude with a brief account of his reception of Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677). The dominant philosophy in Germany in Lessing’s early years was the rationalism of Leibniz, especially in its systematized form as developed by Christian Wolff (1679–1754), according to which the universe is the harmonious creation of a wise and beneficent designer, in which the tendency of all things is to strive towards ever higher levels of rational consciousness and perfection, and in which such partial evils as do exist are ultimately conducive to the universal good. Lessing was first exposed to this philosophy as a schoolboy in Meissen, where his favorite teacher, Johann Albert Klimm, was a Wolffian.2 Wolff’s rational optimism is already evident in the New Year address which the thirteen-year-old Lessing sent to his clergyman father in 1743 in order to counter the latter’s gloomy grumblings over unregenerate human nature and a far from perfect world.3 According to his brother Karl, Lessing immersed himself in Wolff’s writings when he entered Leipzig University, where several of his teachers, including Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800) and Johann August Ernesti (1707–1781), held broadly Wolffian views.4 Lessing’s early writings are accordingly full of echoes of Wolff, for example on the fundamental principles of ethics. For both Wolff and Leibniz, morality is based on cognition, on rational knowledge of the good, which in turn activates the will to promote goodness and thereby increase the perfection of the individual. This cognitive view of ethics plainly underlies Lessing’s remarks on the subject in the philosophical fragment Das Christentum der Vernunft (The Christianity of Reason), first published in 1784 but probably written in 1753, in which he defines moral beings as those which are conscious of their own perfections and capable of acting in accordance with them.5 The feelings and passions play no part in this process, for the perceptions which they afford are of an obscure and confused kind, inferior to the clear and distinct insights afforded by reason. This cognitive (as opposed to affective or sentimental) theory of ethics continues to appear in Lessing’s works until the end of his life, most famously in his late work Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1777/80), in which the whole of human history is depicted as a constant advance towards ever higher degrees of rational insight and hence to ever higher levels of moral consciousness and disinterested virtue.6 In metaphysics no less than in ethics, the influence of Leibniz and Wolff is conspicuous in Lessing’s writings from an early stage.7 Das Christentum der Vernunft contains an ingenious attempt, probably inspired by a similar but more orthodox attempt by the Wolffian theologian Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706–1757), to rationalize the Holy Trinity — that is, to demonstrate the triune nature of the deity by a priori deduction.8 God’s understanding, being necessarily perfect, must have a perfect object,

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namely his own perfection as a whole; and since God is infinitely good, he must also will the objective existence of his perfection, which he “eternally begets” in the form of the Son. The Holy Spirit, as the bond between Father and Son, is then defined in Leibnizian terminology as the “harmony” between the two. Lessing then parts company with Christian apologists such as Baumgarten by declaring that, when God thinks of his perfections separately instead of simultaneously, he gives them existence not as the Son, but as the created world in all its variety and degrees of perfection. This harmonious universe is plainly no different from the “best of possible worlds” of Leibnizian metaphysics; but in presenting it as a necessary projection of the divine consciousness, Lessing is already close to that deterministic vision of the universe which he associated with the pantheism of Spinoza. And although Das Christentum der Vernunft remained unpublished during Lessing’s lifetime, Lessing took his deduction of the Trinity sufficiently seriously to incorporate it, albeit in a more tentative form, in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts over twenty years later.9 By the time Lessing composed Das Christentum der Vernunft, he had lived for several years in Berlin, where he found further incentives to associate himself with German rationalism and with the philosophy of Leibniz in particular. Like his early mentor Christlob Mylius (1722–1754), he took exception to the ideas of some of the French thinkers whom Frederick the Great had invited to Berlin, such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), who reveled in the notoriety which his professions of atheism, materialism, and hedonism — as in L’Homme machine (Man a Machine, 1747) and L’Art de jouir (The Art of Enjoyment, 1751) — had earned him. Both Lessing and Mylius criticized and satirized La Mettrie’s antics, with which even the tolerant Frederick eventually lost patience, in their journalistic writings of those years.10 La Mettrie, who died from a surfeit of pâté in 1751, was perceived rather as a figure of ridicule than as a genuine threat to the rational optimism to which Lessing and most of his Berlin acquaintances — including his close friend, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) — were in varying degrees attached. But Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), President of the Berlin Academy and a distinguished physicist, was an altogether more serious adversary. Ever since his appointment in 1746, Maupertuis had done his utmost to discredit the ideas of the Academy’s founder Leibniz as incompatible with his own brand of mechanistic Newtonianism and with the saturnine pessimism to which he was temperamentally inclined. The quarrel between Maupertuis and the Swiss mathematician Samuel König (1712–1757), who argued that one of Maupertuis’ main physical theories was not original but already discovered by Leibniz, and Voltaire’s opportunistic intervention on behalf of König in order to discredit Maupertuis as his rival for the favors of the Prussian king, need not concern us here.11 These disputes did, however, serve to rally the

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German supporters of Leibniz, including Lessing and Mendelssohn; their treatise Pope ein Metaphysiker! (1755), which repeatedly cites Leibniz’s Théodicée (1710), is, among other things, a defense of Leibniz’s metaphysical optimism in response to an essay topic set by the Berlin Academy with the aim of encouraging attacks on Leibniz’s system.12 The above outline of Lessing’s early debts to Leibniz and Wolff might well convey the impression that his philosophical development was wholly dependent on these thinkers for its systematic basis. But apart from the fact that Lessing was always averse to systems, his early thought is profoundly influenced by another philosophical tendency which co-existed with rationalism throughout the first half of the eighteenth century in Germany. This tradition, properly identified only in recent years and known as “eclecticism” (as in the Institutiones philosophiae eclecticae of Johann Franz Buddeus, 1703) is less easy to define, precisely because it is unsystematic and indeed opposed in principle to systems.13 Its beginnings lie in the seventeenth century, when it arose in reaction to the neo-Aristotelian scholasticism of the Protestant universities in the work of Isaak Vossius (1618–1689), Johann Christoph Sturm (1635–1703), and Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). Its most influential products were the massive works of reference and scholarly histories of Daniel Georg Morhof (Polyhistor, 1688), Johann Heinrich Zedler (Universal-Lexikon, 1732–54), Johann Jacob Brucker (Historia critica philosophiae, 1742–44) and others. Unlike German rationalism, eclecticism has a pronounced empirical element; but unlike the British empiricism of John Locke (1632–1704) and his continental successors such as Condillac (1714–1780), it is grounded not in a psychology of the senses but in the raw material of history and ordinary experience as the chief source of knowledge. Lacking a critical theory of subjectivity such as Kant would later develop, German eclecticism relies heavily on common sense, not least in the sphere of morality. The principles of morality, unlike those of metaphysics, are considered to be self-evident, which helps to explain why morality becomes the bedrock of religion for so many Aufklärung thinkers, including Lessing. The eclectic philosophers also believed that all knowledge is provisional, and that different methods of enquiry may be appropriate to different learned disciplines. Last but not least, one of the most positive consequences of eclecticism’s distrust of dogma is its belief in religious tolerance, whose most eloquent advocates included Thomasius and Lessing himself, who defended it forcefully in his early comedy Die Juden (The Jews, written 1749 and published 1754). Although the eclectic philosophers were critical of Wolffianism — as they were of all philosophical systems — the two traditions were not mutually exclusive: they in fact often coincide, in various proportions and combinations, in the work of particular individuals. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), for example, relies chiefly on Wolff in his philosophical works but on the eclectic tradition in his historical scholarship,


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while Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) fully endorses eclecticism’s belief in common sense and its contempt for metaphysics at large.14 Eclecticism was at its best in the critical analysis of historical evidence, and its critical methods were refined and perfected by, among others, Thomasius and the Huguenot philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706).15 It was this aspect of eclecticism which appealed most strongly to the young Lessing when he first encountered it in Bayle’s vast Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), which he studied intensively in the early 1750s.16 The unsystematic presentation of Bayle’s biographical dictionary, its readiness to leap from one subject to another, was characteristic of the polyhistorical scholarship of its time, but also deeply congenial to Lessing. What raises it above its predecessors is its critical method, which consists of two elements. Firstly, it rigorously questions all supposed historical facts, subjecting traditional sources to close philological analysis and exposing the tendentiousness with which heretical figures in particular had often been maligned by upholders of Christian orthodoxy. These features are prominent in Lessing’s learned writings, many of which are directly modeled on Bayle or designed to fill gaps in his work. This applies to his lives of Plautus and Sophocles,17 and his Rettungen (defenses of such real or imagined heretics as Cardano, Cochläus, and Adam Neuser);18 many of these works have a strong polemical tendency, as does his critique of Jöcher’s Gelehrten-Lexikon (1753), which is modeled on Bayle’s critique of Moréri’s biographical dictionary.19 The second strand of Bayle’s critical method is his philosophical skepticism, inherited from the French skeptical tradition of Montaigne (1533–1592) and La Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672) and mobilized by Bayle in his radical deconstruction of supposedly rational dogmas in both metaphysics and theology. It was this skeptical critique, used by Bayle himself to bolster the case for unreasoning religious faith, which prompted Leibniz to write his Théodicée in defense of rationalism and rational religion. And although Lessing, as already noted, was basically in sympathy with Leibniz’s optimism, he inherits from Bayle a skeptical tendency which leads him not only to doubt some of the central dogmas of Christianity, but also to regard all doctrines, including those which he himself puts forward, as no more than provisional. And finally, Bayle’s powerful advocacy of tolerance, of what he called “the rights of the erring conscience” (that is, of all sincerely held, though possibly erroneous beliefs, including those of atheists), reinforced Lessing’s lifelong sympathy with persecuted individuals and religious or social minorities. That stress on practical morality and distrust of speculation which is characteristic of eclectic philosophy is particularly evident in Lessing’s fragment from the year 1751Gedanken über die Herrnhuter (Thoughts on the Moravian Brethren, published 1784).20 The fragment contains a compressed history of philosophy from Socrates to recent times, followed by an equally compressed history of Christianity. Neither of these developments,

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Lessing suggests in an uncharacteristically Rousseauistic outburst, has done anything to improve practical morality. Human beings were born to act rather than to speculate, he declares, and our morality will not improve until we abandon religious dogma and rational speculation and heed instead the voice of nature in our hearts. Like many of Lessing’s unfinished, posthumously published writings, this fragment is an experimental exercise rather than a doctrinal statement. It nevertheless contains an early indication that, in ethical theory at least, he was less than fully committed to the cognitive ethics of rationalism as embodied in Das Christentum der Vernunft of 1753. This impression is decisively confirmed a few years later when, in his correspondence on tragedy with Mendelssohn and Nicolai (1756–57), he develops a theory of tragic pity and its morally constructive effects, a theory based not on the ethics of rationalism but on the affective ethics of British “moral sense” philosophy and literary sensibility or Empfindsamkeit. In his Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit (1711), the philosopher Shaftesbury (1671–1713) postulates a moral sense in human beings, inherent in their benevolent (or “natural”) as distinct from selfish (or “unnatural”) emotions, which is the source of all virtue;21 this theory was further developed by subsequent British thinkers, notably Francis Hutcheson (1694–1747), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723– 1790). Unlike his mentor Shaftesbury, Hutcheson presents the moral sense not as inherent in the emotions themselves, but as a higher and distinct instance, though he plainly sees it as closer to the emotions than to the intellect in character, for he maintains that it manifests itself in a spontaneous and unreflecting reaction of moral approbation or disapprobation.22 At the time when he formulated his theory of tragic pity, Lessing was familiar with the work of Shaftesbury, and he had recently published his own translation of Hutcheson’s main work on ethics, the System of Moral Philosophy.23 To the extent that his own theory of pity, as will shortly be seen, locates the moral response in the feeling of pity itself and not in a separate moral faculty, it is closer to Shaftesbury’s ethics than to Hutcheson’s. But the context in which Lessing formulates it is that of literary theory rather than moral philosophy as such, and although he was certainly aware of its philosophical ancestry and implications, his earliest formulations of it plainly owe more to literary sensibility than to philosophical ethics. For example, in his preamble to a sentimental tale which he translates from the English in 1751, he talks in typical empfindsam tones of nature’s gift of humane feelings to persons of all social classes, especially the lower ones: Sie [die Natur] theilet die Eigenschaften des Herzens aus, ohne den Edeln und den Reichen vorzuziehen, und es scheinet sogar, als ob die natürlichen Empfindungen bey gemeinen Leuten stärker, als bey andern,


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wären [. . .]. Ein fühlbar Herz — wie unschätzbar ist es! Es macht unser Glück, auch alsdann wenn es unser Unglück zu machen scheinet —24

By this time, Lessing had also decided that drama appeals primarily to the emotions rather than to the rational intellect, and both in his own dramas and his theoretical writings, he regularly presents moral decisions and utterances as the product not of rational reflection, but of spontaneous feeling. He likewise urges actors to deport themselves accordingly, declaring in the later Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1769) that all expressions of morality should come from the heart.25 On the moral effect of tragic pity, Lessing’s principal statement runs as follows: die Bestimmung der Tragödie ist diese: sie soll unsre Fähigkeit, Mitleid zu fühlen, erweitern. Sie soll uns nicht blos lehren, gegen diesen oder jenen Unglücklichen Mitleid zu fühlen, sondern sie soll uns so weit fühlbar machen, daß uns der Unglückliche zu allen Zeiten, und unter allen Gestalten, rühren und für sich einnehmen muß [. . .] Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch, zu allen gesellschaftlichen Tugenden, zu allen Arten der Großmuth der aufgelegteste. Wer uns also mitleidig macht, macht uns besser und tugendhafter, und das Trauerspiel, das jenes thut, thut auch dieses [. . .].26

The role of tragedy is to enlarge our capacity to feel pity. The person most able to feel pity is the best person; tragedy can thus make us more virtuous. There is nothing in this passage to contradict the cognitive ethics of rationalism, provided that the tragic pity which Lessing has in mind is based on a cognitive insight into the merits, or “perfections,” of the person or persons to be pitied. Lessing in fact proceeds, in a subsequent letter to Nicolai, to define pity as a mixed feeling, made up of sadness at the pitied person’s misfortune and admiration for that person’s merits or perfections.27 This is no different from Mendelssohn’s theory of pity, as expressed in his dialogues Über die Empfindungen (On the Emotions, 1755),28 which is in turn based on that of Wolff, according to which pity, like love, entails an “obscure” perception of the pitied individual’s perfections — in other words, it is of an essentially cognitive nature. Despite their cognitive content, however, such emotions as love and pity are not, in the eyes of rationalists such as Wolff and Mendelssohn, a reliable moral guide unless they are further illuminated by reason; for the obscure cognition on which they are based may well be mistaken, and the emotions themselves may mislead those who feel them into acting unwisely.29 It is at this point that Lessing parts company with Wolff and Mendelssohn — and, indeed, with the cognitive theory of ethics. For while he readily admits that feelings of pity may be aroused by false impressions and unworthy objects (that is, by purely illusory perfections), he also maintains that this in no way diminishes the value of pity as an inherently moral

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emotion. For its moral value lies not in the increased insight which it affords into any kind of perfection, but in the general attitude of philanthropy which it encourages towards fellow human beings in distress, however imperfect such individuals may be. Thus, the morally improving effect of tragedy (as distinct, for example, from the fable, whose aim is to afford the clearest possible rational insight30) lies not in any rational cognition which it provides. For the knowledge which pity imparts is on the one hand too confused by emotion to be of any practical use, and on the other hand, since all human beings have a sufficient degree of perfection for us to be able to pity them in some measure,31 such knowledge is basically vacuous. In short, it is the emotion of pity itself, rather than any cognitive content it may possess, which encourages a virtuous disposition and prompts morally commendable acts — just as in the affective theory of ethics. This is what Lessing has in mind when he contrasts the effect of admiration, which must be accompanied by cognitive insight if it is to be of moral benefit, with that of pity, which is morally beneficial irrespective of any insight it may embody: Die Bewunderung [. . .] bessert vermittelst der Nacheiferung, und die Nacheiferung setzt eine deutliche Erkenntniß der Vollkommenheit, welcher ich nacheifern will, voraus.. . . Das Mitleiden hingegen bessert unmittelbar; bessert, ohne daß wir selbst etwas dazu beytragen dürfen; bessert den Mann von Verstande sowohl als den Dummkopf.32

Lessing’s theory of tragic pity is not untypical of its time: Michael Conrad Curtius (1724–1802), for example, in his commentary to Aristotle’s Poetics (reviewed by Lessing in 1753), declares that the experience of tragic pity schools the spectator in humane sentiments which lead in turn to philanthropic acts in everyday life. In philosophical terms, its chief interest lies in the way in which it combines the affective ethics of literary sensibility with elements of Wolffian rationalism. This procedure involves no necessary contradiction, although it is significant that Lessing makes no explicit attempt to reconcile his essentially affective theory of tragedy with his rationalistic theory of the fable. But since he dealt with these two literary forms in two separate works, he doubtless saw no need to do so. Besides, in that pre-Kantian era when the eclectic tradition of philosophy was still alive and Germany was particularly receptive to philosophical developments in other countries (especially Britain and France), there was nothing unusual about adopting different approaches at different times or in seeking to combine more than one of them within a single work: Mendelssohn, for instance, sought to accommodate elements of Shaftesbury’s neo-Platonism and Locke’s empiricism within the systematic framework of Wolffian rationalism, and the ingredients of Herder’s philosophical discourse are more heterogeneous still. But Lessing did not simply overlook the real or apparent inconsistencies to which this eclectic (in the


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ordinary sense of that term) procedure often led. He explicitly acknowledges them in a memorable statement in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie: Ich erinnere hier meine Leser, daß diese Blätter nichts weniger als ein dramatisches System enthalten sollen. Ich bin also nicht verpflichtet, alle die Schwierigkeiten aufzulösen, die ich mache. Meine Gedanken mögen immer sich weniger zu verbinden, ja wohl gar sich zu widersprechen scheinen: wenn es denn nur Gedanken sind, bey welchen sie Stoff finden, selbst zu denken. Hier will ich nichts als fermenta cognitionis ausstreuen.33

He will therefore not have been unduly troubled that the central thesis of his late work Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts is completely at variance with the affective ethics of his earlier theory of tragedy. He now no longer contends, with Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and literary sensibility, that the “natural” feelings of simple or primitive people deliver the most authentic moral testimony. On the contrary, it is no longer the heart which guides the moral understanding — for the testimony of the heart is corrupt and unreliable — but the moral understanding which guides and purifies the heart as mankind advances to ever higher degrees of moral insight, themselves the product of successive advances in rational understanding.34 Thus in Lessing’s later ethical thought, just as in Wolffian rationalism, the wisest person, not the most compassionate person (let alone “der Dummkopf”) is “der beste Mensch.” Lessing was now able to rely almost exclusively on cognitive principles, because he no longer needed that uneasy compromise with affective ethics which had earlier seemed necessary when he wished to account for the moral effects of his own variety of sentimental tragedy. This change in Lessing’s views on ethics is, however, connected with fundamental changes in his philosophical outlook which, for several reasons, took place around 1770. Before he left Hamburg for Wolfenbüttel in that year, he had acquired a copy of the clandestine treatise by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, which sought, on the basis of a radical rationalism according to which only the central truths of rational (or “natural”) religion are necessary for human salvation, to discredit the whole of Biblical revelation as a tissue of lies, contradiction and imposture. Lessing’s discovery of this explosive work coincided with the failure of the theatrical enterprise on which he had been engaged in Hamburg, and which he now abandoned, on his appointment as ducal librarian in Wolfenbüttel, for the world of learning and scholarship. The death of his father in August 1770 lent a new gravity to his own ambivalent relationship with religion, for this had always been intimately associated with his relationship with his father, whose stern Lutheran piety he had simultaneously respected and rebelled against in the name of reason and enlightenment. The latter tendency had hitherto predominated in his work, as in the religious fragments of his

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Breslau period (1760–65) such as Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion (On the Origin of Revealed Religion, published 1784) in which, in deistic fashion, he had defined the best religion as that with the fewest conventional additions to the basic articles of natural religion.35 Faced with Reimarus, however, whose consistent reduction of revealed religion to bad faith and deception he found implausible, he now felt disposed to look again at the truth content of Christian doctrines, including some of those which, as he began to suspect,36 he might have discarded prematurely. His main objection, in the early Wolfenbüttel years, was accordingly not so much to the old Lutheran orthodoxy as to those rational theologians or “neologists” such as August Friedrich Wilhelm Sack (1703–1786), Johann Joachim Spalding (1714–1804), and Johann August Eberhard (1739–1809) who, while not explicitly denying revelation, brushed aside or glossed over all revealed doctrines which did not coincide with rational religion, including original sin, eternal punishment, and the Holy Trinity. They believed, as one commentator aptly puts it, that Christianity is true precisely to the extent that it is superfluous.37 To Lessing, this was halfbaked religion and half-baked philosophy. The last and most important factor in Lessing’s philosophical development around 1770 was the posthumous publication of major works by Leibniz, including his Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain (New Essays on Human Understanding), which appeared in 1765, and the voluminous Opera omnia (Complete Works), published in 1768. These editions revealed a far more complex and diversified thinker than the author of the well-known Théodicée with its systematic rational optimism. Lessing’s interest was also whetted by the knowledge that Leibniz had once occupied the same post as librarian to the Dukes of Brunswick which he now held himself, and he made detailed biographical notes on his predecessor, as well as extracts and translations from his works, in 1772 or 1773.38 But Lessing’s later thought is too individualistic to be reduced simply to that of the philosophers whom he studied, and what he now found congenial in Leibniz was not so much the latter’s specific opinions as his whole style and manner of thinking, especially his readiness to recognize an element of truth in the most diverse philosophical and religious positions: since each monad views the universe from a different perspective, each will form a different, and inevitably partial, view of the whole. A similar willingness can be discerned in Lessing’s own thought even before his move to Wolfenbüttel, as in the ironic “sermon” which he composed just before leaving Hamburg, showing that the Psalmist’s invocation of God’s wrath upon the heathen and the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor are equally defensible, and by no means incompatible.39 Thus, in adopting Leibniz’s perspectival approach in his later years, Lessing was effectively making a principle out of what was already his practice. He defines Leibniz’s strategy as follows in 1773:


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Leibnitz nahm, bey seiner Untersuchung der Wahrheit, nie Rücksicht auf angenommene Meynungen; aber in der festen Ueberzeugung, daß keine Meynung angenommen seyn könne, die nicht von einer gewissen Seite, in einem gewissen Verstande wahr sey, hatte er oft die Gefälligkeit, diese Meynung so lange zu wenden und zu drehen, bis es ihm gelang, diese gewisse Seite sichtbar, diesen gewissen Verstand begreiflich zu machen. [. . .] Er setzte willig sein System bey Seite; und suchte einen jeden auf demjenigen Wege zur Wahrheit zu führen, auf welchem er ihn fand.40

Applied to the question of religious truth, this approach rules out the possibility that, for example, the doctrines of revealed religion are comprehensively false and those of rational religion exclusively true: all of them will embody a greater or lesser element of truth, expressed in more or less rational ways. The unfamiliar works of Leibniz published in the Opera omnia in fact included defenses of several Christian mysteries such as transubstantiation and original sin.41 In a similar spirit, Lessing adds his support in 1773 for two of the doctrines which Leibniz had defended, namely eternal punishment and the Holy Trinity: in the essay Leibnitz von den ewigen Strafen (Leibniz on Eternal Punishment),42 he argues against the neologist Eberhard that, since the consequences of every action in a causally determined universe must be infinite (and therefore eternal), the punishment which every sin incurs, in the shape of diminished perfection on the part of the sinner, must also be eternal; and in Des Andreas Wissowatius Einwürfe wider die Dreyeinigkeit (Andreas Wissowatius’s Objections to the Holy Trinity, 1773),43 he annotates and endorses Leibniz’s defense of the Trinity against the Socinian Wissowatius, thereby renewing his own earlier attempts (in Das Christentum der Vernunft) to make philosophical sense of this central Christian mystery. There is, however, a fundamental difference between Lessing’s and Leibniz’s procedure. Leibniz, ever anxious not to offend Christian orthodoxy, had never claimed to demonstrate the truth of revealed doctrines, but only to defend them against rational attempts to disprove them. Lessing is more radical, contending in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts that the rational content of revealed truths becomes progressively manifest over long periods of time, and he himself proceeds to extract a rational sense from the doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, and the atonement.44 In so doing, he temporalizes Leibniz’s perspectival view of truth, thereby generating a philosophy of history as progress towards ever greater rational insight as the obscure truths of revelation are gradually transformed into the clearer truths of reason. Lessing’s position here is clearly not that of philosophical relativism, for it does presuppose that there is such a thing as ultimate truth, even if complete knowledge of that truth is reserved for God alone and human insights can never do more than approximate to it. But in so far as all of them are approximations, the truths we claim to possess are merely relative, and in

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this qualified sense, Lessing is indeed a relativist. He can consequently argue, in his philosophical sketch Über eine zeitige Aufgabe (On a Timely Task, 1776),45 that we can never be entirely sure what unsuspected truths may still lie hidden in doctrines conventionally dismissed as false or absurd. This attitude lends support to his lifelong belief in tolerance, and to the religious pluralism of Nathan der Weise (1779), according to which each of the three religions concerned has an equally legitimate claim to truth, the precise extent of which can only be determined over an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, period of time. This open epistemology is likewise compatible with the qualified skepticism to which Lessing had been attached ever since his early studies of Bayle, for it implies that few, if any, propositions can ever be more than relatively certain. He brings this skepticism to bear against Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786) in 1778, reminding his opponent that, since few passages in the New Testament are ever interpreted in the same way by everyone, such credibility as the science of hermeneutics possesses is purely subjective: Welches sind die rechten [Begriffe], die hervorgebracht werden sollen? Wer soll das entscheiden? Die Hermeneutik? Jeder hat seine eigene Hermeneutik. Welches ist die wahre? Sind sie alle wahr? oder ist keine wahr? Und dieses Ding, dieses mißliche, elende Ding soll die Probe der innern Wahrheit seyn!46

This same epistemology also accords with Lessing’s belief in the value of polemics as a means of preventing supposed certainties from hardening into unquestioned prejudices;47 and it is equally responsible for the real or apparent inconsistency of his utterances on philosophy and religion in his later years, allowing his interpreters to depict him at various times as an agnostic, a Christian theist, a pantheist, a Pyrrhonist, and many other things besides.48 The fact is that he discerns a heuristic value in numerous distinct positions, while declining to commit himself exclusively to any of them. Lessing’s belief in the provisional nature of all truth and knowledge is most memorably expressed in Eine Duplik (A Rejoinder) of 1778, in his famous declaration that, if God were to ask him to choose between the search for truth and its possession, he would unhesitatingly choose the former, because it is the activity of enquiry itself, rather than any results to which it may lead, which exercises and develops our mental capacities.49 Enlarging on this conviction, the later Lessing speculates that the mental capacities of the human race may themselves evolve over time, and that human reason is not a static and unchanging entity. He explores this hypothesis further in the remarkable fragment Daß mehr als fünf Sinne für den Menschen sein können (That More than Five Senses Are Possible for Human Beings, published 1795)50 and suggests that, just as our souls at present inhabit bodies equipped with five senses, so may they in former times have possessed fewer senses, just as they may in future acquire additional


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senses which will allow them to penetrate dimensions of the universe which are at present closed to them. Human knowledge, in other words, is relative to our present psycho-physical constitution, which is not necessarily unalterable. What Lessing has in mind here is not evolution in the biological sense, of course, but a metaphysical process whereby the immortal soul may migrate to progressively more complex bodies, perhaps in other parts of the universe. In keeping with this speculation, he puts forward the hypothesis of metempsychosis on more than one occasion in his later years, notably in the concluding paragraphs of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.51 This vision of permanent flux and the evolution of the human faculties themselves is a far cry from that Wolffian rationalism to which many of Lessing’s contemporaries remained firmly attached. He duly became convinced that philosophy was ripe for change, telling his old teacher Kästner in 1777 that it had grown so superficial that it could scarcely retain its credibility for much longer.52 He was right, of course, although he could not foresee the form that this change would take with the advent of Kant’s critical philosophy. He had similar feelings about Christianity itself, and he eventually concluded that the controversies with orthodox Lutheranism into which he had latterly been drawn were a necessary prelude to fundamental change.53 Here again, he was right, although he did not live to see the publication of, for example, Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (Addresses on Religion, 1794), in which emotional conviction would replace both rational demonstration and literal interpretation of the Bible as the ultimate foundation of religious faith. It should be obvious from the foregoing account that Lessing repeatedly stressed the provisional nature of his philosophical speculations during the Wolfenbüttel years. But by the oblique modes of discourse to which he resorted in his later years, he further underlined how provisional his own deliberations were, and by extension the elusive and unstable nature of truth itself. Lessing had always, as a poet and dramatist, been fond of metaphors, and in the religious controversies of the late 1770s, he regularly exploited the power of figurative language not only to add concrete vividness to abstract arguments, but also to reinforce the open epistemology to which he was now committed. It enabled him, for example, in the images of architecture, construction, underpinning, undermining, demolition, and reconstruction which he frequently applies to religious criticism, to stress the activity of criticism itself — much to the annoyance of his chief adversary Goeze54 — without explicitly declaring which doctrines are to be rejected, modified, retained, or replaced. Similarly, his parable of the labyrinthine palace in flames55 — a false alarm, as it turns out — underlines the complexity and vulnerability, but also the enduring value, of the Christian religion, while the parable of the three rings in Nathan der Weise, with its rich and multiple meanings and avoidance of dogmatic closure, remains the classic example of its kind.

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Figurative language such as this, and the use of fictional narratives to illustrate and amplify meaning, are of course the stuff of poetry — selfevidently so in the case of Nathan der Weise, which is itself a poetic text. This has led some commentators to argue that all of the main philosophical texts of Lessing’s last years, including Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and the dialogues Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freymäurer (Dialogues for Freemasons published in two installments, 1778, 1780), are essentially poetic documents, using poetic rather than rhetorical language56 and fictional narratives rather than the discursive abstractions of philosophy.57 Such a distinction is one-sided and over-simplified, for philosophers have always enriched their texts with figurative and narrative discourse, from Plato’s parable of the cave to Leibniz’s synchronized clocks and Nietzsche’s reworkings of Greek myth. In Lessing’s case, such devices are admittedly more pervasive, and more consistently ambiguous, than in most of the great philosophers; but that is because ambiguity is a necessary part of his philosophical position, and the poetic means by which he expresses it are only one of the many strategies he employs for similar purposes. Another of these is dialogue, a favorite medium of philosophy since the time of Socrates. Questioning, suggesting, encouraging and qualifying, its function in Ernst und Falk is exploratory rather than expository as Lessing’s interlocutors examine the divisive and cohesive forces in human society and the possibilities of minimizing the former and consolidating the latter in advancing the cause of enlightenment. Numerous rhetorical devices are mobilized in this and other works to underline the hypothetical and tentative nature of the enquiry, from the battery of rhetorical questions in the last quarter of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and the cluster of subjunctives in the famous passage on the search for truth to the riddles and paradoxes of Falk’s definitions of “true” Freemasonry and the repeated use of ellipsis and aposiopesis to deny the reader that definitive statement or affirmative conclusion to which a particular discussion appears to be leading.58 None of these devices is peculiar to poetic language, and it is worth pointing out that oblique modes of expression are not the only means which Lessing uses to preserve the openness and provisional status of his reflections. Ordinary discursive language is at times used to the same end, as in the Latin quotation from Augustine on the title-page of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, which informs us that “all these things are in certain respects true for the same reason that they are in certain respects false,”59 or in the following exchange in Ernst und Falk on the definition of Freemasonry: Ernst: Wovon ich einen Begriff habe, das kann ich auch mit Worten ausdrücken. Falk: Nicht immer; und oft nicht so, daß andere durch die Worte vollkommen eben denselben Begriff bekommen, den ich dabei habe.60


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In itself, the language of both these quotations is literal and unambiguous. But its meaning is obscure, or at the very least perplexing. The first quotation presents a paradox which challenges straightforward definitions of truth. In the second, Falk’s reply is perplexing because it questions the adequacy of conceptual language to do the job it is designed to do, namely to convey a clear idea of what it refers to. This doubt concerning the adequacy of language, particularly conceptual language, as a means of communication is a central theme of Ernst und Falk, and a fundamental feature of Lessing’s thought in his final years.61 It is also one of the most modern features of his thought, and by no means typical of the Enlightenment. It is not simply a product of philosophical skepticism either, for its underlying motive is practical and constructive: it is informed by the belief that concepts, especially those with an ideological loading, can all too readily harden into dogma and prejudice, and in questioning and subverting them, Lessing’s aim is to encourage his readers to think for themselves. In short, he offers no system of philosophy; but he does offer guidance on how to philosophize. The real interest of his speculations accordingly lies not so much in the conclusions he reaches as in the manner in which he presents them. His faith in a benevolent providence, in moral and intellectual progress, and in continued development in a life to come, was shared by many of his contemporaries; but these articles of faith were of less importance to him in themselves than in the stimulus they might offer to further speculation and further enquiry. Far from regarding Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts as his definitive philosophical statement (as it is so often portrayed), he never acknowledged it as his own work, even to his closest friends, and declared: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts ist von einem guten Freunde, der sich gern allerley Hypothesen und Systeme macht, um das Vergnügen zu haben, sie wieder einzureissen. [. . .] Jeder sage, was ihm Wahrheit dünkt, und die Wahrheit selbst sey Gott empfohlen!62

All of these considerations must be borne in mind when we examine the last and most hotly debated aspect of Lessing’s philosophical thinking, namely his reported conversion to Spinozism in the last year of his life. He was certainly aware of Spinoza’s importance (and notoriety) from his university years onwards: his friend Christlob Mylius had praised Spinoza in his periodical Der Freigeist (The Freethinker) in 1745,63 and Moses Mendelssohn, while rejecting Spinoza’s pantheism, discussed his work with respect in his Philosophische Gespräche (Philosophical Dialogues) of 1755.64 We also know that Lessing studied Spinoza intensively in his Breslau period, and in two philosophical fragments of those years entitled Über die Wirklichkeit der Dinge außer Gott (On the Reality of Things outside God, published 1795) and Durch Spinoza ist Leibniz nur auf die Spur der vorherbestimmten Harmonie gekommen (Spinoza Only Put Leibniz on the

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Track of Pre-established Harmony, published 1795), he responds to some of Mendelssohn’s remarks on Spinoza’s doctrines.65 But there are no further references to Spinoza in his surviving writings and conversations until the last year of his life. It is therefore no wonder that his friends were astonished when, over two years after Lessing’s death, the young Fritz Jacobi (1743–1819) reported that, in conversations with him in 1780, Lessing had declared himself a convinced Spinozist, saying: “Wenn ich mich nach jemand nennen soll, so weiß ich keinen andern. [. . .] Es giebt keine andre Philosophie, als die Philosophie des Spinoza.”66 There are indeed some passages in Lessing’s works which recall Spinoza’s doctrines, such as those rationalizations of the Trinity in 1753 and in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts which seem to indicate that the universe is a necessary creation of the divinity, or the suggestion in the latter work that God accommodated his revelations to the understanding of the early Jews and Christians.67 But these are far from enough to confirm that Lessing accepted Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole. For even that determinism (or “fatalism,” as Jacobi called it) to which Lessing subscribed, telling Jacobi that he had no use for free will,68 involves not a mechanical, causal necessity but a moral necessity of the kind in which Leibniz believed, as Lessing had made clear a few years earlier in the commentary to his edition of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem’s philosophical essays (1776), which were themselves inspired largely by Leibniz. On that occasion, Lessing had echoed Leibniz’s theory that to understand the good is to be (morally) compelled to follow it,69 declaring: Zwang und Nothwendigkeit, nach welchen die Vorstellung des Besten wirket, wie viel willkommner sind sie mir, als kahle Vermögenheit, unter den nehmlichen Umständen bald so, bald anders handeln zu können! Ich danke dem Schöpfer, daß ich muß, das Beste muß.70

This is the language of Leibniz, and not of Spinoza, and the same is true of Lessing’s many affirmations of optimism, faith in progress, epistemological perspectivism, and belief in a dynamic universe of monads. Assuming that Jacobi’s report of the conversations in 1780 is accurate — and none of Lessing’s closest friends saw any reason to doubt its authenticity — why did Lessing assure his young visitor that he found Spinoza’s philosophy the only tenable one? In order to answer this question, one must first consider Jacobi’s motives for introducing himself to Lessing and seeking his company. His interest had first been aroused, he tells us, by Lessing’s writings on religion, and he visited him with the intention “in ihm die Geister mehrerer Weisen zu beschwören, die ich über gewisse Dinge nicht zur Sprache bringen könnte.” The chief of these “wise men” was, of course, Spinoza, and on the day of their first meeting, their conversation, as Jacobi reports, dealt largely with “atheists, deists, and Christians.”71 Lessing must therefore


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have discovered almost at once what Jacobi’s attitude to religion was, and certainly before the topic of Spinoza was explicitly raised: Jacobi was a Christian fideist who believed, unlike Lessing, that reason and rationality must inevitably lead to determinism and atheism, of which he saw Spinoza as the prime example, and that only free will and religious faith, as facts of experience which require no further demonstration, can lead the way to truth and salvation. Lessing had been down this particular road before. He was familiar with the time-honored debate on freedom and necessity at least since his early years in Berlin, when he studied and rejected the materialism of La Mettrie, and probably already as a student in Leipzig. But he had also encountered it in a similar context to that in which Jacobi reopened it, in the person of another earnest and devout young man, the playwright Joachim Wilhelm von Brawe (1738–1758), whose dramatic endeavors he had encouraged during his second period in Leipzig. Brawe, who was still at university, had been much impressed by the philosophy lectures of Christian August Crusius (1712–1775), who defended the freedom of the will and his own supra-rational Christian faith against the rationalism of Wolff and Leibniz, which he considered presumptuous and ultimately deterministic.72 As Christian Felix Weisse recalls, Lessing much enjoyed debating these issues with the hapless Brawe, regularly out-maneuvering him with his dialectical skills and obliging Weisse and other friends to turn the conversation to less contentious subjects.73 His reaction to Jacobi was no different. No sooner had he discovered that Spinoza embodied everything which Jacobi found theologically and philosophically unacceptable than he pronounced himself a convinced Spinozist. When Jacobi published his account of the conversations after Lessing’s death, Mendelssohn and others who had known Lessing well at once recognized his ironic and provocative stance in the debate, even as reported by the stolidly literalistic Jacobi.74 To anyone familiar with Lessing’s axiomatic opposition to systems, especially in his later years, it is in any case inconceivable that he should suddenly have identified himself with the most rigorous systematist of the seventeenth century. As Jacobi’s report shows, Lessing’s interest in philosophy continued undiminished to the end of his life. In 1780, he read and recommended to Jacobi Hume’s recently published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion; their dialogic mobility and analytical acuteness must have greatly appealed to him, although Hume’s skeptical distrust of all metaphysical speculation no doubt struck him as unduly restrictive.75 But only a few weeks after his death in February 1781, Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) was published, transforming the landscape of German philosophy. This did not prevent Jacobi’s report concerning Lessing’s supposed Spinozism from causing a major stir when it appeared in 1785: it led, in fact, to a Spinoza renaissance in Germany, as Herder, Goethe, and several of the German

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Romantics went on to construct monistic philosophies of nature on the model of Spinoza’s pantheism and in reaction to Kant’s dualistic metaphysics.76 But despite their obvious differences — especially on metaphysical questions — Lessing and Kant also had a good deal in common. Both defend the free exercise of reason and reject any attempt to declare religious dogmas unalterable for all time;77 both uphold liberal political principles and regard the state as a necessary evil; and both envisage history as a rational process leading to progressive moral improvement.78 Lessing’s philosophical writings were also of interest to the Romantics and post-Kantian Idealists.79 Friedrich Schlegel in particular found the openness, irony, and subversiveness of Lessing’s later works congenial and akin to his own critical aspirations.80 Schelling and Hegel were attracted to his writings on religion and allude to them in their early works, and in Hegel’s case, in his lectures on the philosophy of religion.81 Hegel’s search for a rational, speculative content in Christian revelation develops Lessing’s parallel quest in a more systematic manner, and his philosophy of history as the product of an immanent rationality, as a natural theodicy, can likewise be seen as an expansion of Lessing’s simpler scheme, further enriched by Herder’s insight into the distinctiveness and individuality of successive historical cultures. But although Lessing’s legacy to Idealism is historically important and consistently underestimated, it is not this aspect of his thought which resonates most strongly today. Those who incorporated his reflections into new philosophical systems were negating the fundamental tendency of his thought, which stands out more clearly today than it did to most of his contemporaries: his conviction that all philosophical doctrines and religious confessions embody a relative degree of truth, and his hope that, by subjecting them all to continuing scrutiny, we may at least keep moving in the direction of an ever-receding certainty.

Notes 1

Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings, ed. David Masson. 14 vols. (London: A. & C. Black, 1889), 11, 162–63.

2

Waldemar Oehlke, Lessing und seine Zeit. 2 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1919), 1, 45–47.

3

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Glückwünschungsrede, bey dem Eintritt des 1743sten Jahres, von der Gleichheit eines Jahres mit dem anderen,” in G. E. Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann; 3rd ed. by Franz Muncker, 23 vols. (Stuttgart: Göschen, 1886–1924; reprinted by Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin, 1968), 14, 135–42. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations will be from this edition and will be indicated in the notes by the abbreviation LM with volume number and page number, for example: LM 14:135–42.


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4

Karl Lessing, G. E. Lessings Leben, ed. Otto F. Lachmann (Leipzig: Reclam, [1888]), 34.

5

LM 14:178.

6

LM 13:413–36.

7

See H. B. Nisbet, “Lessing’s Ethics,” Lessing Yearbook 25 (1993): 18–20.

8

LM 14:175; see also H. B. Nisbet, “The Rationalisation of the Holy Trinity from Lessing to Hegel,” Lessing Yearbook 31 (1999): 68–70. 9

LM 13:430–31.

10

LM 1:237–40; 4, 232, 279 and 423–27; see also Ernst Consentius, Der Wahrsager: Zur Charakteristik von Mylius und Lessing (Leipzig: Avenarius, 1900), 40–47.

11

See Hartmut Hecht, ed. Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis: Eine Bilanz nach 300 Jahren (Berlin: A. Spitz, 1999), 363–417; also Ursula Goldenbaum and Alexander Kosenina, eds. Berliner Aufklärung: Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 1999), 69–100.

12

See LM 6:430–43 and Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Fritz Bamberger et al. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1971–), 2, xvi and xix. Subsequent references to this edition, marked M, will appear within the notes.

13

See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Theodizee und Tatsachen: Das philosophische Profil der deutschen Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 203–7; ibid., “The Two Philosophical Mainstreams of the German Aufklärung: Rationalism and Eclecticism,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 263 (1989): 544–50; also Horst Dreizel, “Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der ‘eklektischen Philosophie,’ ” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 18 (1991): 281–343.

14 See Bernhard Fabian, ed. Friedrich Nicolai 1733–1811: Essays zum 250. Geburtstag (Berlin: Nicolai, 1983), 241–42. 15

See Herbert Jaumann, “Frühe Aufklärung als historische Kritik: Pierre Bayle und Christian Thomasius,” in Frühaufklärung, ed. Sebastian Neumeister (Munich: Fink, 1994), 149–70.

16

See H. B. Nisbet, “Lessing and Pierre Bayle,” in Tradition and Creation: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson, ed. C. P. Magill, Brian A. Rowley, and Christopher Smith (Leeds: W. S. Maney, 1978), 13–29. 17

LM 4:57–82 and 8:293–375.

18

LM 5:310–33, LM 5:353–67, and LM 12:202–54.

19

LM 5:127–42.

20

LM 14:154–63.

21

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 163–230.

22

Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1754–55), 1, 24–25 and 228.

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See LM 7:64–65.

24

LM 5:69. See also “Vorrede,” LM 7:69 in Des Herrn Jacob Thomson sämtliche Trauerspiele, ed. G. E. Lessing, LM 7:68.

25

LM 9:193; compare also Hamburgische Dramaturgie, LM 9:265–66.

26

Letter of November 1756, LM 17:66.

27

LM 17:77.

28

M 1:110–11.

29

M 2:154; compare also LM 19:56.

30

See Lessing, Abhandlungen über die Fabel, LM 7:454.

31

See Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, LM 10:108–9.

32

To Moses Mendelssohn, letter of 28 November 1756, LM 17: 75.

33

LM 10:187–88.

34

LM 13:418, 427, and 432–33.

35

LM 14:312–13.

36

Lessing, To Moses Mendelssohn, 9 January 1771, LM 17:364–65.

37

Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment: His Philosophy of Religion and Its Relation to Eighteenth-Century Thought (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1966), 16. 38

Lessing, Leibnitz [sic], LM 15:512–22.

39

Lessing, Eine Predigt über zwei Texte, LM 15:120–24.

40

Zur Geschichte und Litteratur: Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel. Erster Beytrag, LM 11:470. Compare also Richard Daunicht, ed. Lessing im Gespräch: Berichte und Urteile von Freunden und Zeitgenossen (Munich: Fink, 1971), 503. 41

See Georges Pons, G E. Lessing et le Christianisme (Paris: Didier, 1964), 231.

42

LM 11:461–87.

43

LM 12:71–99.

44

LM 13:430–31.

45

LM 16:293–301.

46

Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt, LM 13:131.

47

See H. B. Nisbet, “Polemik und Erkenntnistheorie bei Lessing,” in Streitkultur. Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Günter Sasse (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 416–19.

48

See Karl S. Guthke, Der Stand der Lessing-Forschung: Ein Bericht über die Literatur von 1932–1962 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), 88–95. 49

Lessing, Eine Duplik, LM 13:23–24.

50

LM 16:522–25.

51

LM 13:435–36; see also LM 16:443 and 525 and Daunicht, ed. Lessing im Gespräch, 334 and 592. 52

Daunicht, ed. Lessing im Gespräch, 432.


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53 See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, ed. Wilfried Barner et al., 12 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), 12, 591. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the notes marked Ba with volume and page numbers. 54

J. M. Goeze, Lessings Schwächen, Ba 9, 176–77 and 179.

55

LM 13:93–96.

56

Karl Eibl, “Lauter Bilder und Gleichnisse. Lessings religionsphilosophische Begründung der Poesie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 59 (1985): 240–41.

57

David Hill, “Lessing: Die Sprache der Toleranz,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 64 (1990): 243–45.

58

LM 13:121, 133, 362, etc.; compare also Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Poesie und Reflexion: Aufsätze zur Literatur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 167–68.

59

LM 13:413.

60

LM 13:345.

61

See H. B. Nisbet, “Zur Funktion des Geheimnisses in Lessings Ernst und Falk,” in Lessing und die Toleranz, ed. Peter Freimark, Franklin Kopitzsch, and Helga Slessarev (Detroit and Munich: Wayne State UP and edition text ⫹ kritik, 1986), 304–6; also Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, “Gesten der ars socratica in Lessings Schriften der Spätzeit,” in Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings, ed. Mauser and Sasse, 506–8. 62

To J.A.H. Reimarus, letter of 6 April 1778, LM 18:269.

63

See Erich Schmidt, Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, 2 vols, 4th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923), 1, 62.

64

M 1:8–19.

65

LM 14:292–96.

66

Heinrich Scholz, ed. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1916), 77–78.

67

Compare Benedict de Spinoza, The Chief Works, ed. and trans. R. H. M. Elwes, 2 vols., revised ed. (London: George Bell, 1887), 1, 38, 41, 71, and 165.

68

Scholz, ed., Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit, 82.

69

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, ed. Hans Heinz Holz and others. 4 vols. in 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965–92), 3:1, 262–68.

70

“Zusätze des Herausgebers,” Philosophische Aufsätze von Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, LM 12:298. 71

Scholz, ed. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit, 74.

72

Compare Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1945; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), 254–64; also T. W. Danzel and G. E. Guhrauer, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Sein Leben und seine Werke, 2nd ed. by W. von Maltzahn and R. Boxberger, 2 vols. (Berlin: Theodor Hofmann, 1880–81), 1, 329–30.

73

Daunicht, ed. Lessing im Gespräch, 110–12.

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74 See Daunicht, ed. Lessing im Gespräch, 581–85; also Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), 621 and 711. 75

Scholz, ed. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit, 240.

76

See David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1984), 97–170; also Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason. German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1987), 44–108. 77

See “Erster Anti-Goeze,” LM 13:143–44 and Immanuel Kant, AkademieTextausgabe, ed. Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 9 vols. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1968), 8, 38–39.

78

See Ernst und Falk, LM 13:363–64 and Kant, Akademie-Textausgabe, 8:17–31.

79

See Wulf Köpke, “Der späte Lessing und die jüngere Generation,” in Humanität und Dialog: Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht, ed. Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Laurence G. Lyon (Detroit and Munich: Wayne State UP and edition text ⫹ kritik, 1982), 211–22. 80

See Horst Steinmetz, ed. Lessing — ein unpoetischer Dichter: Dokumente aus drei Jahrhunderten zur Wirkungsgeschichte Lessings in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main and Bonn: Athenäum, 1969), 169–223. 81

See Nisbet, “The Rationalisation of the Holy Trinity,” 77–84.


Johann Christoph Sysang, copper engraving of Johann Melchior Goeze, circa 1760. Courtesy of Lessing Museum, Kamenz.

Lessing and Theology Arno Schilson

D

URING THE LAST decade of his life, the years in Wolfenbüttel, Lessing devoted himself substantially to theology, conducting discussions and controversies on fundamental questions with numerous renowned contemporaries.1 He displayed a surprising expertise concerning difficult problems in the field. Equally striking is his struggle with contemporary theology and its status amidst the Enlightenment’s all-encompassing call for reason and rationality. Lessing’s statement that he is just a lover of theology and not a theologian (“Liebhaber der Theologie, und nicht Theolog”), for he was not committed to any one dogma (“auf kein gewisses System schwören müssen”2) — referring to the respective doctrinal “systems” propagated by Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics — must be viewed in this larger context. Lessing’s remark does not reflect a superficial point of view or a lack of knowledge about theological issues. His objections to errors he perceived in the theology of his time are based on theological expertise combined with perspicacious analytical power.

Lessing’s Commitment to Theological Questions: An Overview The first of Lessing’s Wolfenbüttel publications with a primarily theological character struck theologians like a thunderbolt because of its significance to the history of the Churches and their central doctrines: Berengarius Turonensis: oder Ankündigung eines wichtigen Werkes desselben (1770, Berengarius Turonensis: Or Announcement of an Important Work by Him).3 Shortly after moving to Wolfenbüttel to work as a librarian at the famous Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Lessing discovered in the library a hitherto unknown manuscript by Berengar of Tours (999–1088), a medieval theologian who had been denounced as a heretic. In this work, Rescriptum contra Lanfrancum (Reply to Lanfranc) Berengar sought to refute the ideas of Lanfranc of Bec (ca. 1010–1089), his chief opponent in the controversy concerning the doctrine of transubstantiation (Abendmahlsstreit). Lessing saw in Berengarius a precursor (or even “advocate”) of the Lutheran doctrine. As for the genre, the Ankündigung

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constitutes one of Lessing’s characteristic “rescues” or “vindications” — a retrieval of another man’s honor that he had performed many times already, even in his early years, and executed brilliantly.4 For his extraordinary discovery and skillful presentation of the manuscript by Berengarius, previously believed lost, Lessing was almost awarded an honorary doctorate by the theological faculty at Leipzig, as his brother Karl told him in a letter dated 4 June 1771.5 Even this theological contribution, however, also took a critical stance regarding specific positions within theology. Lessing’s critical stance toward Christianity is evident already in two fragments dating from far earlier than the Wolfenbüttel years: Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion (On the Genesis of Revealed Religion, 1763/64) and Von der Art und Weise der Fortpflanzung und Ausbreitung der christlichen Religion (On the Ways by Which Christian Religion Multiplies and Spreads, 1763/64);6 the tone of these works foreshadows the temper of Lessing’s later theological writings. Lessing’s theological competence is revealed not only in Berengarius, but also in other publications of that time, last not least in the contributions entitled Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (On History and Literature: From the Treasures of the Ducal Library at Wolfenbüttel, 1773–1781). The same applies to a corpus of Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Fragments of an Unknown Man, 1774–77), which he published and provided with a critical and informative commentary, possibly also with Gegensätze des Herausgebers (CounterArguments of the Editor).7 Using this method of publication, Lessing triggered a fierce controversy with numerous contemporary theologians — the most important among his opponents being the Lutheran chief pastor Johann Melchior Goeze of Hamburg. Their debate, considered one of the most important disputes of the eighteenth century, was very soon to be labeled the “Fragmentenstreit” (Fragments controversy) and would occupy an important place in the history of theology. This debate took shape by the end of 1777 and lasted until Lessing’s death. The controversy about central questions of theology referred on the one hand to the critical reception of the Fragmente themselves. On the other hand, however, the dispute very soon touched upon basic questions of Christian theology, especially with regard to the Gegensätze written by Lessing. These antitheses, among other things, were concerned with relating biblical testimonies to certain creeds of the early church that were part of the oral tradition, as well as with the quest for a sound “proof” concerning the truth of Christian revelation, one that would meet the standards of reason. There was also urgent discussion regarding the proper techniques required for a careful hermeneutic analysis (Bibelhermeneutik), as Lessing saw the further destiny of Christianity endangered as long as it lacked the methods of reliable exegesis. After all, the question of Christianity’s legitimacy and identity — as viewed within the larger context of interacting with and

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opposing revealed religions such as Judaism and Islam — was of major importance. The dispute triggered by Lessing’s publication of the fragments inspired a large number of his own writings. Being predominantly of a polemic nature, those works nevertheless displayed a high degree of knowledge, as well as an acute sense of appreciation of theological problems, whereas Lessing’s opponents, the Lutheran parish priest Goeze foremost among them, often ranged far below Lessing’s intellectual level. In addition to Lessing’s numerous pamphlets, the Paralipomena — his outlines (some of them more elaborated than others), abandoned drafts, mere fragments of thought, and sketches pertaining to larger projects, were published as Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Lessing’s Theological Inedita) by Lessing’s brother Karl in 1784.8 This indicates that Goeze’s silence by no means signaled a break in terms of theological controversy.9 As heterogeneous fragments (some of them almost ready for publication) from his legacy prove, Lessing obviously aimed at another major theological controversy for which he thought himself to be perfectly prepared. Goeze’s uncompromising worship of the literal meaning of the Bible’s text — suppressing, in the vein of Luther, any kind of (oral) tradition of Christian truths and creeds — found its advocate in no less a person than Christian Wilhelm Franz Walch (1726–1784), a renowned Protestant church historian from Göttingen, who attacked Lessing by means of his Kritische Untersuchungen vom Gebrauch der heiligen Schrift unter den alten Christen in den ersten vier Jahrhunderten (Critical Investigations Concerning the Use of the Holy Scriptures Among Ancient Christianity During the First Four Centuries, 1779). Walch referred his view back to an allegedly unequivocal document of early Christian theology and incorporated numerous quotations from it into his essay, which was implicitly directed against Lessing. The latter felt obliged to defend the validity of his own arguments and sources regarding the writings and testimonies of the ancient Christian theologians. At the same time, Lessing was outraged (as drafts for pamphlets against Walch from the Inedita reveal) about his opponent’s fake reference to an allegedly unequivocal translation of ancient Christian sources, a reference employed for the sole sake of proving Lessing wrong. Not only in the first of his Sogenannte Briefe an den Herrn Doktor Walch (SoCalled Letters to Herr Doctor Walch),10 but as early as his Nötige Antwort (Necessary Response, 1778) addressed to Goeze, he selfconfidently emphasized his competence and knowledge regarding theological issues: Diese Sätze habe ich aus eigner sorgfältigen, mehrmaligen Lesung der Kirchenväter der ersten vier Jahrhundert gesammelt; und ich bin im Stande mich mit dem gelehrtesten Patristiker [Walch!] darüber in schärfste

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Prüfung einzulassen. Der Belesenste hatte in dieser Sache nicht mehr Quellen, als ich. Der Belesenste kann also auch nicht mehr wissen, als ich; und es ist gar nicht wahr, dass so tiefe und ausgebreitete Kenntnisse erfordert werden, um in allen diesen Stücken auf den Grund zu kommen, als sich manche wohl einbilden, und manche die Welt gern bereden möchten.11

Lessing, not free of pride, speaks here too of the “Unschädlichkeit meines Systems” while emphasizing the “besondern Nutzen und Vorteil” that Christianity “in Absicht ihrer itzigen Feinde davon zu erwarten habe.” Lessing believes that his theological thinking can assist a Christianity under attack. Frequent remarks like these reveal Lessing not only as a “lover of theology,” but also as someone who tried to respond to the challenges facing theology by harking back to the early days of Christianity and relevant theological source texts. In so doing, he thought and wrote against the grain of the often superficial theology of his time.

Theology in Lessing’s Germany We can appreciate fully Lessing’s uniqueness within the theological context of his age only if we sketch, roughly at least, the field of eighteenthcentury theology. Since the seventeenth century, Lutheran orthodoxy had been the predominant theological line, exerting a shaping influence especially on German theological thought. Characterized by a strong sense of rationalism, it was almost a match for Scholasticism — a school of thought prevalent throughout the Catholic domains of that time, and marked by both strict logic and a tendency toward speculation. Furthermore, Lutheran orthodoxy upheld the so-called Schriftprinzip (that is, the principle of the written word of Scripture), according to which the Bible is the only legitimate source of revelatory testimony. The chief pastor of Hamburg, Johann Melchior Goeze, Lessing’s sharpest and most persistent adversary, was the living epitome of this self-confident line of Lutheran theology, which, competing with Tridentine Catholicism, put a strong emphasis on maintaining true faith (thus the term orthodoxy: sincere pledge). Beyond any doubt, Lessing himself held the speculative tendencies he found in orthodoxy, along with the cohesive “system” it provided, in high esteem. In spite of his undeniable appreciation of orthodoxy, however, he did not think of those tendencies in terms of an ideal solution to the problems caused by the epoch of the Enlightenment, as a carefully phrased passage from a letter to his brother Karl (dated 2 February 1774) may prove. Lessing affirms that he does not favor by any means the idea of an everlasting orthodoxy based on a literal reading of Scripture and a self-contained


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theological system, a point on which his brother had misunderstood him. Rather, he considers orthodoxy a phenomenon that has been largely overcome: Mit der Orthodoxie war man, Gott sei Dank, ziemlich zu Rande; man hatte zwischen ihr und der Philosophie eine Scheidewand gezogen, hinter welcher eine jede ihren Weg fortgehen konnte, ohne die andere zu hindern. [. . .] Darin sind wir einig, daß unser altes Religionssystem falsch ist: aber das möchte ich nicht mit Dir sagen, daß es ein Flickwerk von Stümpern und Halbphilosophen sei. Ich weiß kein Ding in der Welt, an welchem sich der menschliche Scharfsinn mehr gezeigt und geübt hätte, als an ihm.12

This statement anticipates an equally careful manner of applying those kinds of revealed truths which have proved productive in terms of rational development and thus were not to be stigmatized as pernicious “speculations” — see, for instance Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1780), especially §§ 73–80.13 In the same letter to Karl, Lessing refers to “Neologie” (derived from the Greek: neos logos) as “unsere neumodische Theologie.”14 He considers this innovation to be a serious contemporary challenge. In what Lessing considered an outright dangerous manner, neology attempted to reconcile faith and reason in order to counterbalance the antagonism between reason and revelation that had been shaped by orthodoxy. Ridicule and contempt were not all Lessing held in store for this downright un-orthodox way of theologizing. For instance, he considered that neology compared to orthodoxy as liquid manure does to unclean water; he considered the new religious system more questionable because it tried to influence reason and philosophy far more than orthodoxy had sought to do. Lessing thought of traditional orthodox theology as disputing with healthy reason, whereas neology seeks to dazzle common sense with intellectual sophistries.15 Lessing published provocative fragments (discussed in more detail in the next section of this essay) in order to counteract specious neological attempts to reconcile faith and reason, which he considered both erroneous and dangerous. Lessing attacked this “neumodische Theologie” for its belief in what he considered the shaky ground of historical-biblical tradition, probing for anything else that might qualify as solid proof of the truth of Christianity. Of all the “neologists,” only Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791) responded (rather late, namely in 1779 in fact) to Lessing’s publication of the fragments of Reimarus. The others remained eloquently silent. Considering Lessing’s combative intentions, one might consider his publishing tactics a failure, as he was unable to provoke the neologists to reveal their actual convictions and intentions. Originally, Lessing planned to confront the neologists with a comprehensive and seemingly indomitable edifice of thought (that is, the Fragmente)

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that — once having laid to waste the fundaments of Christianity — was erected solely upon reason. In addition to orthodoxy, Pietism, in its variegated ways, represented an additional theological direction in the eighteenth century. As opposed to orthodoxy, Pietism, being deeply rooted in Lutheranism and leaving its mark on the university of Halle, put no special emphasis on doctrinal precepts. Rather, it encouraged individuals to seek an inner light within their souls — believed to be more or less immediately evoked by divine intervention. The belief system of Pietism stressed subjective feelings expressed with free-flowing sentimentality, true faith manifesting itself in exemplary behavior and all-encompassing tolerance. Although there is no direct relationship between Lessing and Pietism, it still holds true that Lessing’s father was a Lutheran clergyman who favored tolerant and pragmatic faith over strict, theory-oriented orthodoxy. The consideration of emotions as evidence of one’s faith is a technique to be found in various quotes concerning Lessing’s dispute on Christianity, for instance in his Gegensätze des Herausgebers: “Aber was gehen dem Christen dieses Mannes Hypothesen, und Erklärungen und Beweise an? Ihm ist es doch einmal da, das Christentum, welches er so wahr, in welchem er sich so selig fühlet.”16 This statement, completely misunderstood by Goeze, was later on to be defended by Lessing in his Axiomata, a publication clearly directed against the Chief Pastor. Here, Lessing accuses his opponent of denying any genuine connection between emotion and Christianity.17 The same conviction holds true for the idea of tolerance, which implies open-mindedness with regard to other Christian denominations and ways of life. Hence, in a fragment of 1750, Lessing took a quasiprogrammatic stance in favor of what was then the most famous group of Pietists, namely the Free Church of Moravian Brethren at Herrnhut (usually, and also here, referred to as Herrnhuter), founded by Count Zinzendorf in 1722. They soon found themselves ostracized by the orthodox and even persecuted for their alleged seduction of the souls of the faithful. According to orthodox opinion, this group had abandoned the way to salvation. Lessing dedicated to them his theological debut Gedanken über die Herrnhuter (Thoughts about the Herrnhuter, 1784).18 In this fragment — the text simply breaks off — Lessing once and for all settles the score with the contemporary contempt for the Herrnhuter. Dogmatically and unmistakably it begins by declaring that humans were made for deeds, not for empty philosophizing: “Der Mensch ward zum Tun und nicht zum Vernünfteln erschaffen. [. . .] Glückselige Zeiten, als der Tugendhafteste der Gelehrteste war! als alle Weisheit in kurzen Lebensregeln bestand!”19 This passage is followed by a short sketch depicting the history of a fatal decline — a development that last not least the Herrnhuter themselves tried to reverse.


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Lessing clearly distanced himself from all of these important branches of contemporary theology and practical religion; and he cannot be easily subsumed under any of them without contradiction or discontinuity. Rather, he took learned, yet idiosyncratic positions in theological controversies. In so doing, he opened up perspectives far beyond the discourse of his day and pointed out ways to solutions hitherto unconsidered. This is especially the case with Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1777–1780), among other things Lessing’s brilliant plan for a history of theology, which establishes a guideline for the productive community and peaceful co-existence of (Christian) creeds, and thereby remains far superior to neological reasoning. This work, as well as Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) — the drama that emerged out of the dispute about the fragments — include hints that go far beyond the author and his times.

Lessing as Publisher of “Anonymous Fragments” In 1774, Lessing started publishing excerpts from a manuscript that he claimed to have come across in the Wolfenbüttel library. He pretended merely to fulfill his duty as a librarian by publishing portions of it in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Litteratur (Contributions to History and Literature). In fact, however, it concerned a work almost ready for publication and entitled APOLOGIE oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (APOLOGIA or Defense for the Rational Worshippers of God),20 written by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), who had been a Professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages in Hamburg. In its entirety, this document remained unprinted until 1972 (!). Reimarus’s children, who were friends of Lessing, probably gave him a provisional rendition of the manuscript from which many of the “Anonymous Fragments” were culled. Reimarus’s identity was revealed only long after the Fragmentenstreit by his son Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus in 1814. Reimarus’s Apologie first of all contained a vitriolic attack on Judaism, claiming that it could not meet the standards of reasonable religion, in so far as it did not bear testimony to the idea of immortality. Not only did Reimarus know how to shatter the historical credibility of crucial Old Testament narratives (for example, Exodus), but he also hinted at contradictions with regard to the various accounts of Christ’s resurrection. Furthermore, he tried to lend credibility to his theory that the narrative and doctrinal basis of Christian belief was nothing but a tissue of lies, made up by the disciples in answer to their leader’s ultimate failure and death on the cross. While Reimarus was a well-known citizen of Hamburg and respected throughout his lifetime as a devout Christian, his goal was to destroy the basis of biblical testimony by means of historical-textual criticism, so as to replace it by a religion and a church service based on reason.

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By publishing individual parts of Reimarus’s work as “fragments,” Lessing was pursuing a distinct strategy. At first he published an excerpt provocatively entitled Von Duldung der Deisten (On Tolerating the Deists, 1774).21 It presented Reimarus’s passionate plea for freedom and reasonableness of thought with special regard to the matters of religion. Lessing, however, accompanied this text with a harsh critique of contemporary theology, especially of neology. Surprisingly, this sampling drawn from Reimarus’s work did not encounter the vigorous contradictions that Lessing had hoped to receive from certain theologians. Hence, he felt compelled to choose for publication passages that were far more explosive. Only three years later, Lessing published no fewer than five of these fragments together as the fourth installment of Beiträge zur Geschichte und Litteratur.22 They dealt with various provocative religious topics and were followed by Lessing’s own counter-arguments: Gegensätze des Herausgebers.23 The Gegensätze reveal Lessing as an informed and perspicacious critic of the “anonymous author’s” theses, which were potentially disastrous for both Old Testament Judaism and Christianity. The five fragments appear under the heading Ein Mehreres aus den Papieren des Ungenannten, die Offenbarung betreffend (More Items from the Papers of the Anonymous Man Concerning Divine Revelation). The first fragment, Von Verschreiung der Vernunft auf den Kanzeln (On the Defamation of Reason in the Pulpits) mercilessly attacked the belief that original sin had such a pernicious effect on man’s reason that he has ever since remained unable to come to reasoned conclusions concerning the truth of both the Christian faith and of religion as such. Given that premise, the second fragment dealt critically with divine revelation, supposedly the only way that man could learn about God. Even the title was programmatic and unequivocal: Unmöglichkeit einer Offenbarung, die alle Menschen auf eine gegründete Art glauben könnten (Impossibility of a Revelation That Could Be Believed Reasonably by All Men). In radically denying the necessity, even the possibility of a universal revelation, Reimarus vigorously argues for a legitimate confinement to a religion whose truths and insights are solely founded upon reason. This dynamic plea for a religion of pure reason is sustained in the third and the fifth fragment, respectively, by a paradigmatic critique of miracles reported in both the Old and New Testaments. Reimarus, the well-versed philologist, minutely deconstructs the credibility of a crucial Biblical account in the third fragment, Durchgang der Israeliten durchs rote Meer (Passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea). With unrivaled precision, he discusses the New Testament’s accounts of Christ’s resurrection in the fifth fragment, Über die Auferstehungsgeschichte (On the Narratives of Christ’s Resurrection) and hints at their evident contradictions in order to imply a lack of credibility. In so doing, Reimarus sought to deprive Christian religion of nothing less than its historical legitimacy.


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The fourth fragment, bearing the telling title Daß die Bücher A.T. nicht geschrieben worden, eine Religion zu offenbaren (That the Books of the Old Testament were not Written for the Purpose of Founding a Religion), is an obvious polemic against any kind of revelatory claim made by the Old Testament. Reimarus denies Judaism’s validity as a faith because he believes that the books of the Old Testament do not contain the idea of immortality which, in general, is considered crucial to any kind of religion. Hence, the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament as a whole cannot be acknowledged as divine revelation or as bases for religious belief. The fact that Lessing (as a publisher) consciously extracted the fifth fragment from a larger context was first revealed in the following year. At a time when the dispute on the fragments published in 1777 had moved into a direction he neither hoped for, nor expected — the dispute with Goeze still being in full swing — Lessing published yet another single anonymous fragment. It was entitled Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger (On the Purpose of Jesus and His Disciples, 1778)24 and tried nothing less than to shatter lastingly the whole edifice of Christian belief (especially the belief in Christ as such) by employing a kind of historical criticism whose polemical force drew upon exceptional analytical competence. Reimarus argued that Jesus, as a historical individual, could rather trivially be classified as a distinguished Jewish reformer. The disciples, however, unable to come to terms with the ignominious death of their leader ingeniously conceived a different, revolutionary belief system in which Jesus took the status of a spiritual messiah. The status of an anointed “Christ” was nevertheless irreconcilable with his being as a historical individual. In this context, Reimarus considers the testimonies of Christ’s resurrection a web of lies, for it was the Disciples who secretly stole their master’s body. Convinced that historical evidence — due to its contradictory and noncommittal nature — could not adequately prove the truthfulness of the Christian religion, Reimarus set forth the important and far-reaching conclusion that Christianity is unable to withstand any investigation based on critical rationality. Its historical root having withered away, Christianity had become groundless. It was only with regard to this specific opinion that Lessing agreed with Reimarus. After an intense reading of the Apologie, Lessing was convinced that the highly acclaimed method of combining historical evidence with a detailed examination of biblical sources presented Christianity with more a curse than a blessing. Therefore, he viciously attacked Johann Heinrich Ress (1732–1803), an opponent of his who had tried to show that the contradictions inherent in the testimonial of resurrection did not exist. Ress clung to the concept of historical evidence, leading Lessing to dismiss the validity of such an approach: “Wo bleiben alle historische Beweise für die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion? — Wo sie wollen! Wäre es denn ein großes Unglück, wenn sie

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endlich einmal wieder in den Winkel des Zeughauses gestellt würden, in welchem sie noch vor funfzig Jahren standen?”25

Lessing as Critic of the “Anonymous Fragments” Lessing was well aware of the volatile nature of the fragments. While Reimarus closely approximated his ideal of a true critic of religion, the decision to publish the Fragmente carried with it many difficulties. It was Lessing’s own Gegensätze des Herausgebers, however, that most provoked Goeze’s harsh contradiction and uninhibited polemic, to the point that the Hauptpastor almost overlooked how dangerous the fragments themselves were. Lessing opened his own response to Reimarus’s iconoclastic assault upon the basic concepts of Christian religion with some important differentiations that determined the line of argumentation to be followed. In so doing, he at first referred to the most intimate, indomitable “experience” concerning the redeeming truth essential to Christian religion: the letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion. “Der Buchstabe ist nicht der Geist; und die Bibel ist nicht die Religion. Folglich sind Einwürfe gegen den Buchstaben, und gegen die Bibel, nicht eben auch Einwürfe gegen den Geist und gegen die Religion.”26 Continuing, Lessing emphasizes that Christianity existed before the evangelists and Apostles wrote. “Das Christentum war, ehe Evangelien und Apostel geschrieben hatten. [. . .] Es mag also von diesen Schriften noch so viel abhängen: so kann doch unmöglich die ganze Wahrheit der Religion auf ihnen beruhen.” Lessing concludes vigorously: Religion is not true because evangelists and Apostles taught it, rather, they taught it because it is true. “Die Religion ist nicht wahr, weil die Evangelisten und Apostel sie lehrten: sondern sie lehrten sie, weil sie wahr ist. Aus ihrer innern Wahrheit müssen die schriftlichen Überlieferungen erklärt werden, und alle schriftliche Überlieferungen können ihr keine innere Wahrheit geben, wenn sie keine hat.”27 By publishing the Gegensätze, counter-arguments apodictically phrased and virtually disguised as “axioms,” Lessing knocked the weapon out of his opponent’s hands, namely the charge that Reimarus’s devastating critique had denied the truth of biblical testimony.28 At the same time, Lessing tried to vindicate Christianity by calling attention to other, more appropriate ways of proving the truth of Christian religion, ways unaffected by Reimarus’s keen criticism. In so doing, he added three important hints which he would develop as a further line of argumentation in the dispute on the fragments, and on which he would rely when debating his adversaries. First, it is the basic distinction between the letter (Buchstabe) and the spirit (Geist)29 (on a larger scale analogous to that between the “Bible” and “religion”), which is crucial with regard to the Biblical foundation of


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Christian religion. Lessing argued that these are by no means coinciding phenomena, and that any assault, however devastating, on one does not necessarily affect the other (and thus lies beyond the realm of Reimarus’s iconoclastic criticism). At this critical juncture, Lessing was calling attention to theological issues that had been undeservedly forgotten. This reminder of the early testimonies of Christian theology and the appreciation of the oral tradition connected to it, was considered important by Lessing with regard to both the existence of Christianity in his time, and with regard to Reimarus’s assaults.30 Secondly, Lessing asserted what was to him an undisputable fact,31 that Christianity, for more than 1700 years, had been playing an essential part in directing the proper ways of common sense. The Christian religion had by no means proven hostile to the development of human reason, but rather helpful — a perspective that leaves its imprints on the later Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, the first 53 paragraphs of which Lessing had already published earlier in his Gegensätze pertaining to the fourth of Reimarus’s fragments. An argument set forth by Lessing and often encountered in various contexts holds that Providence rectifies the origins and backgrounds of certain truths through their fruitful effects and positive developments. This holds true especially for Christian religion, as § 77 of Erziehung illustrates: “Und warum sollten wir nicht auch durch eine Religion, mit deren historischen Wahrheit, wenn man will, es so mißlich aussieht, gleichwohl auf nähere und bessere Begriffe vom göttlichen Wesen, von unserer Natur, von unsern Verhältnissen zu Gott, geleitet werden können, auf welche die menschliche Vernunft von selbst nimmermehr gekommen wäre?”32 In his far-reaching answer to Johann Heinrich Ress’s defense of the reliability and truth of the narrative of Christ’s resurrection, Lessing did more than rigorously deconstruct his opponent’s argumentation. He in fact took a programmatic stance with regard to the proper meaning of Christianity’s historical foundations. He refers to the miracles of Jesus and his disciples as a kind of scaffold that can be torn down when the building is finished. It is the building which should be of interest, Lessing insists, and not the scaffold.33 A third way that the Christian religion could be decisively rehabilitated was indicated by Lessing’s concept of vital “Erfahrung” by which the faith’s “innere Wahrheit” manifests itself, that kind of truth that needs no extrinsic vindication. Any historical criticism is warded off by this self-evident and serene truth, for it does not rely on any circumstances at all and thus remains immune to all criticism. Lessing, on the one hand, emphasizes the “inneres Gefühl” that offers certainty, rescuing every Christian from assaults like those performed by Reimarus. On the other hand, Lessing unequivocally and emphatically points out the beneficial effect Christian religion has had on the development of reason, as well as on the growth of humanism. This fact — indisputable and obvious as it is to Lessing — legitimizes its claim to truth far beyond historical evidence.

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On the basis of these clarifications and further hints, Lessing, at a time when the dispute on the fragments had entered its second phase, responded to his opponent Goeze that in his opinion it is important to differentiate between religion and the history of religion, religion and theology, and religion and the Bible: Bei mir bleibt die christliche Religion die nemliche: nur daß ich die Religion von der Geschichte der Religion will getrennet wissen. Nur daß ich mich weigere, die historische Kenntnis von ihrer Entstehung und ihrer Fortpflanzung; und eine Überzeugung von dieser Kenntnis, die schlechterdings bei keiner historischen Wahrheit sein kann, für unentbehrlich zu halten. Nur daß ich die Entwürfe, die gegen das Historische der Religion gemacht werden, für unerheblich erkläre; sie mögen beantwortet werden können, oder nicht. Nur daß ich die Schwächen der Bibel nicht für Schwächen der Religion halten will. Nur daß ich die Prahlerei des Theologen nicht leiden kann, welcher dem gemeinen Manne weis macht, jene Einwürfe wären alle schon längst beantwortet.34

The Fragmentenstreit — “Minor Respondents”35 By publishing the fragments, and by entering the debate dealing with things unverified in both the Bible and in revealed religion as such, Lessing intended to challenge theologians, including the representatives of neology. No one in this target group, however, was willing and able to publish a pamphlet of antitheses or indeed any kind of qualified response. This is all the more surprising because the fragments published in 1777 earned Lessing a widespread and long-lasting readership even post mortem. However, among the “minor respondents” (Wolfgang Kröger’s term) who did disagree in print, mainly schoolteachers and priests, there was not a single distinguished theologian. In September 1777 the headmaster Johann Daniel Schumann (1714–1787) from Hanover was the first to step into the arena with his reply: Über die Evidenz der Beweise für die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion (On the Obviousness of Certain Proofs Concerning the Truth of Christian Religion).36 Here the author claims that the evidence of historical facts pertaining to the Bible ultimately supports the truthfulness of the Christian religion. Lessing replied with the concise and forceful Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (On the Proof of Spirit and Strength, 1777),37 in which he emphasized the ghastly, wide abyss (“garstigen breiten Graben”) between the coincidental truths of history (“zufälligen Geschichtswahrheiten”) on the one hand, and the inescapable truths of reason (“notwendigen Vernunftwahrheiten”) on the other. While setting himself off from Schumann by articulating this gap in terms of a general


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problem, it is, however, just here that Lessing refers to the undeniable benefits yielded by Christianity during several centuries. He concludes that precisely these fruits have rendered questions concerning the historical truth of Christianity’s foundation irrelevant. Lessing added a brief dialogue, Das Testament Johannis (St. John’s Testament, 1777),38 whose middle part consisted of a precept based on St. John’s Gospel: “Children, love one another!” Next to respond was Johann Heinrich Ress, mentioned earlier, superintendent and Protestant priest at Wolfenbüttel. His tract struggled yet again to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the narratives of Christ’s resurrection, which Lessing believed had been revealed by Reimarus to be beyond dispute. Since even the title of Ress’s book explicitly referred to the fragments — Die Auferstehungsgeschichte Jesu Christi gegen einige im vierten Beytrage zur Geschichte und Litteratur aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel gemachte neuere Einwendungen vertheidiget (The Testimony of Resurrection as Defended Against Some of the Recent Objections Made in the Fourth Installment of Contributions to History and Literature from the Treasures of the Ducal Library)39 Lessing felt prompted to take a stance. His uncommonly lengthy Duplik — to be understood in the sense of a double (Du-) reply (Replik), that is, a reply to the reply by Ress.40 Step by step it plowed through the fresh but futile attempt to defend the testimonies of resurrection, refuting Ress with expert knowledge and vitriolic polemics. Lessing started out by affirming that the frequent contradictions in the account of the Apostles as indicated by Reimarus were indeed true contradictions. Although Lessing’s argumentation was based on the same premise as that of Reimarus, he did not follow his opponent’s, that is, Reimarus’s, conclusion that this would mean that the Christian religion as a whole was erroneous and false. Rather, Lessing heavily emphasized this undisputable fact: Christianity, which triumphed over heathen and Jewish faiths through the gospel of Christ’s resurrection, exists today. Should one believe, Lessing demands, that this gospel was not convincing when it triumphed? Should one believe that it was not convincing at that time only because one cannot prove its full credibility today?41 In the spring of 1778, Friedrich Wilhelm Mascho, a scholar from Hamburg and former headmaster, published his Verteidigung der geoffenbarten Religion wider einige Fragmente aus der Wolfenbüttelschen Bibliothek (Vindication of Revealed Religion Against Some Fragments from the Library at Wolfenbüttel).42 This “Defense” attacked the fragmentist’s inadequate biblical hermeneutics. Mascho wished to disprove the fragments in order to improve religious education, teaching the world a new Christianity that was at once pure, genuine, Biblical, and rational. Only two fragments of a draft have survived of Lessing’s reply, which was never published;43 the first, however, was incorporated into the 1. Anti-Goeze (1st Anti-Goeze, 1778).44 As to Mascho, Lessing reveals the headmaster’s uncertainty in

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calling for a new interpretation of the doctrine of inspiration and his idiosyncratic understanding of the Christian religion.45 Georg Christoph Silberschlag (1731–1790), a Lutheran preacher from Berlin, also felt prompted to disprove the five fragments. His pamphlet of spring, 1778, bears the provocative title: Antibarbarus oder Verteidigung der christlichen Religion und des Verfahrens des evangelischen Lehramts im Religionsunterrichte gegen und wider die Einwürfe neuerer Zeiten (AntiBarbarus or Vindication of Christian Religion and of the Procedures Employed by the Teaching Profession in Religious Education Against Some Objections of Late).46 Silberschlag asserted that the fragmentist’s arguments and proofs were hardly the best the eighteenth century had to offer and could not fulfill the demands of enlightened reasoning — in short: he acted as though the fragmentist were an uneducated barbarian. Lessing’s response to this assault on Reimarus puns wittily on Silberschlag’s programmatic title Antibarbarus with his own title, Barbarus Antibarbaro. The first of two additional replies, written by the pedagogue and theological “layman” Friederich Daniel Behn (1733–1804),47 did not provoke Lessing to respond, as he had already stated everything the subject required in his Duplik. Lessing also did not reply to the Protestant pastor Johann Balthasar Lüderwald’s (1722–1796), tract, Die Wahrheit und Gewisheit der Auferstehung Jesu Christi (The Truth and Certainty Concerning the Resurrection of Jesus Christ).48 Also in this case, Lessing obviously followed his own maxim that things which had been said before did not have to be discussed, confirmed, or disproved again.

The Fragmentenstreit — The Controversy with Johann Melchior Goeze49 The exchanges just described constitute a minor prelude to the vigorous public controversy between Lessing and the Lutheran Hauptpastor Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786), arguably Lessing’s most important opponent in this context. In late 1777, Goeze heatedly criticized Lessing’s Gegensätze des Herausgebers50 in a Hamburg periodical. A bit later, Goeze inserted in the same journal a portion of Ress’s above mentioned reply, which by then had already met with Lessing’s rebuke. In April 1778, Goeze combined two previously published assaults on the fragmentist into his first independent pamphlet in order to attack Lessing explicitly: Etwas Vorläufiges gegen des Herrn Hofrats Leßing mittelbare und unmittelbare feindselige Angriffe auf unsre allerheiligste Religion, und auf den einigen Lehrgrund derselben, die heilige Schrift (Something Preliminary Against the Direct and Indirect Hostile Assaults by the


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Court Counselor Herr Lessing on Our Sacrosanct Religion and on the Sole Foundation Thereof, Holy Scripture).51 The second contribution rather unequivocally announced judicial measures to be taken against Lessing on the grounds of his alleged heresy. Still, by re-stating his former arguments yet again, Goeze was not observing the conventions of academic dispute, for not only had Lessing already responded to Ress, but also to Goeze himself when he published his own Axiomata in March 1778 subtitled: Wider den Herrn Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg (Against the Chief Pastor Herr Goeze of Hamburg). Meanwhile, Lessing’s matter-of-fact tone had become harsher. This is revealed by his first publication exclusively pertaining to his dispute with Goeze: Eine Parabel, nebst einer kleinen Bitte, und einem eventualen Absagungsschreiben an den Herrn Pastor Goeze, in Hamburg (A Parable, Along with a Request and a Possible Refusal to the Parish Priest Herr Goeze of Hamburg, 1778). Indeed, it opened with a parable, namely the so-called “Palast-Parabel,” a piece until recently52 underrated or simply neglected. In an allegorical, yet obvious way, Lessing states his view concerning the Christian religion and the alleged threat posed by the Fragmenten. What follows is his insistent “request” to Goeze that the latter should eventually realize the true meaning of his Gegensätze, as well as his serious concern about Christian religion expressed in them. Lessing then responded to Goeze’s latest attacks. He had harshly accused Lessing of denying verbal inspiration, and of harboring contempt for the Bible. To his reply that was just about to go to press, Lessing added with great indignation a strongly worded dismissal (“Absagungsschreiben”) in which he refuses to tolerate Goeze’s accusations and indeed asserts that he has better intentions regarding Christianity than does Goeze.53 The fact that Lessing had been well prepared for a rather long controversy with Goeze, who was known for his argumentative disposition, manifests itself in the number of publications that he had written in response to Goeze up to mid-1778. Lessing’s initial position is marked by the Parabel, followed by the more fundamental and systematic approach of the Axiomata, and finally, there is the long list of Anti-Goeze installments — a total of eleven pamphlets. Lessing’s third and last publication of a fragment, the previously mentioned Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger, which clearly and unmistakably emphasized the explosive character of the fragmentist’s assaults, shared its publication date (21 May 1778) with the 6. Anti-Goeze (6th Anti-Goeze). Goeze did not hesitate to publish polemic replies to Lessing’s pamphlets. The first, Etwas Vorläufiges (see above), was published in mid-April of 1778 and contained earlier articles as well as new sections pertaining to the Fragmentenstreit. An elaborated “Vorbemerkung” accuses Lessing — among other things — of disputing in a “strange way”:

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Seine Bemühungen gehen nicht dahin, den Verstand seiner Leser durch Gründe zu überzeugen, sondern sich ihrer Phantasie durch allerlei unerwartete Bilder und Anspielungen zu bemächtigen. Er bestimmet daher nichts durch richtige Erklärungen, er führet nie einen gründlichen und einleuchtenden Beweis, sondern er spielt beständig mit Gleichnissen, Instanzen und Antithesen. Er nimmt die Worte in verschiedenen Bedeutungen, und gerade jedes Mal in derjenigen, von welcher er sich die meiste Hoffnung macht, dass sie am ersten blöde Augen blenden werde. Er erlaubt sich Sophismen, Equivocen und Fallacien.54

Much to Goeze’s scorn, Lessing argues with figurative language, parables, and allusion, not language that Goeze finds logical and convincing. All of this leads to the ironic, yet serious accusation that Lessing employs and pursues a “logic of the theater” (Ba 9, 121). Only a little later, in May 1778, Goeze’s next pamphlet against Lessing was provocatively entitled Lessings Schwächen: Das Erste Stück (Lessing’s Weaknesses: Part One).55 As this subtitle (similar to Lessing’s numeration of his pamphlets responding to Goeze) indicates, the Hauptpastor too, had prepared himself for a rather long controversy. Das zweite Stück (Part Two) appeared in June 1778,56 Das dritte Stück (Part Three) in late August.57 Here, Goeze criticizes harshly Lessing’s pamphlet published earlier the same month — Nötige Antwort auf eine sehr unnötige Frage des Hrn. Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg (Necessary Response to Quite an Unnecessary Request by the Chief Pastor of Hamburg, Herr. Goeze, 1778).58 Meanwhile, namely as of July 6, 1778, Lessing had to face the revocation of the immunity from censorship granted to him by the Duke, a freedom pertaining especially to theological publications. On August 17, Lessing experienced yet another setback when the Duke rescinded his freedom to have his manuscripts printed free of censorship elsewhere — of which Lessing had availed himself when he issued his Nötige Antwort. The librarian thus felt prompted to fall silent with regard to the Fragmentenstreit, and after his final reply to Lessing, even Goeze himself did not say anything further. Lessing’s dispute with Goeze centered predominantly on two questions. The first concerned the Bible’s exclusive validity as proof of the truth of the Christian religion. In connection with that, there were Lessing’s hints at another kind of proof — a proof that is irrefutable and remains unaffected by any kind of historical criticism. The second question concerned the ultimate nature and eternal validity of the Christian religion, and indeed of religion as such. While Goeze’s stance concerning the first of these questions was disproved by Lessing, who employed great expertise and good argumentation (especially with regard to ancient Christian theology), Goeze stuck to his point concerning the second one. In a most aggressive way he assailed his opponent and tried to nail him down by openly asking about Lessing’s personal religious beliefs.


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Lessing answered this crucial question in a rather evasive and hesitating manner with his two installments of Nötige Antwort auf eine sehr unnötige Frage des Hrn. Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg.59 Admittedly, however, in the first publication, he expressly emphasized that under the term “Christian religion” he subsumes all those kinds of teachings that are included in the creeds of the Christian Church dating from its first four centuries: “daß ich unter der Christlichen Religion alle diejenigen Glaubenslehren verstehe, welche in den Symbolis der ersten vier Jahrhunderte der Christlichen Kirche enthalten sind.”60 Objecting to Goeze’s Bibliolatrie,61 he persistently relied on the fundamental importance of the early ecclesiastical Regula fidei, the religious norm and the (oral) credo. In the publication that followed, Lessing’s most important vindicator in the dispute with Goeze just happened to be Catholicism. Catholics, he argues, believe in the Bible because they are Christians, but they are not Christians because they believe in the Bible: “Alle und jede rechtgläubige Katholiken glauben die Bibel und der Bibel, weil sie Christen sind: sind aber nicht Christen, weil sie die oder der Bibel glauben.”62 The fact that Lessing never responded directly to the other part of Goeze’s question, namely the one pertaining to his own religion, may be rooted in his deep respect for the greatness and incommensurability of religious truth as such. Possibly, here like nowhere else in the work of Lessing, his enigmatic phrase — taken from another of his important late works that was published around the same time, entitled Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freymäurer (Ernst and Falk. Discourses for Free Masons, 1778 and 1780) — holds true: “Der Weise kann nicht sagen, was er besser verschweigt.”63 In all probability, however, Lessing did reply to Goeze’s question concerning his own personal viewpoint in matters of religion — though not in a scholarly and speculative manner. Rather, the answer is to be found in the allusions, metaphors, and hints so often mentioned in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. His answer thus could poignantly employ the kind of “logic of the theater” ridiculed by Goeze. Several times, Goeze indignantly and polemically remarked that Lessing was aiming at victory by the simple means of rhetoric. The librarian’s radius of activity was indeed diminished by rigid and comprehensive censorship which actually prohibited him from publishing any independent works on theological issues. On September 6, 1778 — full of disillusionment, but mindful of his own possibilities and abilities — Lessing wrote to his close friend Elise Reimarus that he would try to preach from his old pulpit, the theater: “Ich muß versuchen, ob man mich auf meiner alten Kanzel, auf dem Theater wenigstens, noch ungestört will predigen lassen.”64 Looking for Lessing’s answer to Goeze’s question concerning his own religion, one must look beyond the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and

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direct one’s eyes to the stage, namely to Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise (1779). In the context of Lessing’s dispute, it virtually takes the place of the twelfth Anti-Goeze. It is only the logic of the theater, it is only the poetic form of the play that still allows Lessing to express and depict what he has to say about the truth of Christian religion: about its foundation and vindication, about its nature and its lasting historic importance.

Lessing’s “Poetic Theology”: Nathan der Weise By selecting the genre of drama as the means to answer the question concerning his personal religious beliefs, Lessing consciously stepped beyond narrow theological circles and addressed the literary public of his age. With regard to this audience, “Publikum”65 as Lessing himself often called it, Nathan was to announce a religious truth that went far beyond the level of the former theological dispute. In this respect, the so-called “Ringparabel” — often considered the play’s “central message” — only serves as a springboard for the religiously based truth Lessing tries to convey.66 Hence, the “Ringparabel” neither represents the play’s point of departure nor arrival, nor is it its centerpiece. In a way that is both most effective and definitive, its function is to point out yet again an idea which qualifies as one of the most important insights to emerge out of theological dispute: the aporia to which (according to Lessing) any kind of historical claim to religious validity inevitably leads. The fact that this holds true not only for Christianity, but at the same time for the two other great examples of revealed religion, namely Judaism and Islam, is quite brilliantly illustrated by Nathan’s narrative, the “Ringparabel.” In response to the sultan’s expectation that Nathan could tell him straightaway which of these three religions might be the right one, the latter temporarily falls silent. The first part of the parable, then, told by Nathan in response to the sultan’s question, leads to the recognition that all three revealed religions have their basis in history (“auf Geschichte [gründen]”67) and that the solution desired therefore cannot be achieved. After all, all three of them — and each one in its own way — are deeply rooted in the oral traditions of their “Väter” (558). The sultan’s terror in facing this aporia is followed by his request to carry on with the parable. Then Nathan tells him of a piece of advice — not, however, of a verdict — given by the wise judge: “Mein Rat ist aber der: ihr nehmt die Sache völlig wie sie liegt [. . .] Wohlan! Es eifre jeder seiner unbestochnen Von Vorurteilen freien Liebe nach!


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Es strebe von euch jeder um die Wette, Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ring’ an Tag Zu legen! Komme dieser Kraft mit Sanftmut, Mit herzlicher Verträglichkeit, mit Wohltun, Mit innigster Ergebenheit in Gott, Zu Hülf!” (559) The owner of each ring (symbolizing the three revealed religions) should, through his actions and devotion to their God, “prove” the truth of his religion. Hence, the “Ringparabel” encourages us neither to disrespect nor to discard religion, but rather to remember its innermost core and invigorate it. A responsible coming to terms with the situation thus presented calls for a truly humane way of acting which arises from a state of “innigster Ergebenheit in Gott” (559). The issue in this case is by no means a kind of humanism or morality existing totally independent of any transcendent reference. Rather, the judge’s advice stated in the “Ringparabel” is aiming at a religiously dominated truth and at a profound kind of wisdom that marks the limits of reason. What this actually refers to, what the attitude of devotion to God consists in, how it is to be realized in everyday life — in short, Lessing’s answer to Goeze’s question regarding his religious beliefs — is displayed by the dramatic plot itself. As for Nathan, the actual dramatic climax lies in a scene which, far beyond all morality, touches the sphere of religious experience.68 In the seventh scene of the fourth act the poetic answer to the question of how Christian religion is to be understood, starts to become manifest. The scene in question — if there is such thing as a key scene — is the one which sets the stage for an updated Job-plot, thereby turning the theater into a pulpit. As early as the first scene of the first act, a deeper dimension to the (seemingly) superficial action is being disclosed by the very words Nathan most explicitly articulates. Contemplating his “fatherhood” of his foster daughter Recha, he remains aware of the pain it would cause should he ever be separated from her: “Wenn ich mich je wieder entwöhnen müßte Dies Kind mein Kind zu nennen!” (486) However, it is exactly this painful decision which Nathan is asked to make as the plot runs its course. In a conversation with a monk, he remembers the most desperate hour of his life, a true Job-like situation in fact. Indeed Lessing’s covert allusion to the biblical narrative of Job does raise the question of a divinely approved meaning of history including all its tragedy and absurdity. What is at issue, though, is neither mere reason, nor plain morality; rather, it is something that might be termed “experience of religion69 in the strictest and most complete of senses. This kind of

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experience concerns the ultimate limit of knowledge, which only reason totally devoted to God (that is, reason articulating itself as genuine truth) is able to acknowledge and transcend. This is precisely Lessing’s hint at an answer to the question concerning the truth of Christian religion. On stage, Nathan reports his crucial experience: Back then, when his entire family had been burned to death by marauding Christians, a man (who will later become a monk) unexpectedly appeared, entrusting a tiny baby to Nathan. His faith in God — regained in spite of the painful loss of his family — was, according to his own words, rooted in reason (“Vernunft”; 596), thus leading him to recognize that his individual destiny was part of the divine master plan: “Doch war auch Gottes Ratschluß das!” (596). In a unique way, reason is understood in terms of wisdom, that is, as an instrument for acknowledging even that which remains difficult to grasp, “schwer zu begreifen” (596). It is only with the liberating acknowledgement of God’s will that reason achieves its true greatness. In this respect, Lessing — to a greater extent than suggested at first glance — relies on the Biblical figure of Job and its lasting importance. Lessing’s Job figure finally recognizes the limits of human reason. Earlier in his life, even Nathan himself has turned toward wisdom, thus proving that this “submission to God” is by no means without consequences concerning human action, but immediately becomes relevant in everyday life. For his foster daughter Recha he has developed a trailblazing and important “doctrine” which she considers “so viel tröstender,” so much more comforting than all competing concepts of divinity or any quarrels among religions and confessions. What is referred to here is: [. . .] die Lehre, daß Ergebenheit In Gott von unserm Wähnen über Gott So ganz und gar nicht abhängt. (543)70 Submission to God is not dependent on religious beliefs. Nathan’s recollection of his “Ergebenheit in Gott” that takes place during the conversation with the monk helps him in present times and makes possible the impossible. The loss of “his” daughter, which, to him, at the beginning of the play seemed unimaginable, has now become possible. In the same way that his adoption of Recha could only have been performed by a “gottergebnen Menschen” (596), so Nathan now turns his eyes to the impending loss of his foster daughter and knows that it, too, is God’s will. Once again, he will obey: Ob der Gedanke mich schon tötet, daß Ich meine sieben Söhn’ in ihr aufs neue Verlieren soll: — wenn sie von meinen Händen Die Vorsicht wieder fordert, — ich gehorche! (597)


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Far beyond the dramatic plot, these words and their background provide an important clue concerning the message and importance of Lessing’s Nathan. By means of employing both the concept of “submission to God” (being constitutive to his main character) and Nathan’s specific kind of wisdom, Lessing formulates his own answer to the question concerning the ultimate truth of any kind of religion.

The Historical-Theological Relevance of Revelation and Reason By virtue of another important work from the late Wolfenbüttel period, Lessing has left his indelible mark on the histories of theology and philosophy. In Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts71 — arguably the most systematic among his specifically theological writings, as it is rigidly subdivided into 100 paragraphs — he counter-balances both the abstract and rigid concept of reason and the equally rigid and immediate concept of revelation with a historical reconciliation of the two ideas. Most importantly, he responds intelligently to Reimarus’s assaults on Judaism and its allegedly inadequate claim to qualify as a “religion.” Since revelation proceeds gradually and takes the possibilities and circumstances of human reason for its guide, it follows a teleological model, in which what has manifested itself on the lower level retains its own historical claim. Even in the first fifty-three paragraphs, which try to describe revelation as education of humankind — added by Lessing to his answer to Reimarus’s provocative fourth fragment, in which the latter called into question the revelatory quality of Jewish religion — the basic outlines of a work that, in its entirety, was not published until 1780, are clearly discernible. The “Vorbericht des Herausgebers” (Preface by the Editor) — Lessing denied authorship and reduced his own role to that of a mere publisher — contains an important hermeneutic instruction for reading the following paragraphs. Lessing explicitly terms it a hint, a “Fingerzeig.” Its conclusion runs that all religions have developed according to human understanding within a specific realm and should not be subject to anger or ridicule: “Warum wollen wir in allen positiven Religionen nicht lieber weiter nichts, als den Gang erblicken, nach welchem sich der menschliche Verstand jedes Orts einzig und allein entwickeln können, und noch ferner entwickeln soll; als über eine derselben entweder lächeln oder zürnen? Diesen unsern Hohn, diesen unsern Unwillen, verdiente in der besten Welt nichts: und nur die Religionen sollten ihn verdienen? Gott hätte seine Hand bei allem im Spiel: nur bei unsern Irrtümern nicht?” (74). After laying an elaborate foundation, the work unfolds in three steps. The paragraphs §§ 8–53 focus on Jewish history, called the “first age”;

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this is followed by the Christian history of revelation, termed the “second age” (§§53–80); and finally, a new prospect regarding the “third age” is introduced by the “Zeit eines neuen ewigen Evangeliums” — a time soon to come and virtually conjured up (§§ 81–100). As a whole, Lessing’s elaborations follow a programmatic basic pattern made explicit even in the first two paragraphs: The role that education plays for the individual is analogous to the role of revelation for the human race. Revelation is education that has taken place and that continues to take place (75, §§ 1 and 2). After all, he is talking about the development of human reason within the historic context of an educational process as yet unfinished. At the same time, a new perspective is being introduced, namely a perspective on the reciprocal stimulation between revelation and the development of reason, but also in terms of the leading role played by reason with regard to the kind of insight (“Erleuchtung”) (85, §40) that occurs when facing the hidden treasures of revelation. This is exactly what happens to the people of Israel in Babylonian captivity. As a basic rule the course of the histories of revelation and reason follows this principle: the truths of revelation must become the truths of reason, if humanity is to progress. The truths of revelation were not truths of reason when they were revealed, but they were revealed in order to become such. They were like the sums that the mathematics teacher gives his students, so that they can orient themselves during their own calculations (94, § 76). This movement of an enlightenment of reason itself — also understood to be effective in terms of revelation — has not come to an end. The third stage (the “dritte Zeitalter” [97, § 89], the “Zeit der Vollendung” [96, § 85], “die höchsten Stufen der Aufklärung und Reinigkeit des Herzens”) has most definitely not yet been reached. In this respect, Lessing proves a far-sighted philosopher of reason concerning the stage of development and direction contemporary Enlightenment is taking. The latter by no means has reached its true goal. The last twenty paragraphs of his educational piece change the logical progress of his thought (which otherwise is calmly floating and free of special emphasis) through the extensive inclusion of questions, exclamations, appeals, conjectures, possibilities, hopes, and enthusiastic hypotheses that fundamentally change the style of his writing. Lessing believes that the attainment of this third stage will not be the result of human struggle and autonomous progress. Rather, he counts on the reliability of Providence which will bring about the time of a new, eternal religion (“Zeit eines neuen ewigen Evangeliums”). By using incantational words which repeatedly stress the actual cause for historical progress, Lessing tries to calm his own impatience, as well as that of others: “Geh deinen unmerklichen Schritt, ewige Vorsehung! Nur laß mich dieser Unmerklichkeit wegen an dir nicht verzweifeln. — Laß mich an dir nicht


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verzweifeln, wenn selbst deine Schritte mir scheinen sollten, zurück zu gehen!” (97–98, § 91). Lessing’s final comment on the theology of his age, which he made available to a large public in his late work Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, is intended to provoke and to stimulate. It provides a skeptical look at contemporary attempts to celebrate reason, understood as already enlightened and autonomous, at the expense of the preceding (and thus “inferior”) stage of revelation. The idea that “die höchsten Stufen der Aufklärung und Reinigkeit” (96, § 81) have not been ascended by far, and that it is therefore advisable to hark back to both the “Elementarbuch” of the New Testament and to the truths revealed by Christian religion (92, § 69); and, finally, that only in so doing one may devote oneself fully to the service of reason — this very idea points out the course this important lover and critic of theology is taking.

Notes We are deeply saddened that Arno Schilson passed away on 29 March 2005. In the name of all contributors we express our gratitude to Professor Schilson for his lifelong devotion to Lessing scholarship. He followed the development of this volume with much interest and with helpful comments. His passing is a great loss for all of us and he will be fondly remembered by his colleagues and friends in the field. — The Editors. 1 The primary source for Lessing’s works is: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), subsequently referred to in the notes and text as “Ba” with volume and page numbers. Volumes 8 to 10 contain commentaries— written by myself—on the theological parts of Lessing’s work, dating from the second half of his Wolfenbüttel period. The following parts of this essay heavily rely on these commentaries.

As for the subject proper, see the following works by Arno Schilson: Geschichte im Horizont der Vorsehung: G. E. Lessings Beitrag zu einer Theologie der Geschichte (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1974); Lessings Christentum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980); “Lessing und die katholische Tübinger Schule,” Theologische Quartalsschrift 160 (1980): 257–77; “Offenbarung und Geschichte bei J. M. Goeze und G. E. Lessing. Hinweise zu einer offenbarungstheologischen Neuorientierung, in “Verspätete Orthodoxie: Über D. Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786), ed. Heimo Reinitzer and Walter Sparn (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrowitz, 1989): 87–119; “‘Glanz der Wahrheit’ oder ‘blendender Stil?’ Überlegungen zu Gegenstand und Methode in Lessings Streit mit Goeze,” in Streitkultur: Strategien des Überzeugens im Werk Lessings: Referate der internationalen Lessing-Tagung der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg und der Lessing Society an der University of Cincinnati, Ohio/ USA, vom 22. bis 24. Mai 1991 in Freiburg im Breisgau, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Günther Sasse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993): 56–77;

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“. . . auf meiner alten Kanzel, dem Theater”: Über Religion und Theater bei Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997). In chronological order, see also especially: Helmut Thielicke, Offenbarung, Vernunft und Existenz: Studien zur Religionsphilosophie Lessings (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 5 1967, 11936); George Pons, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing et le Christianisme (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1964); Harald Schultze, Lessings Toleranzbegriff: Eine theologische Studie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969); Klaus Bohnen, Geist und Buchstabe: Zum Prinzip des kritischen Verfahrens in Lessings literarästhetischen und theologischen Schriften (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1974); Herrmann Timm, Gott und die Freiheit: Studien zur Religionsphilosophie der Goethezeit, vol. 1, Die Spinozarenaissance (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1974); Leonard P. Wessell, G. E. Lessing’s Theology: A Reinterpretation: A Study in the Problematic Nature of the Enlightenment (The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co., 1977); Martin Bollacher, Lessing: Vernunft und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zum Problem religiöser Aufklärung in den Spätschriften (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1978); Eckhard Heftrich, Lessings Aufklärung: Zu den theologisch-philosophischen Spätschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978); Johannes von Lüpke, Wege der Weisheit: Studien zu Lessings Theologiekritik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989); Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Vernunft als Weisheit: Studien zum späten Lessing (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991); Beate Allert, “About a Burning Building in Eco and Lessing, or: How to Process Messages,” Lessing Yearbook 29 (1997): 57–86; Stefan Matuschek, “Undogmatische Anschauung. Diderots Tempel- und Lessings Palast-Parabel,” ibid.: 31–40; Monika Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 344–75; 425–55. 2

Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt, Ba 9, 57.

3

Ba 7, 9–126.

4

See, for instance, the early fragment Gedanken über die Herrnhuter (Thoughts on the Herrnhuter, 1750) (Ba 1, 935–45) then the relevant essays Rettung des Hier. Cardanus (Vindication of Hier. Cardanus, 1754), Rettung des Inepti religiosi, und seines ungenannten Verfasssers (Vindication of Inepti Religiosi, and His Anonymous Author, 1754), and Rettung des Cochläus, aber nur in einer Kleinigkeit (Vindication of Cochläus, But Only with Regard to a Trifle, 1754) (Ba 3, 198–258). See also Lessing’s Von Adam Neusern, einige authentische Nachrichten (Of Adam Neusern, Some Authentic News, 1774) (Ba 8, 17–114) dating from his early Wolfenbüttel period and constituting the vindication of a man unjustly denounced as a heretic by both theology and church, and even more unjustly denounced by theological and ecclesiastical historiography. 5

“Von Karl Lessing,” 4 June 1771, Ba 11/2, 208.

6

Ba 5/1, 423–45.

7

Ba 8, 115–34, Ba 9, 217–310.

8

Ba 8–10.

9

The last publication of Goeze against Lessing was the third part of Leßings Schwächen, which appeared in the second half of August, 1778 (Ba 9, 447–69).


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Lessing’s struggle with Goeze was furthermore interrupted by the Pastor himself, who set all his hopes on the persecution of Lessing by secular political instances. 10

Ba 10, 179–212.

11

Ba 9, 434.

12

Ba 11/2, 615.

13

Ba 10, 93–95.

14

Ba 11/2, 615; see my commentary (Ba 8, 849–51), as well as my article “Neologie,” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd Ed. Vol. 7 (Freiburg: Herder, 1998): 736; see also: Karl Aner, Die Theologie der Lessingzeit (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1929; reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964). 15

“An Karl Lessing,” 20 March 1777, Ba 12, 51–52.

16

Ba 8, 312.

17

See G. E. Lessing, Axiomata, Ba 9, 83–86.

18

Ba 1, 935–45.

19

Ba 1, 936.

20

See Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Apologia or Defense for the Rational Reverers of God), published by request of the Jochaim-Jungius-Society of the Humanities at Hamburg by Gerhard Alexander in 2 Pts. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1972); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Hermann Samuel Reimarus: Handschriftenverzeichnis und Bibliographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1951). 21

Ba 8, 115–34.

22

Ba 8, 171–311.

23

Ba 8, 312–50.

24

Ba 9, 217–310.

25

G. E. Lessing, Eine Duplik, Ba 8, 519.

26

Ba 8, 312.

27

Ba 8, 312–13.

28

Lessing thus implied that these were self-understood truths not requiring any further explanation — a strategy later attacked by Goeze. Lessing responded to Goeze’s objections in his own pamphlet Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt (Axioms, If There Are Such in Matters Like These, 1778) (Ba 9, 53–89).

29

See especially Bohnen.

30

See especially Pons, 314–69.

31

Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, Ba 8, 444.

32

Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, Ba 10, 95.

33

See G. E. Lessing, Eine Duplik, Ba 8, 518–19.

34

Axiomata, Ba 9, 84–85.

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35

See especially Wolfgang Kröger, Das Publikum als Richter: Lessing und die “kleineren Respondenten” im Fragmentenstreit (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: KTO Press, 1979); an exact chronology of the entire dispute (and of its documentation in Ba 8 and 9) can be found in Ba 9, 760–67.

36

Ba 8, 355–435; all texts relevant to the “Fragmentenstreit” are published in Ba 8 and 9. 37

Ba 8, 437–45.

38

Ba 8, 447–54.

39

Ba 8, 475–503.

40

Ba 8, 505–86.

41

Ba 8, 518.

42

Ba 8, 589–98.

43

Ba 8, 599–601.

44

Ba 9, 96–99.

45

Ba 8, 601.

46

Ba 8, 605–7.

47

Ba 9, 101–15.

48

Ba 9, 155–59.

49

Ba 8, 591; see especially William Boehart, Politik und Religion: Studien zum Fragmentenstreit (Reimarus, Goeze, Lessing) (Schwarzenbek: Dr. Rüdiger Martienss, 1988); Gerhard Freund, Theologie im Widerspruch: Die Lessing — Goeze — Kontroverse (Stuttgart and Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1989); Schilson, “Offenbarung und Geschichte”; by the same author, “Glanz und Wahrheit.”

50

Ba 9, 11–20.

51

Ba 9, 11–37; 117–45.

52

Ba 9, 34–52; see Allert; Matuschek, et al.

53

Ba 9, 49.

54

Etwas Vorläufiges gegen des Herrn Hofrats Lessings mittelbare und unmittelbare feindselige Angriffe, Ba 9, 119. 55

Ba 9, 163–84.

56

Ba 9, 357–94.

57

Ba 9, 447–69.

58

Ba 9, 427–31.

59

Ba 9, 427–34; 471–79.

60

Nötige Antwort auf eine sehr unnötige Frage des Hrn. Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg, Ba 9, 430.

61

Cf. the fragmentary sketch by this very title, directed against Walch: Ba 10, 165–72.

62

Ba 9, 474.

63

Ba 10, 25.

LESSING AND THEOLOGY 64

“An Elise Reimarus,” 6 September 1778, Ba 12, 193.

65

See again Kröger’s study.

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66

The following interpretation of Lessing’s Nathan relies heavily on my own essay: “. . . auf meiner alten Kanzel, dem Theater,” from which I have quoted several sections verbatim. See also the excellent study by Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Vernunft als Weisheit, esp. 55–107, as well as Volker Leppin’s recent essay “Das Theater als Kanzel. Beobachtungen zu einer absichtsvollen Bemerkung Lessings,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 96 (1999): 77–93. 67

Ba 9, 557, v. 459; further citations are in the text. For clarity only the page number will be in the text.

68

Strohschneider-Kohrs, 59, see also 62–107.

69

Strohschneider-Kohrs, 67.

70

The key phrase “Ergebenheit in Gott” occurs but three times in the entire play. First it is spoken by Recha, where it signifies the father’s dowry; secondly, it appears in the Ringparabel; finally, it is mentioned by Nathan in conversation with the monk, where it denotes Nathan’s religious attitude. 71 G. E. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, Ba 10, 73–99; further citations from this work are in the text and are noted by page number, then paragraph number. See my introductory commentary (ibid., 794–864), as well as the following titles: Norbert Altenhofer, “Geschichtsphilosophie, Zeichentheorie und Dramaturgie in der Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Anmerkungen zur patristischen Tradition bei Lessing,” in Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang: Beiträge zur internationalen Tagung der Lessing Society in der Werner-Reimers-Stiftung Bad Homburg v. d. H., 11–13 Juli 1983, ed. Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh (Detroit and Munich: Wayne State UP, edition text und kritik, 1994): 25–36; Thomas Althaus, Das Uneigentliche ist das Eigentliche: Metaphorische Darstellung in der Prosa bei Lessing und Lichtenberg (Münster: Aschendorff, 1991), 171–84; Bohnen 184–96; Bollacher, 203–39; Karl Eibl, “Lauter Bilder und Gleichnisse. Lessings religionsphilosophische Begründung der Poesie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 59 (185): 224–52; Fick 425–55; Heftrich; Lüpke 162–73; Willy Michel, “Antidogmatische Fiktionsbildung im geschichts-philosophischen Verstehen. Lessings Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts,” in Die Aktualität des Interpretierens: hermeneutische Zugänge zu Lessing, ed. Willy Michel (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1978), 20–33; Wilm Pelters, Lessings Standort: Sinndeutung der Geschichte als Kern seines Denkens (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1972); Schilson, “Offenbarung und Geschichte,” “Tübinger Schule”; Strohschneider-Kohrs, 216–46; Thielicke; Timm, 117–30.


Engraving of Moses Mendelssohn by Moritz Steinla, 1821. Courtesy of Lessing Museum, Kamenz.

Lessing and the Jews Willi Goetschel

C

ELEBRATED FOR THE ENLIGHTENED humanism of Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) and its positive portrayal of the play’s Jewish protagonist — a portrayal many understood to be Lessing’s tribute to Moses Mendelssohn — Lessing’s entire work and thought have also encountered strong reservations and criticism.1 His sympathies for the Jews cost him the respect of those preoccupied with the myth-building of German nationalism in the nineteenth century. In fact, Lessing was taken to task by some for his “un-German,” even for his “Jewish” character. This controversial status during the establishment of a national canon of German literature has defined the interest and concern for the subject “Lessing and the Jews.” As a consequence, the way in which the subject would be addressed was shaped by the interests of the cultural war about national identity that was to characterize much of nineteenth-century Germany’s cultural politics.2 The emergence of Germanistik in a climate determined by the agenda of this ongoing culture war had a profound impact in framing the subject of Lessing and the Jews as a question of national and ideological rather than religious or philosophical concern. Indeed, this went so far as to define both the sympathies and antipathies for Lessing in a lasting manner. While Lessing thus served as a key figure in the struggle of staking out the claims and counter-claims of both German nationalists and German Jews, the situation has changed little after Auschwitz except for the participants. With the Jews gone, Lessing has become a curiously absent presence in Germany, just as the Jews once had been. Against those critics who consider Lessing as a liability of an obsolete canon, others maintain the signal importance of Lessing as a rare champion of tolerance and freedom of thought. Yet for Lessing the problem presented itself differently. For him, the importance of Jews presented less a challenge to an emerging national sentiment than to the question what role Christian identity was to play in this national project. For Lessing this was less ethnically determined than imagined as a new political space yet to be constituted, and therefore open to all regardless of their religious affiliation. To Lessing the challenge of the Jews posed itself in terms of Christianity. For if Christianity were to play any role in the age of Enlightenment, its assumptions and presuppositions had to

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be examined. Because Judaism stood at the heart of the genesis of the Christian religion, it was imperative to rethink the relationship to Jews and Judaism from the point of view of Christianity. As long as this nexus was not acknowledged, Lessing’s line of argument suggests, Christianity was denying its very essence. For Lessing, the genealogical link required a change in attitude for the sake of the very truth of theology itself. This view is quite different from the dominant agenda exemplified by figures like Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) who identified the problem less in terms of religious difference, but, instead, of ethnic difference; a difference that, in the eyes of Michaelis and many of his contemporaries, assumed essentialist significance. To Michaelis, the difference presented itself as that between Germans and Jews. This decisive shift from religious to secular discourse has often been ignored in scholarship but it indicates not only a signal change in the German attitude towards the Jews but towards German self-perception.3 It is as if the emerging national identity of Germans depended on a foreign body in its midst to differentiate and constitute itself long before Fichte’s invidious quasi-ontological division of humanity into Germans and non-Germans inaugurated a new brand of nationalist discourse. While Michaelis initiated a new discourse that assigned priority to an essential distinction between Germans and Jews, Lessing’s interest in and engagement for the Jews is only fully understood when approached in the context of the former distinction that would critically address the theological implications of Christian self-understanding. Lessing challenged resolutely the dogmatic mind-set on which Michaelis’s distinction between “Germans” and “Jews” rested. Almost every page of Lessing’s writing suggests that Michaelis’s is a spurious distinction not only irrelevant to an understanding of Jewish identity but unfortunate for any notion of German identity. Rather than pitting Germans against Jews, Lessing argues for the recognition of Judaism as a productive and promising culture that enriches an inherently multi-ethnic make-up of the German nation.4 Seen in this perspective, Lessing’s interest in comparative approaches to literature, culture, and tradition plays a critical role. His attitude towards Jews is thus no longer simply to be seen as a token of good will, for it plays a crucial role in his critical rethinking of both the claims of Christianity and the groundwork of modern national identity. Read in this context, Lessing’s writing is to be understood as a critical intervention that articulates its political concerns in no uncertain terms. Lessing’s two stage plays Die Juden (The Jews, written in 1749 and published in 1754) and Nathan der Weise demonstrate, when read with their historical specificity in mind, the force of critical thinking that drives Lessing’s writing. Yet, the interpretative attitudes of generations of readings have shrouded these plays in conventions of literary history, with the consequence of having effectively silenced the social and political protest they

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so eloquently and movingly voice. Read, however, against the background of the interminable controversy on German Jewish emancipation, Lessing’s writing displays a critical force that still challenges conventional views of the Enlightenment. More than an exercise in sublime theorizing about the detrimental force of prejudices, Die Juden stages an intricate critique of Christianity’s prejudice against Judaism as tantamount to blaming the victim from whom it stole its legitimacy. But more than just a radical Enlightenment critique, this play also points to the way in which Christianity’s guilt towards Judaism and the Jews could be redeemed. Christianity is thus not sentenced to failure but given the mission of living up to its own claims, which it owes to Judaism. Acknowledgment and respect for the Jews would thus result in a better and more profound respect for Christianity’s own tradition, or so the play suggests. Three decades later, in Nathan der Weise, the argument is taken a step further. However, the assumption that the play champions tolerance as the answer to the “Jewish Question” has led to a united front of criticism judging the play’s message as naïve and ineffective. Contrary to such a view, however, the play moves beyond a call for tolerance to one for freedom of thought and religion thereby highlighting that the very idea of tolerance remains ultimately inadequate. Remarkably, tolerance is not what Nathan lives and preaches. Rather, the play’s plot argues that tolerance is not enough if a genuinely co-equal life of people on earth is to be guaranteed. In direct opposition to the Augustinian notion of tolerance, Lessing has his characters in their earthly city of Jerusalem live in full religious freedom. But it is not until the interpretative screen of the notion of tolerance is dropped that the challenging implications of Nathan der Weise come to the fore. For Lessing, Jews and Judaism are not limited to isolated bit parts. Rather, Jewish culture and tradition appear as constitutive for both Christian identity and its modern, secular varieties. The first time Lessing cites a Jewish source, it serves precisely this purpose of arguing the culturally equal status of Jewish culture and tradition, rather than a plea for sympathy or understanding of the Jews. In his first play, a comedy called Der junge Gelehrte (The Young Scholar, written in 1747 and published in 1754), in which Lessing pursued his early ambition to become the German Molière, the servant wonders what kind of magic book the protagonist is reading: Aber, sagen Sie mir nur, was lesen Sie denn da für ein Buch? Potz Stern, was das für Zeug ist! Das verstehen Sie? Solche Krakelfüße, solche fürchterliche Zickzacke, die kann ein Mensch lesen? Wann das nicht wenigstens Fausts Höllenzwang ist — —Ach, man weiß es ja wohl, wies den Leuten geht, die alles lernen wollen. Endlich verführt sie der böse Geist, daß sie auch hexen lernen. — —5

Before author and title of the book are introduced, the audience witnesses the enactment of a hermeneutic situation that stages the citation as a

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dramatic comment on popular Christian theology. Tellingly, the servant pronounces this comment without any knowledge of either author or title of the book at hand, information that Damis, the young scholar, now provides in a matter-of-fact tone in response to the servant’s zealous theological attitude: Du guter Anton! Das ist ein Buch in hebräischer Sprache. — Des Ben Maimon Jad chasaka. (282)

To the audience, this would have been a rather esoteric bit of knowledge. If there was a theologian in the audience he might have recognized that this was a book by the foremost Jewish rationalist philosopher Moses Maimonides. He might even have understood the title’s meaning “the strong hand.” But that’s as far as the knowledge would have gone. Yet this exchange, providing just an author and a book title, elicits the servant Anton’s reply that highlights the dramatic function to which Lessing puts this Jewish reference: Ja doch; wers nur glauben wollte! Was Hebräisch ist, weiß ich endlich auch. Ist es nicht mit der Grundsprache, mit der Textsprache, mit der heiligen Sprache einerlei? (282)

Anton does not recognize Hebrew but he is well aware of what it stands for. His expression of disbelief mocks the fact that the Hebrew language stands for the guarantee of the truth of Christian belief. The redundancy in the triad Grundsprache, Textsprache, heilige Sprache (basic language, the language of the text, holy language) betrays the fact that Anton is sufficiently informed about the status of Hebrew to be familiar with technical terms like Grundsprache and Textsprache, terms for a language he otherwise does not even recognize when he sees it. This moment of recognition — and simultaneous nonrecognition — captures the conflicted attitude of Christian theology with regard to its source language and, consequently, its source book. But Anton continues, now telling about its oral use by the local reverend: Die [the Hebrew language] warf unser Pfarr, als ich noch in die Schule ging, mehr als einmal von der Kanzel. Aber so ein Buch, wahrhaftig! hatte er nicht; ich habe alle seine Bücher beguckt; ich mußte sie ihm einmal von einem Boden auf den andern räumen helfen. (282)

Anton, in other words, is familiar with Hebrew, at least in its oral form when hurled from the pulpit. But the reverend’s oral use of Hebrew is separated from the use of a book or written text. The reverend does without the proof text on which he, however, depends for his entire theology. The absence of any Hebrew book in the reverend’s library highlights the hypocrisy of this kind of “sola scriptura” theology. And as if to underscore


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the fact that the protagonist (and with him Lessing) is well aware of the ignorance of the clerics and of the audience as a whole when it comes to Hebrew authors, he retorts that it would be wonder enough if a country reverend had heard even the name of this author. Lessing thus remarks explicitly on how his reference to Maimonides is to be understood: not as a plea toward increased understanding of foreign cultures but as a call to revisit one’s own culture. Damis, the young scholar and the play’s protagonist, does not read Maimonides’ celebrated philosophical work the Guide of the Perplexed, a book among others admired by philosophers like Leibniz for its rationalist thought. Rather, he quotes Maimonides’ Mischne Torah, the systematic codification of Jewish law also known under the title Yad Ha-Hasaka. The criticism that this work is unknown to Christian theologians points in another direction than a reference to the representative work of medieval Jewish philosophy would have. Such a reference would have signaled the imperative to familiarize oneself with another, largely foreign philosophical tradition. But why quote the codex of Maimonides? Why would a young scholar want to read the Jewish law? What does the gesture of this reference signal? What could be a more stinging critique of the Christian religion than to remind the public of the existence of the logically ordered and systematized Jewish law that Christianity claims to have replaced? What a provocation for a Christian audience to be told that the Jewish law presents a text that commands the respect of scholars! Provocative because it makes no claims about the Jewish law per se but serves as reminder of the hypocrisies of Christianity’s own pretensions. A curious exchange takes place later in the same scene when the dialogue turns to the number of languages the protagonist has acquired. In this context, Damis mentions the recent visit of a rabbi. After Anton’s bragging about a multi-lingual cousin, Damis now wonders in jest whether this rabbi might not have been this cousin. More than just a blank refusal of being associated with being Jewish, Anton’s reply complicates the question of identity in an interesting way. Though this cousin is no Jew, he is a member of another ethnic group with minority status: Daß ich nicht gar ein Jude wäre! Mein Vetter war ein Wende; ich kann Wendisch; und das können Sie nicht. (285)

The punch line of this exchange thus introduces a view that complicates the bipolar framework of an opposition of “German” versus “the Jews.” Questioning any pretense of a unitary German identity (“ich kann Wendisch; und das können Sie nicht”), this exchange provides the opportunity to the subaltern character of Anton to do some of the wisecracking that is so liberating in comedy, exposing Damis’s attitude towards his farreaching linguistic abilities as pretentious. What is at stake here is less a search for exotic otherness but, rather, the kind of alterity that a critical

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reflection reveals to stand at the core of cultural identity. In his first play, Lessing stages Jews less as representatives of an unfathomable otherness than as a reminder that the characters’ attitude to the construction of their own identity is not an easy one. The insight that behind the concern with the Jews lurks the deeper and more challenging problem of one’s own religious, social, political, and national identity plays itself out in the subsequent plays Die Juden and finally in Nathan der Weise. It allows Lessing to cast the challenge of Jewish identity throughout as constitutive for the way in which conflicts of Christian and modern national identity act themselves out. Anton serves as a comic yet critical reminder that any attempt at reducing the plurality of identities in German lands to one homogeneous German identity is doomed to fail and can, therefore, not be used to distinguish Jewish identity as essentially different from German identity.

Die Juden With Die Juden, Lessing for the first time presents a Jew on the German stage in a positive light. Already the plural in the play’s title points to a curious play with the audience.6 While “the Jews” who rob their victims in this comedy turn out to be Christians donning fake beards to cover up their crimes, the one and only character in the play that stands out as a free and enlightened individual without any defining group characteristic is the traveler, who only at the end reveals himself as a Jew. Written one year after Frederick the Great’s 1748 promulgation of a law prohibiting Jews from shaving their beards, so that they could be easily identified, Lessing’s play demonstrates the absurdity of this law.7 One has to appreciate the wording of this incriminating law to grasp the bold response Lessing’s comedy presents: “Die Juden sollen sich, um nicht als Diebe verdächtig zu erscheinen, den Bart nicht ganz abscheren.”8 In other words, in order to avoid suspicion Jews were ordered to look “like Jews.” If non-compliance would make them suspicious, so would compliance. And if wearing a beard meant being a Jew, it also meant to be marked for contempt. No wonder Frederick showed little sympathy for Lessing for the rest of his life. Not only did this law, the play suggests, promote prejudices against the Jews, but it encouraged abuses by others. Such legislation, the play shows, undermined the very aspirations of the Prussian king to be an enlightened ruler. But while the well-shaven, cultivated, and enlightened traveler only identifies himself in the final scene as a Jew, thus powerfully exposing the hypocrisy of the village’s thieves, who simply used beards to pass for Jews, the comedy’s joke is on the villagers. Their characters, actions, and their masquerading expose them as corrupt Christians taking advantage of state legislation. On the other hand, the traveler’s speech and action make him, in the eyes of the other characters (and the audience), an exemplary character who in order to


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pass as Christian only lacks one thing — to be a Christian. The comedy thus thrives not on the unexpected and unheard notion of a Jew who outdoes the Christians, but on exposing the prejudice against Jews as a projection of one’s own moral faults. What hurts is not that individual Jews can be better people than Christians but the fact that Christian identity requires a negative image of Jews in order to construct a positive image of itself.9 This point is made already in scene 3, in a short soliloquy of the traveler whose Jewish identity is as yet unknown to the audience. There, his closing comment reveals radical Enlightenment tenets whose full critical potential unfolds in the course of the play. The comment is so shocking that it can only be introduced at a moment when its full implications remain still hidden: “Wie aber, wenn es bei der einen [Völkerschaft] ein Religionspunkt, und beinahe ein verdienstliches Werk wäre, die andre zu verfolgen?”10 If this is indeed the point of the play, rather than the display of the superior morality of the Jews, that is, of an exemplary and ideal representative of Jewish people, it becomes clear how truly radical this play really is. For the comment critically brackets the question of the nature of the Jews, returning the challenge to the source of the mechanism of repression, exploitation, and disfiguration. The traveler thus has no qualms about admitting that Jews occasionally commit criminal acts. But his point is that such a crime does not occur without its reasons, and those reasons usually have to do with Christians: “Wenn ein Jude betriegt, so hat ihn, unter neunmalen, der Christ vielleicht siebenmal dazu genötiget” (382). This simply means that it is the rules and regulations in modern Christian society that condition, if not force many Jews to assume the characteristics for which they are then reprimanded. In a little mocking poem of the same period, written in 1751, Lessing gives this insight a spirited turn when he comments on Voltaire’s dealings with the Berlin Jewish banker Abraham Hirschel, a partner in a crime that went sour.11 Lessing’s poem ends with the punch line that the reason why Hirschel did not succeed in his scheme to trick Voltaire was simply that Voltaire was the bigger rascal: “Und kurz und gut den Grund zu fassen, / Warum die List, / Dem Juden nicht gelungen ist; / So fällt die Antwort ohngefähr: / Herr V** war ein größrer Schelm als er.”12 Lessing knew what he was talking about. According to the historian Heinrich Graetz, Lessing was at that time Voltaire’s secretary, and he was also in charge of translating documents that Voltaire needed to submit to the court.13 In 1753 Lessing published this poem. The play, however, addresses the power of prejudice in a more subtle way. Here, the prejudice is not as easily dissolved but lingers on. The sting remains, articulating the challenge of an open social critique. While the traveler reveals himself at the end as a Jew and the baron claims that this will not make a difference in their friendship, the problematic difference is expressed in the baron’s last words that it would be wonderful if all Jews were like the traveler: “O wie

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achtungswürdig wären die Juden, wenn sie alle Ihnen glichen!”14 Guthke calls this the “irreal subjunctive” of secularized prejudice.15 And he points to the fact that the final joke is the traveler’s, who retorts that it would be wonderful if all Christians were like the baron: “Und wie liebenswürdig die Christen, wenn sie alle Ihre Eigenschaften besäßen!” The point consists, as Guthke notes, in the critical asymmetry that remains in the apparent equivalence of Christians and Jews. Pretending that both men are merely trading matching compliments, this exchange marks once more the real gap between Christian and Jew. The insistence on difference becomes legible as a critique of the desire for the homogeneity of everyone’s identity, a critique, the play implies, that forces us to rethink identity on other terms than the binary logic of the opposition between German and Jews or the dogmatic theological opposition between Christians and Jews.16 In an ingenious way, the plot of the theft, return, and eventual gift of the corpus delicti, a valuable silver box, exposes the source and economy of the prejudice through its enactment as it repeats its elements point for point. Having stolen it from the wealthy and sophisticated traveler, Martin Krumm, one of the highway robbers who, disguised as Jews, had attempted to rob their own baron, succeeds, if only for a short time, in laying the blame on the Jews. However, after the thief is found out and forced to return the box to its rightful owner, the Jew, the box is not yet at its journey’s end. For the traveler decides to give this box to his servant, who is equally prejudiced against Jews. This conciliatory gesture highlights the trajectory of another theft. The box’s curious travel from the traveler’s pocket into the hand of the thief and from there to the baron’s maid, who passes it on to the traveler’s servant, who unsuspectingly shows it to the traveler, who lets him keep it, suggests that the box can only become a genuine gift if the cycle of crime and theft is broken. Only then can it represent a true gift, that is, a legitimate possession. For just as the Christians masked as Jews attempt highway robbery, so Christianity appropriated Jewish religious tradition while reducing Jews to their outward appearance. Lifting Jesus from his cultural environment and making him one of their own, Christians reduced the rest of Jewish tradition to Christianity’s exact opposite. This was to contain the paradox at the heart of Christian theology: the desire to separate Jesus the great Savior from the very people and tradition from which he arose. As a consequence, Christian theology is faced with the difficult task of legitimating its claim to Jesus while effectively disinheriting the Jews. This is done by separating Jesus from his Jewishness, a move that, however, has its own complications. Unacknowledged, it requires a projection of the own problematic onto its source, but in a way that exempts Jesus himself from any reproach. The Jews serve this function as the stand-in for Christian guilt. Just as the robbers in this comedy, Christians depend on the Jews to bestow


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legitimacy on their own tradition, which they took from the Jews, turning them into scapegoats for their own theft. But the traveler’s leaving the box in the hand of his servant, at the end of this comedy, signals the promise emancipation holds: when conducted in honesty and in bright daylight, the constitution of religious identity need no longer be disguised and therefore illicit. Instead, acknowledgment of the Jews will enable the Christians to grasp the gift of tradition without having to cover it up as a theft. In short, Christians need the Jews not as scapegoats, but instead, to come to a better, more enlightened and ultimately more profound understanding of their own religion. A different relationship with Jews does not, therefore, mean giving up one’s Christian identity: on the contrary, it emerges in Lessing as the only meaningful way to be a Christian. It is precisely this comic but profound moment in this comedy that challenged Enlightenment philosophers and provoked traditional theologians. Yet while the traveler’s own identity remains remarkably undeveloped, his characterization hints at a Jew just as provocative as Jesus. The traveler’s unusual sophistication, his enlightened manners, attitudes, opinions, his bag of books as well as his land of origin, the Netherlands, all remind an attentive reader of Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677),17 an outlawed author in the eighteenth century whose Theological-Political Treatise created a storm of protest and rejection. But Spinoza was also the author of the Ethics whose philosophical views and guidelines for a life free from the domination of passions this traveler seems to follow in so exemplary a way. With this allusion to Spinoza, the play takes issue with another prejudice that dominated the European imagination up to the so-called “Pantheism Dispute” in which Lessing was posthumously enlisted by Jacobi as cryptoSpinozist. The play thus also enacts a cautiously coded rescue operation, a kind of critical approach to scholarship that allowed Lessing to revisit figures on the margin, a critical intervention he soon turned into its own kind of literary genre, the Rettung (vindication). Lessing’s attitude toward Spinoza expresses, as Guthke has correctly pointed out, a central aspect of Lessing’s attitude to Judaism in general.18 For Spinoza’s thought plays a key role in Lessing’s own. But while the comedy of the young Lessing only gestures coyly towards Spinoza, his presence assumes more distinct features as Lessing’s work matures.19

Vindicating Cardanus With his vindications Lessing created a new genre whose literary form was designed to challenge the historiography of religion and thought and vindicate the individuals who had fallen victim to judgments that had been passed and handed down through centuries without further examination.20 Heretics, atheists, and radicals no longer had to be portrayed as the abject

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of society. Instead, they could now be understood as important voices capable of articulating concerns ignored by the mainstream. Inspired by Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique and his own teacher Johann Friedrich Christ, who had written a vindication of the sixteenthcentury critic Hieronymus Cardanus (1501–1576),21 Lessing’s first vindication, “Rettung des Hier. Cardanus,” written in 1754, was also dedicated to Cardanus. Accused of atheism, Cardanus was a heretical figure to whom Lessing was attracted because he had compared Christianity with Judaism and Islam. However, Lessing criticized Cardanus for giving Judaism and Islam short shrift. For while he defends Cardanus against the wrongful accusation of being unjust towards Christianity, Lessing argues that Cardanus’ discussion of Judaism and Islam remained biased and prejudiced. But Lessing’s vindication of Cardanus aims at more than setting the record straight on behalf of an otherwise long-forgotten critic. This vindication sets the stage for Lessing’s own critique of Christianity, which is ultimately more biting than what the critics of Cardanus would have ever imagined. The way in which Lessing voices his critique is crucial. For Lessing introduces two fictional characters, a Jew and a Muslim, to answer Cardanus directly. Both expose Cardanus’s biased reasoning. Directly addressing the problem of the ubiquitous persecution of his people, the Jew turns the theological argument that the plight of the Jews is a sign of their rejection by God on its head. Rather than being a sign of rejection, God’s love of his people expresses itself, just as in the case of God’s servant Job, as the election of this people. But just as God commanded Satan to spare the lives of the Jews: “Siehe da, er sei in deiner Hand, doch schone seines Lebens!” (Job 2:6), God tells the enemies of the Jewish people to spare their lives: “mein Volk sei in eurer Hand, doch schonet seines Lebens!”22 This bold statement puts the enemies of the Jewish people in a precarious parallel. Lessing not only points out in an original way a possible mode of Jewish self-understanding, but he dresses it in a theological argument that implicates Christianity. Again, Lessing’s Jew suggests that Christianity’s perception of Judaism is caught up in Christianity’s self-perception and that Christianity cannot arrive at an unbiased understanding of Judaism without coming to terms with its own problem of selflegitimation. What Christianity might construe as God’s punishment of the Jews, represents in the light of Jewish self-understanding the very raison d’être of the Jewish people. In the figure of Job, Lessing epitomizes the theological conflict between Christian and Jewish self-understanding.

Moses Mendelssohn During his years in Berlin, Lessing had come into contact with young Jewish intellectuals. Here, in 1754, he met Moses Mendelssohn


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(1729–1786). This was the beginning of a deep and lasting friendship. Lessing and Mendelssohn quickly began to work together. To encourage his shy and diffident friend, Lessing arranged for the publication of Mendelssohn’s first book, his Philosophische Gespräche (Philosophical Dialogues, 1755), which established Mendelssohn’s name as a new author.23 Together they wrote Pope, ein Metaphysiker! (Pope, a Metaphysician! 1755), a tongue-in-cheek response to the Berlin Academy’s anti-Leibnizian stand. But more importantly, Lessing and Mendelssohn became the editorial team for the Enlightenment publishing enterprises of Friedrich Nicolai. As literary critics, they strove to set standards for the newly emerging German literature. But beyond a shared interest in literature and the arts, Mendelssohn became for Lessing the congenial interlocutor with whom he could discuss metaphysics and air questions regarding philosophy and religion. In Mendelssohn, with his self-conscious stand on Judaism, Lessing found a superb and supple mind, whose independent thinking presented a match for Lessing’s searching character. When Lessing developed his dramatic theory, he mainly did so in his correspondence with Mendelssohn, whose aesthetic thought and instincts provided significant guidance. While it was impossible for Mendelssohn, as a Jew, to support Lessing publicly in his polemic exchanges with the clergy, he remained Lessing’s most important and supportive interlocutor, with whom he could share and clear his thoughts. Mendelssohn played an important role early on when Lessing quoted him, though under the protection of anonymity, in an exchange with Michaelis about Lessing’s play Die Juden. In 1754 Michaelis had responded to the publication of Die Juden in a review faulting Lessing for what seemed to him a highly improbable presentation of a Jew with impeccable moral character. Lessing’s reaction to Michaelis’s criticism represents one of the first open discussions on the status of Jews in German society. With the reproduction of a letter by a Jew (Mendelssohn), Lessing introduced not only the evidence Michaelis had called for but changed the discourse in a decisive manner, as he let a Jew step forward and speak in his own voice. This was a spectacular turn, and one as consequential as the dramatic turn that his comedy performs. But this time, a living Jew was allowed to speak for himself and his people. With this intervention Lessing initiated the debate on Jewish emancipation.24 In his letter to Michaelis accompanying this response, Lessing privately pointed out that the author of the letter was a person of no less stature than what he calls a second Spinoza, “einen zweiten Spinoza [. . .], dem zur völligen Gleichheit mit dem ersten nichts als seine Irrtümer fehlen werden.”25 As strong as such an endorsement was in Lessing’s own eyes, for Michaelis this was hardly the kind of recommendation that might have appeased him. A year earlier, in 1753, in reviewing the anonymous Schreiben eines Juden an einen Philosophen, nebst der Antwort (Letter of a Jew to a

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Philosopher with Reply), Lessing had left no doubt about his stand on this subject. There he underscores the importance of emancipating Jews not just for the Jews’ sake but in the interest of the state, for the freedom of the people as a whole.26 When he met Mendelssohn a year later he showed that this was not lip service but a concern close to his heart. With the friendship with Mendelssohn, a new stage in Christian-Jewish relations was reached where the paradigm of a genuine dialogue, where both sides participate as equals, replaces the traditional notion of tolerance.27 While tolerance allowed for the appreciation of the other as human being, it also reasserted the view that the other was in error and that the error itself remained wrong and unacceptable. But for the sake of the humanity of those who err but share the universal human potential for redemption, tolerance was to be maintained. This Augustinian view was quite the opposite of what Lessing had in mind. With his friendship and collaboration with Mendelssohn Lessing demonstrated that the Enlightenment claim of the independence of morality from religion was no fantasy but crucial to the well-being of social, political, and cultural life. The friendship between Lessing and Mendelssohn assumed symbolic significance for the way in which German-Jewish coexistence was imagined by both Jews and Christians as an inspiring dialogue that brought out the profound elective affinity of Christians and Jews. But equally crucial for Lessing and Mendelssohn remained the respect for their difference. For both Mendelssohn and Lessing it is difference (their different provenances, characters, temperaments, educations, and lifestyles) that brings them together. The secret spring of their deeply felt partnership is thus not similarity but asymmetry; an asymmetry that provides the inspiration rather than constraints for a productive and mutually stimulating friendship that enriches both in equally crucial yet distinct manners, as they give and take.28 Asymmetry, in short — the life principle that animates the alliance between Mendelssohn and Lessing — is the defining principle of friendship in modernity, as Georg Simmel noted.29 And Martin Buber will point out that it is distance that makes any form of relation possible in the first place.30 Mendelssohn and Lessing put this insight into practice as the anticipation of their program for social and political emancipation and the realization of equality. While the concept of friendship in Greek antiquity and the Renaissance was defined by the haven of equality it feigned amidst the dire inequality that ruled the world, friendship is redefined in modernity as the project of reaching out for the other in the name of equality; an equality whose utopian impulse calls for its social and political realization here on earth. At the forefront of this development, Mendelssohn and Lessing offer a new paradigm that replaces conventional notions of friendship as contingent on identity with a modern approach to friendship that recognizes difference as a vital and productive impulse that not only poses


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a hermeneutic challenge to but also serves as a measure for the success of emancipation.31 As a consequence, the debate about this particular friendship becomes itself one of the public events through which the various positions and views on enlightenment and emancipation find their exposition.

The Education of Mankind In his position as the head librarian at the Ducal library of Wolfenbüttel, Lessing had published parts of the controversial manuscript of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s (1694–1768) Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes.32 To protect the identity of the posthumous author and his family, Lessing presented his selections as library finds of “papers of an anonymous person.” In the persona of the conscientious editor, Lessing accompanied the edition of his selection with critical counterobservations. In the same context he also published the first part of Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (Education of Mankind, §§1–53, 1777; complete text 1780) in the disguise of a text by yet another “anonymous person.” This text offers a challenging philosophy of history and religion that articulates important implications regarding the role of Judaism in history. The essay outlines a view of history that casts Judaism as pioneer in a historical process. The essay’s scheme of three stages of world history — Judaism, Christianity, and a future third gospel — seems at first to commit Judaism to the primitive stage in this historical outline. But this presentation also claims a crucial functional identity between the Old and the New Testament that casts Christianity as functionally performing the same tasks Judaism had performed at an earlier stage and continues to perform. The essay stresses that this view of the logic of world history, along with the genealogical perspective, replaces the traditionally polarizing views that cast Judaism more as an obstacle in the course of world history. Instead, the essay emphasizes the profound similarities of the two religions. In Lessing’s essay, Judaism is now presented as a catalyst in the process of progress, an important stepping stone on which Christianity’s tradition rests. In critical distinction to the traditional image of the Jewish people as one that is unaffected by change and development, the architecture of the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts stands on the argument that Providence chose a “raw” people, “das ungeschliffenste, das verwildertste” (§ 8) and “rohe Volk” (§ 11) to be educated.33 So while the chosen people is guided through all stages of the education of childhood, the other people are left with the guidance of the light of reason alone (§ 20). Only from such a people, § 18 notes, could the educators of humanity be raised, a people whose loyalty and obedience to God represents a heroic world historical deed (“heroischer Gehorsam” is twice mentioned: §§ 32 and 33). But

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while the age-old prejudice of the petrification of the Jewish people is abandoned right at the beginning, Lessing now adds a new turn to this. The Babylonian exile, he points out, is the first instance where the dialectics of reason and revelation come into play. For it is only thanks to the exposure to the Persians that the Jews gain the kind of cultural refinement that enables them to reach the next step of education. Thanks to the cultural exchange with the Persians, the Jews are now able to read their scripture with the sophisticated eyes of an enlightened people. This complete transformation (“gänzliche Veränderung,” §40) of the Jewish people introduces a model of historical understanding that highlights the dynamic aspects of Jewish tradition. A people is no longer simply understood in static terms but seen as the scene of cultural negotiations. As a consequence, tradition can now be addressed as an ongoing dynamic exchange with other traditions. Tradition can thus no longer be imagined to flow from unambiguously pristine and pure origins. Instead, this account suggests that the notion of tradition in the singular represents a distinctly ahistorical invention and that, in its beginnings, traditions have always already existed in plural formations whose historical change and development represent ever new reinventions of each other.34 The implications of this new concept of tradition are clear: Judaism and Christianity move closer together, so close in fact that one seamlessly comes to replace the other. Functionally indistinguishable if not identical, Judaism and Christianity are no longer polar opposites but simply different moments in the history of mankind they share.35 Historically connected, Christianity is not just the enhanced and more advanced edition of Judaism. For the dialectics of history do not move in simple straight lines (§ 91). While it was thanks to the apostles that the gospel of Jesus, originally meant for the Jews alone, was set in wider circulation among the nations, they did so by mixing in other doctrines less conducive to progress (§§ 62 and 63). The Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts thus complicates the simple theological and Enlightenment narratives of progress or even the scheme of a dialectics whose final synthesis triumphantly absorbs all the previous movements. Instead, it argues for the historical incommensurability of the particulars of different religions. This means that while from a historical perspective both Judaism and Christianity appear to become obsolete at the threshold of modernity (notice the radical historicizing of Christianity!), the individual religions keep their subjective rights to exist and continue. More importantly, the notion that religions change over time (see the example of the Babylonian exile) makes it possible for Lessing to accommodate a theory of history and progress able to differentiate between different historical periods of particular religions. Such differentiation takes historicism to its logical conclusion, thus allowing for a historical understanding of the equality of different religious traditions while recognizing their interactions as creative moments of


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exchange. As a consequence, the Jewish people, just like other agents of world history, emerge as the carrier of a tradition that not only played a constitutive role for Christianity but remains, at the same time, able to rejuvenate and reinvent itself in the course of history. As a result, it is possible to recognize the central role of Jewish tradition for the construction of a secularized philosophy of history and progress. Inscribed as a crucial moment in the history of progress, Jewish tradition emerges as a genuine partner and interlocutor of the project of modernity. Wary of Lessing’s speculative trajectory, Mendelssohn, however, expressed his reservations: Ich für meinen Theil habe keinen Begriff von der Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, die sich mein verewigter Freund Lessing von, ich weis nicht, welchem Geschichtsforscher der Menschheit hat einbilden lassen. Man stellet sich das collective Ding, das menschliche Geschlecht, wie eine einzige Person vor, und glaubt, die Vorsehung habe sie hieher gleichsam in die Schule geschickt, um aus einem Kinde zum Manne erzogen zu werden.36

Apprehensive of the consequences of such a philosophy of history, Mendelssohn argued that such a view rules out the very simultaneity of what this view would cast as non-simultaneous: “Im Grunde ist das menschliche Geschlecht fast in allen Jahrhunderten, wenn die Metapher gelten soll, Kind und Mann und Greis zugleich, nur an verschiedenen Orten und Weltgegenden.”37 Mendelssohn’s skepticism concerning the Enlightenment view that mankind as a whole is on its way to universal progress and perfection does not signal his renunciation of messianic hope. On the contrary, his resistance to theological instrumentalization of messianic hope expresses his critical concern about the danger of theological speculation that, ultimately, leads to the submission of the subject of history to one or another speculative perspective. But while contemporary critics along with the overwhelming majority of scholarship viewed Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts as Lessing’s testament, this text suggests another reading more akin with Mendelssohn’s own view. This is a reading attuned to the critical mode in which this text is fashioned, as a thought experiment exposing the implications of theological discourse rather than a pronouncement advancing theological claims. Read as a reflection on the problematic of the “theological-political” complex that ultimately informs any form of theological claim, the particular critical point of the Education appears as the recognition that any speculation on the course of history must always remain just that: a speculation.38 As a result, no such speculation can ever stand as a final answer but will always pose the challenge to more questions, exposing any closure as hinging on one or another theological view.

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Nathan der Weise The debate about Nathan’s Jewish identity is as old as the play itself. Indeed, the character Nathan addresses this issue himself, and one should not forget that his actions, too, are powerfully suggestive answers to the question of his identity. An instructive example of the importance of reception history for the understanding of a text, the controversy regarding Nathan’s Jewishness reflects the profound critical impulse this literary figure has imparted on generations of readers and spectators. Curiously, Nathan’s Jewishness has been called into question, and he has been accused, celebrated, or bemoaned as protestant, deist, assimilationist etc.39 No doubt, Nathan has from the beginning become a popular projection screen for transferential cathexes by the audience. This transferential overload — often superimposed by the audience’s need to fill in, or add, a more concrete image to Lessing’s programmatically abstract character — has inspired many an audience to reinvent Nathan in their own changing images. This has not only had consequences for the way Nathan der Weise has come to be seen and presented on the stage, but more importantly it has determined the interpretations of the play as a whole. The conventional approach of construing the play as a plea for tolerance, however, imposes a view that reads the figure of Nathan as a compliant character whose submissive behavior undermines the humanism he seems to represent. But such a reading, in its anti-Semitic, Zionist, or culturally critical mode, ignores aspects that are crucial to the text.40 First, the word tolerance only occurs once in the text, and there it carries clearly pejorative connotations. Running up against Nathan’s reservations about giving him Recha’s hand in marriage the Templar seeks to denounce Nathan in the eyes of Saladin: “Der tolerante Schwätzer ist entdeckt!”41 Hardly implying a complimentary meaning of the word, this passage reminds the reader, or at least, makes the effort to do so, that the thrust of this drama remains critical of talk of tolerance; a pointer that the play’s message lies somewhere else. Second, the philosophical message suggests that this play champions freedom of religion for all, including the Jews and other non-Christians, a claim pointing far beyond the traditional reach of tolerance. At the moment of the play’s dramatic climax, Nathan tells the ring fable, a story that performs a transformation of the truth concept critical to the play. As the ring fable effectively does away with any remnants of metaphysical and rationalist claims, it highlights the fundamental significance of action, which not only must accompany truth, but must be understood to represent the only valid criteria for truth available to us. As a consequence, no truth claim can any longer receive any legitimation from metaphysics or any other form of reason that is not based on a praxis accessible to all human beings.42 This is one step further than what the Enlightenment claim for tolerance would imply. For this move disallows


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the assumption that still informs the Enlightenment notion of tolerance that there is such a thing as the truth of religious tradition and that it is attainable by humans. Third, all figures that represent religious groups (Daja, Patriarch, Al Hafi, Sultan, even the Templar) suggest that the road of tolerance would not solve their conflicts. Instead, a more radical cure is needed. If the very nature of Daja and the Patriarch seem to reject any notion of tolerance out of hand — they also do not appear in the final reconciliation scene — Al-Hafi is simply opting out, while for the Sultan and his sister the plot points past tolerance to another solution. This is also true for the Templar, who cannot tolerate another religion, be it Judaism or Islam. It is only when the play moves from a discourse of tolerance to a “theological-political” discourse, that is, one that argues for the separation between theology and politics, that the interests of the conflicting parties can be critically addressed and brought to a solution.43 As the drama frames its concern as one of delimiting the juridicopolitical claim of religious groups in the interest of a modern, emancipated understanding of religion, the paradigm of tolerance is abandoned. Instead, it is replaced by a model of full legal equality whereby the state (Saladin) recognizes the necessity of granting its citizens the same rights regardless of their religious affiliation.44 Lessing’s drama points in the direction of what Mendelssohn argued, and what Marx would argue in a more explicit and polemic way: that in order to achieve emancipation for the Jews, the society as a whole first needs to be emancipated. This position, which explains why the final scene can do without Daja and the Patriarch as anachronistic figures, presents a view of Jews that no longer needs to approach its subject in patronizing fashion as a plea for tolerance. Resolutely more radical, this play does not just call for equality as a gesture of tolerance but argues the case of genuine juridico-political equality, relegating tolerance to an era where truth could still be claimed unilaterally by one or the other party. At the end of the drama, Nathan no longer needs to pose as typical Jew or its opposite, as traditional or assimilated. Instead, he now — like everybody else — is able to be himself, be just a man for himself in all his particularity, that is, a Jew who has to explain and to legitimate himself as little as anyone else. No longer just tolerated but fully recognized in his particularity, the question of his identity ceases to be an instrument of repression and control. What he or anyone else is has now become a matter of their individual self-determination, whose religious significance has lost its juridical-political hold.45 In his notes for a talk on Nathan der Weise, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) points out that Jews were more tolerated during the Middle Ages than in modern times, a fact that is characteristic for the transformation of the concept of tolerance.46 He also stresses the play’s overcoming of the notion of tolerance, the “Überwindung des

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bloßen Toleranzgedankens, vor allem der Indifferenz” which he sees challenged in the ring story’s suggestion to return in a “thousand, thousand years” when a more competent judge will preside over the court.47 While most discussions addressing the question of Nathan’s Jewishness settle for one or another point of view, Rosenzweig directs critical attention to the fact that the drama itself presents this issue in terms of a tension whose problematic the play seeks to stage as critical challenge rather than to resolve. While some critics have pointed out that Nathan’s, or the traveler’s in Die Juden for that matter, refusal to be identified as individuals with a collective notion of the Jewish people might be construed as their distancing themselves from their people,48 Rosenzweig rightly rejects such a view. The individual cannot be equated with a people or an entire religion, a view held dearly during the Middle Ages: “Sind wir unser Volk (Bemerkung, daß Volk hier nicht politisch gemeint ist)? Nein sicher: der Mensch ‘ist’ nicht sein Volk. Der Mensch ist nicht das Judentum, das Christentum. Dies war der Irrtum des Mittelalters. [. . .] Deshalb mußte das Mittelalter zerbrechen und das ‘rein Menschliche’ kommen.”49 As the play presents the audience with both a universalistic Nathan — an abstractly human and idealized sage — and a character whose Jewish particularity implicates more than such anemic idealization, Lessing confronts the modern reader with the challenge to negotiate this tension creatively. As Rosenzweig points out, for some Jews Nathan might not be Jewish enough.50 But he also insists that it cannot be denied that act 4 of the drama (where Nathan tells the Friar his Job-like experience of the loss of his entire family) highlights the Jewish experience. As Rosenzweig puts it: “Wir stehen im IV. Akt, nicht im V., der nicht zufällig blutleer geraten ist.”51 In this way, Rosenzweig embraces an uncompromisingly critical stand on the undeniably assimilationist moment in the way the play constructs Jewish identity, while at the same time highlighting the Jewish particularity it so impressively stages. Rosenzweig avoids a partisan interpretation of Nathan’s Jewishness. But he also steers clear of the kind of unforgiving criticism that Zionist and orthodox Judaism had launched to expose what to them seemed to represent assimilationist tendencies. Beyond any version of tolerance, Rosenzweig recognizes the new solution of what he critically calls the problem of tolerance (das Toleranzproblem). This solution, which Rosenzweig sets off in quotation marks, reads: “‘Nur weil du Edom bist, darf ich Jaakob sein.’ ”52 For it is no longer like the coexistence of two statues side by side (Nebeneinander) or, worse, the indifferent confusion (Durcheinander) former generations found in Nathan der Weise. Rather, the relationship between Jews and Christians is to be imagined as “ein organischer Zusammenhang, organisches Neben-, Gegen- und Miteinander,” an organic connection, an organic side by side where both sides contrast and at the same time join together to build a whole.53 Rosenzweig’s approach takes the play’s tension as a productive


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comment on the problem of tolerance itself. Rather than calling for tolerance as the problem’s solution, he argues, the play presents tolerance as the problem that needs to be resolved. Rosenzweig’s own profound rethinking of the Christian-Jewish dialogue as a necessity for both Christianity and Judaism protects him from the desire to look for an unequivocal representation of Jews — positive or negative. Instead, his position enables him to recognize in the play’s dramatic conflict the genuine conflict modern society faces. For Rosenzweig, the modern reader can no longer simply bet on either the universalistic or the particularistic angle because each needs its other. As a consequence, Nathan’s soliloquy about whether or not he should appear in front of Saladin as self-conscious Jew is not so much a comment about Nathan’s own Jewishness but highlights, more importantly, the challenge of negotiating one’s identity in modernity. Curiously, literary criticism and scholarship have focused on the representation of the Jewish characters in Lessing’s plays and his attitude towards Jews as the interpretative key to the question of Lessing’s view on Jews. But this discussion left out a crucial part of the equation of Lessing’s fundamental reconsideration of the I-Thou relationship of Christians and Jews. Avoiding the philosemitic trap of simply reverting the negative prejudice into a positive one, Lessing is less interested in casting morally superior Jewish characters for the pedagogic profit of his Christian contemporaries — already a losing proposition from the viewpoint of drama — than in exposing the deep, hidden speech and thought patterns of a morally corrupt theology that needs to rationalize its claim as the rightful heir to Jewish tradition by declaring the Jews theologically unfit. In exposing this theological layer, Lessing rightly recognizes the projective quality of Christian theological reasoning and its ramifications in legal and political discourse. Recognizing the problem of the dialectics of prejudice, he is aware that simply advancing a positive depiction of a Jew or the Jews as a people would do little to challenge the prejudice but would, in all likelihood, only reinforce it. Instead, his approach is to expose the mechanism of the prejudice as one that is independent of its object. This paradigmatic shift in addressing the “Jewish question” challenges any depiction of Jews, or Christians for that matter, as only secondary and directs critical attention to the construction of Christian identity as the source and site of the problem. This is why an analysis of the representation of the Jewish characters in Lessing must remain circular; they all point back to their origin as Christian constructions. They function as critical reminders that Jews and Christians are implicated in a theological discourse that still needs to be critically worked through if the project of emancipation is to promise any success. Beyond good and evil, Lessing’s Jews are anything but paradigms for moral action or social integration. Instead they articulate critical concern for the crisis of modernity faced by the Enlightenment and the emerging modern European nation-state whose rise in the nineteenth century will lend a new

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urgency to Lessing’s staging of Jews. Lessing’s Jews figure the dilemma of modernity as it confronts Christian tradition even in its most secularized varieties. As long as such forms of secularism exclude Jews from full participation and leave them in the conceptual cold, Lessing suggests, these forms of secularism fall short of producing the kind of modernity they claim as their own.

Notes 1 An earlier discussion of Die Juden and Nathan der Weise has appeared in my “Lessing’s ‘Jewish’ Questions” in The Germanic Review 78 (2003), 62–73. I thank the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation for the permission to use a revised version of that article for parts of this essay. 2 For the anti-Semitic camp see esp. Eugen Dühring, Die Ueberschätzung Lessing’s und seiner Befassung mit Literatur (Leipzig: Thomas, 2nd ed. 1906), which appeared first in 1881 as Die Überschätzung Lessing’s und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden; Sebastian Brunner, Lessingiasis und Nathanologie: Eine Religionsstörung im Lessingund Nathan-Cultus (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1890). For a discussion and complete listing of the anti-Semitic literature on Lessing see Gunter Grimm in Wilfried Barner, Gunter Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, Martin Kramer, Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 4th ed. 1981), 397–401, and Karl S. Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum. Rezeption. Dramatik und Kritik. Krypto-Spinozismus,” in Judentum im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, vol. 4, edited by Günter Schulz (Wolfenbüttel: Jacobi, 1977), 229–71, 257–58 note 3. 3

For a good discussion see Anna-Ruth Löwenbrück, “Johann David Michaelis und Moses Mendelssohn. Judenfeindschaft im Zeitalter der Aufklärung” in Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit, ed. by Michael Albrecht, Eva J. Engel, and Norbert Hinske (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 315–32. See also Karlfried Gründer, “Johann David Michaelis und Moses Mendelssohn” in Begegnung von Deutschen und Juden in der Geistesgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jakob Katz und Karl Heinrich Rengstorf (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 25–50. For a study of Michaelis’s antisemitism see the chapter “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imagery: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany” in Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 51–89.

4

Lessing’s plays address the multi-ethnic makeup of German lands repeatedly, thus highlighting the fundamental role of regionalism in German identity. In Minna von Barnhelm this issue takes center stage as the comedy’s conflict is, ultimately, the project of a vision of nation building that no longer depends on hegemony for its realization.

5

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Der junge Gelehrte, in G. E. Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich: Hanser, 1979), vol. 1, 282. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from this edition (G) and will subsequently indicated in the notes with volume and page number (for example, G 1, 282). Subsequent citations from Der junge Gelehrte are in the text.


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6 Guthke rightly maintains that it was not Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G*** (1746–48) but Lessing’s play that introduces the subject of Enlightenment and Judaism to German literature. See Karl S. Guthke, “Lessings Problemkomödie Die Juden,” in Wissen aus Erfahrungen: Werkbegriff und Interpretation heute. Festschrift für Herman Meyer, edited by Alexander von Bormann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 122–34, esp. 125, and Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum,” 237 and 259–60 n. 17. Guthke also points out the comic implication of the title Die Juden. While the actual Jew in the play is anything but comic, the comedy exposes the prejudice concerning “the Jews.” See Guthke, “Lessings Problemkomödie,” 123–25. For additional discussion see Wilfried Barner, “Lessings Die Juden im Zusammenhang seines Frühwerks,” in Humanität und Dialog. Lessing und Mendelssohn in neuer Sicht, edited by Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Lawrence G. Lyon (Detroit: Wayne State UP and Munich: text und kritik, 1982), 189–209; Wilfried Barner, “Vorurteil, Empirie, Rettung. Der junge Lessing und die Juden,” in Juden und Judentum in der Literatur, edited by Herbert A. Strauss and Christhard Hoffmann (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 52–77; Gunnar Och, Imago judaica: Juden und Judentum im Spiegel der deutschen Literatur 1750–1812 (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1995), 68–90. 7

Lessing himself indicates 1749 as the year the play was written. It was published in 1754. For the question of dating the actual composition see Guthke, “Lessings Problemkomödie,” 238 and Och, Imago judaica, 69.

8

“In order to not make themselves suspicious as thieves, Jews are not supposed to shave their beards completely.” Selma Stern, Der preussische Staat und die Juden, part 3, first half vol. of documents (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1971), 208.

9 It seems wrong, therefore, to call Die Juden and Nathan der Weise “philosemitic” as Ritchie Robertson does. He qualifies this characterization a page later: “Die Juden is not so much philosemitic as anti-antisemitic” (for a critical position on this view see Barner, “Vorurteil, Empirie, Rettung,” 68). But this qualification has not led him to revise his first characterization. See Ritchie Robertson, The “Jewish Question” in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 34, 35 and his essay “ ‘Die hohe Lied der Duldung’? The Ambiguities of Toleration in Lessing’s Die Juden and Nathan der Weise,” in Modern Language Review 93:1 (1998): 105–20, 109, 111. 10

G. E. Lessing, Die Juden, G 1, 382. Subsequent citations are in the text.

11

For background on this affair which also led to Frederick the Great’s termination of his friendship and support for Voltaire, see Heinrich Graetz, “Voltaire und die Juden,” in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 17 (1868): 161–74. 12

G. E. Lessing, “Auf ——,” G 1, 46.

13

Graetz, “Voltaire und die Juden,” 168.

14

G. E. Lessing, Die Juden, G 1, 414.

15

Guthke, “Lessings Problemkomödie,” 131; Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum,” 243 and 245. 16

Guthke, “Lessings Problemkomödie,” 130.

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17

See Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum,” 255.

18

See Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum,” 249–54.

19

I have discussed Spinoza’s significance for Lessing’s development in detail in part 3 of my Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, Heine (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004), 183–250. 20 Cf. Albert M. Reh, “Große Themen in kleiner Form. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Rettungen — eine europäische Apologetik,” in Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang, edited by Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh (Detroit: Wayne State UP; Munich: text ⫹ kritik, 1984), 175–84. 21

For Bayle as inspiration for Lessing’s vindication of Cardanus see the editor’s note in Lessing, G 7, 725. 22

G. E. Lessing Rettung des Hier. Cardanus, G 7, 23.

23

For a discussion of Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Gespräche see chapter 6 of my Spinoza’s Modernity, 87–93.

24

The exchange with Michaelis, including Mendelssohn’s letter, is reprinted following the text of the play Die Juden in G 1, 415–22. 25 G. E. Lessing, “An Johann David Michaelis,” 16 October 1754 in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), vol. 11/1, 58. 26 The review appeared in Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung, for which Lessing worked at that time. G 3, 175–76. 27 See Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, “Von der Toleranz zur Dialogik — Lessings und Mendelssohns Herausforderung zum christlich-jüdischen Gespräch” in Goldschmidt, Aus den Quellen des Judentums, Aufsätze zur Philosophie, vol. 5 of Werke (Vienna: Passagen 2000), 145–56. 28

This and the next paragraph follow my discussion in “Lessing, Mendelssohn, Nathan: German Jewish Myth Building as an Act of Emancipation,” in Lessing International: Lessing Reception Abroad, edited by John McCarthy, Richard Schade, and Herbert Rowland, Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 341–60.

29

For a brief survey see the entry on friendship in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, vol. 2 (Basel: Schwabe, 1972). For a sociological discussion of friendship as a relationship based in modernity on social differentiation rather than the traditional complete interface, see Georg Simmel, Soziologie, Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, 5th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), 268–69. 30

Martin Buber, “Urdistanz und Beziehung,” Schriften zur Philosophie, Werke 1 (Munich: Kösel Verlag; Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1962), 411–23; see also Martin Buber, On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity, edited by S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992).

31

For the cultural significance of the friendship between Mendelssohn and Lessing see Goldschmidt, “Von der Toleranz zur Dialogik.”

32

The publication of a complete edition of this work appeared two centuries later: Herman Samuel Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, ed. Gerhard Alexander (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972).

LESSING AND THE JEWS 33

207

G. E. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, G 8, 489–510.

34

See my discussion of this new concept of tradition in “The Differential Character of Traditions,” Telos 95 vol. 26 (1993): 161–70.

35

Lessing follows here Spinoza’s argument of the functional identity of Christian and Jewish religion. Cf. Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 221–22.

36

Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, in Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe, edited by Alexander Altmann (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann-Günther Holzboog, 1983), vol. 8, 162. “I, for my part, cannot conceive of the education of the human race as my late friend Lessing imagined it under the influence of I-don’t-know-which historian of mankind. One pictures the collective entity of the human race as an individual person and believes that Providence sent it to school here on earth, in order to raise it from childhood to manhood.” Translation from Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, translated by Allan Arkush, introduced and with a commentary by Alexander Altmann (Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1983), 95–96.

37 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, in Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. Altmann, vol. 8, 162. “In reality, the human race is — if the metaphor is appropriate — in almost every century, child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different places and regions of the world.” Translation from Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power, 96. 38

For Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise as a subtext for Lessing’s Education of Mankind, see my Spinoza’s Modernity, chapter 15, 219–29.

39

Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum,” 230–37, gives a survey of the camps of interpreters. See also my discussion of this aspect Nathan in Spinoza’s Modernity, 234–36.

40 For a critical survey of such readings, see the chapter on Nathan in Och, Imago judaica, 149–62; Guthke, “Lessing und das Judentum”; Barbara Fischer, Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von “Nathan der Weise” (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2000); and my chapter “Negotiating Truth: On Nathan’s Business,” in Spinoza’s Modernity, 230–50. 41

G. E. Lessing, Nathan der Weise, act 4, scene 4, G 2, 307.

42

I have discussed this in detail in my chapter on Nathan in Spinoza’s Modernity, 239–45.

43

Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise serves as an important subtext for the play. See my discussion in Spinoza’s Modernity.

44

Aamir Mufti has directed my attention to the fact that Lessing’s Saladin does not so much come to represent Islam as the power and interests of the emerging modern nation state. See Aamir Mufti, “Secularism and Minority. Elements of a Critique” Social Text 45 (1995):75–96. 45

The Jewish historian Simon Dubnow notes that Nathan der Weise is a “brilliant anti-thesis of Shakespeare’s Shylock.” Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1928), 376. For a brief discussion of the ways in which Nathan can be seen as the direct opposite of Shylock, see Och, 159–62.

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46 Franz Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” in Rosenzweig, Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, edited by Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 449–53, 452. The notes were taken for a talk in 1919. 47

Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” 452.

48

Robertson, The “Jewish Question,” 41.

49

Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” 450. “Are we our people? (Comment that people is not meant here as a political entity). No, to be sure: one man ‘is’ not his people. One man is not Judaism, Christianity. This is the mistake of the Middle Ages. [. . .] This is why the Middle Ages had to break apart to be replaced by the ‘purely human.’ ” 50

Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” 450–41.

51

Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” 453. “We are in act 4, not in act 5 which, not accidentally, has turned out anemic.” 52

Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” 450, “Only because you are Edom may I be Jacob.”

53

Rosenzweig, “Lessings Nathan,” 450.

Drama and Drama Theory

Lessing’s Drama Theory: Discursive Writings on Drama, Performance, and Theater Peter Höyng

Introduction ENLIGHTENMENT?1 It is an act of conscious resistance against a tradition that is perceived as antiquated or irrational. It is a process in which one first evaluates the current state of knowledge in specific areas of society that seem outdated, before one develops an empirical, philosophical, or scientifically informed and new approach. This critical work can penetrate and apply to every aspect of knowledge in society: philosophy, politics, the sciences, health, agriculture, farming, literature or, as in our case, theater. Common in all these efforts is the desire to change society in the social, political, or cultural domain. This process and project of Enlightenment pervaded mainly England, France, and Germany during the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie, especially young intellectuals, were the main social group that embraced and advanced the project of Enlightenment. Lessing — one can easily argue — embodies the paradigm of German Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay deals with Lessing’s discursive writings on dramatic literature (that is, referring to a written text by a playwright), performance (acting, actors, and production on stage), and theater (the institution). There is no such thing as Lessing’s “drama theory,” assuming that theory implies one systematic, coherent, and all-encompassing text. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) in his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (An Essay on Critical Poetics for the Germans, 1730) was the last person to develop such a comprehensive theory.2 Instead, Lessing wrote diverse texts in several genres, in which he develops a new approach toward drama, performance, and theater. In this sense, Lessing’s theoretical texts on drama — as opposed to his plays — were a work in progress. One can extract from these writings his theoretical positions on the “bürgerliche Trauerspiel” (bourgeois tragedy), on the “rührende Lustspiel” (sentimental comedy), on acting, and on the institutionalization of theater.

W

HAT IS

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The process of Lessing’s theoretical engagement with drama and theater is also evident when looking to the biographical context. As a student in Leipzig — at the age of seventeen — he visited theater performances and began writing on all aspects of theater. He continued this until the age of thirty-eight when the Deutsche Nationaltheater in Hamburg closed. Therefore, Lessing’s theoretical texts on drama and theater cover a time period of twenty years during which the theater in the various German states underwent significant changes that eventually led to a new paradigm still relevant for theaters in German-speaking countries today. The following texts are the most essential with regard to Lessing’s critical work for a re-definition and new perspective on drama, performance, and theater. I list them in order of composition: 1. Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (Contributions on the History and Reception of Theater, 1750). 2. Theatralische Bibliothek (Theatrical Library, 1754–1758). 3. “Vorrede zu des Herrn Jacob Thomson sämtliche Trauerspiele” (Preface to Jacob Thomson’s complete Tragedies, 1756). 4. “Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel mit Nicolai und Mendelssohn” (Letters to and by Nicolai and Mendelssohn on Tragedy, 1756–1757). 5. Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Newest Literature, 1759–1765). 6. Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–1769). Literary historians and critics have focused mainly on the last three works. I will follow this common practice but deviate in two significant ways. Instead of interpreting these texts exclusively from within literary and drama discourse,3 I will first situate Lessing’s critical writings in the context of the theatrical praxis of the second half of the eighteenth century. His theoretical and critical texts on drama should not be separated from the practical aspects of the theater and of society at large. Instead of discussing the above-mentioned texts sequentially and individually, I will explain Lessing’s main positions in relation to the three aspects of drama: text, performance, and institution. I will first explain how his theoretical positions on drama are directly linked to the idea of theater as a public institution; second, I will delineate Lessing’s re-evaluation of the gap between emotions and rational thought in text and performance. As we will see, these aspects are entangled with one another and interdependent in Lessing’s promotion of enlightened ideals: to bridge theory with practical matters and to base practical matters on theoretical arguments. Or to allow Lessing to speak for himself: “Wer richtig raisonniert, erfindet auch: und wer erfinden will, muß raisonnieren können. Nur die glauben, daß sich das eine von dem andern trennen lassen, die zu keinem von beiden aufgelegt sind.”4

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The Praxis of Theory and Theory of Praxis There are at least three reasons why it is best to characterize Lessing’s relationship to drama and theater in light of the quote above. The chiasmus, that is, the praxis of theory and theory of praxis first refers to Lessing’s discursive writing style; second, to his (unintentional) creation of a new profession; and third, to his work as a playwright. In the following, I will discuss briefly all three aspects in order. As we can see from the above chronological list of theoretical texts, Lessing utilized various genres for his writing on drama, ranging from essays in a journal to semi-private letters and from published letters to critical reviews. Essays, letters, and reviews are all genres conducive to exploring and elaborating new ideas in an evolving manner, that is, practicing a discursive style of writing. Instead of setting forth a linear and systematic argument, Lessing often introduces one aspect at some length, only to shift abruptly to a new idea or aspect, after which he might return to his first thesis or point of departure. It is as if the reader is invited to observe and engage in the very process of thinking. As Monika Fick argues, Lessing stages in his writing the dynamic process of thinking.5 In other words, Lessing applies his talent for the stage to his thinking process and vice versa; Lessing’s process of arriving at theoretical ideas is similar to a play in the sense that he proposes various and often opposing views in a persuasive rhetoric before he comes to his conclusive idea. Lessing’s choice of genres that enable the discursive style is ideal for addressing the public and activating an engaged discussion. Lessing’s discursive writing style — often ironic, at times polemical and denunciatory — rejects a comprehensive theory but employs throughout a theoretical, that is, analytical and critical, mind-set that covers all aspects of drama: its text, performance, the institutions that produce it, and reception by the audience. Thus his theoretical mind is simultaneously practical because he applies it to the practice of a dramatic performance in a theater. There is ample evidence of how Lessing’s discursive style served his interest in advancing the quality of theater through theoretical means by turning to his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, a compilation of weekly reviews — 104 in all — that aimed to advise the actors and to educate the audience of the Deutsche Nationaltheater in Hamburg (1767–1769). When Lessing looks back and reflects on his first forty-nine reviews, he does so in his discursive style, here with a witty comment: Wahrlich, ich betaure [sic] meine Leser, die sich an diesem Blatte eine theatralische Zeitung versprochen haben, so mancherlei und bunt, so unterhaltend und schnurrig, als eine theatralische Zeitung nur sein kann. [. . .] anstatt all dieser artigen Sächelchen, die sie erwarteten, bekommen sie lange, ernsthafte, trockne Kritiken über alte bekannte Stücke; schwerfällige

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Untersuchungen über das, was in einer Tragödie sein sollte und nicht sein sollte; mit unter wohl gar Erklärungen des Aristoteles. Und das sollen sie lesen? Wie gesagt, ich betauere [sic] sie; sie sind gewaltig angeführt!6

Lessing pretends to pity his readers who may have expected a light, entertaining theater newspaper and instead are confronted with long, earnest reviews and theoretical reflections on drama. Yet in spite of Lessing’s distancing self-irony, he points out cogently his overall task and idea: critically accompanying the performances, discussing the merits and shortfalls of the repertoire, and providing for authors, actors, and the audience a theoretical framework that is based on Aristotle’s theory on drama. Lessing’s ability to combine theoretical and critical thinking towards the reality of theater had an unintentional but far-reaching effect. His work in Hamburg and his Hamburgische Dramaturgie led to the creation of a new profession that is still highly significant for German-speaking theaters, which are mostly state-funded: that of the dramaturge.7 A dramaturge closely assists the work of the Regisseur, the director of a stage production, in different ways. She or he helps in the selection of plays, provides the historical and theoretical background of the play and/or playwright, is often responsible for making significant and meaningful cuts, and provides critical input for the entire production. In other words, today’s dramaturge does in many ways what Lessing started in Hamburg. Describing this role, he wrote that: “Diese Dramaturgie soll ein kritisches Register von allen aufzuführenden Stücken halten, und jeden Schritt begleiten, den die Kunst, sowohl des Dichters, als des Schauspielers hier tun wird.”8 The work of a dramaturge is specific to the German stage tradition and can be explained by Lessing’s overall vision of what he intended for the Deutsche Nationaltheater in Hamburg: to create a stage as a public forum that combines critical entertainment and entertaining enlightenment at the same time. For Lessing the theater should serve as a public space for the bourgeoisie that displays and conveys its own concerns of morality, politics, and aesthetics. Lessing’s last play, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), exemplifies best this desire to create theater as a public forum. Lessing’s dramatisches Gedicht (dramatic poem) on religious tolerance was a continuation and immediate reaction to a ferocious public dispute between the professor and bible critic Hermann Samuel Reimarus and the orthodox Lutheran priest Johann Melchior Goeze. That Lessing chose to write a play — and not a treatise — shows his strong belief that the theater should serve as a public sphere in which matters of politics and morality should be negotiated by artistic means. In other words, it is this very combination of theoretical underpinnings and theatrical practice that makes Lessing a key figure in German theater history. Finally, Lessing’s theoretical pragmatism and the pragmatism of his theory become evident in his being a successful playwright. Lessing not


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only conceptualized the “bürgerliche Trauerspiel” (bourgeois tragedy) in his writings on drama and theater, but also wrote the prime examples of the genre Miß Sara Sampson (1755) and Emilia Galotti (1772). He not only reflected on the sentimental comedy, but also created its German prototype, Minna von Barnhelm (1767). He not only studied and praised Shakespeare’s plays, but also introduced Shakespearean blank verse to the German stage in Nathan der Weise. Lessing’s theoretical work on drama is indeed as much linked to the practice of the playwright as the playwright is linked to his theoretical reflections and suppositions. Not until the plays of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and more recently Heiner Müller (1929–1996) is there another German dramatist who like Lessing embodies the practical aspects of theater within a theoretical and ideological framework. Whereas Brecht has influenced playwrights and directors around the world, Lessing’s reception is negligible outside of Germany. There are two striking indicators of this neglect. In the United States the position of a dramaturge is generally unknown, and has only started gaining momentum in recent years in avant-garde theaters where she or he serves as a critical voice in developing the plays for the season, promoting new plays, and critically assisting the overall production — much as Lessing did in Hamburg. Yet the recent development takes place without historical awareness of Lessing’s contribution to the establishment of the profession of dramaturge. This lack of historical awareness of Lessing’s contribution can be seen by yet another indicator: there are no English translations of Lessing’s dramaturgical texts available. Only the Hamburgische Dramaturgie has been translated, and it is out of print. To make this inadequacy become even more apparent: the last publication of this translation dates back forty years, and the translation itself dates from 1890.9 It is therefore not an overstatement to say that there is little knowledge of Lessing as a key theoretician and innovator of the modern German stage. In other words, whereas in the world of German-speaking theater there is an awareness and a tradition of Lessing’s theoretical writings on drama and theater, such knowledge is limited in the United States to scholarly circles. This can be explained by the different traditions of theater practice and history in the German-speaking countries and the United States. The German theater tradition maintains that the public and state-subsidized stage should be, above all, a “moralische Anstalt”10 or forum for serious aesthetic discourse and, second, that it should be entertaining. Lessing did not favor a strict dichotomy between moral discourse and entertainment value; just the opposite is true. However, he is certainly the first theater critic and playwright in German who argues that the artistic quality of the play and the performance should override commercial concerns or mere entertainment value. For Lessing, the theater should be a public forum that engages its audience in the project of Enlightenment.

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Theatrical Performance as Social Activity Before discussing in some detail any of Lessing’s theoretical positions on drama it is necessary to understand what he himself faced when speaking of theater or seeing a performance. Let us once again frame our concerns within the triad of dramatic literature, performance, and theater. Lessing delivered a devastating evaluation in his “81. Literaturbrief” (1760): “Wir haben kein Theater. Wir haben keine Schauspieler. Wir haben keine Zuhörer.”11 Lessing could have added that not only were there no theaters, actors, or audience, but that there were also no German playwrights of consequence. As overstated and polemical as this is, Lessing has a point: the number of plays written in German and performed in the Germanspeaking states from the 1750s until the mid-1770s was dismal.12 German playwriting was in a nascent state before court theaters opened their stages to the public and to the concept of plays written in German in the mid1770s; this eventually became the paradigm of the public, state-funded theater as we know it in the German-speaking countries today. A mere browsing through Reinhart Meyer’s extensive bibliographies of dramatic texts13 reveals two facts: before 1750 — the year Lessing began his theoretical writings on theater — there were almost no plays available by German authors in the German language. Most dramas were translations from the French, Italian, or English. Striking too is that the majority of works were not tragedies but comedies.14 What was absent was an author who wrote texts in German that would be rehearsed and performed by well-trained actors before an educated audience that expected an artistic production. In other words, what was absent was the concept that the playwright is primarily concerned about the artistic quality of his or her text, which in turn is more or less binding for the actors’ performances. It is this author- and text-based model of theater that Lessing regrets is lacking, and its lack at the time enables us to see the importance of what Lessing, his contemporaries, and subsequently a new generation of authors initiated and began to establish. One of the reasons there were so few authors writing plays in German was the lack of theater buildings except for those at the courts, and even those were not open to the public until the late eighteenth century. Furthermore, the court theaters in Vienna, Mannheim, Munich, Dresden, or Hannover performed mostly expensive Italian opera productions, and if theater was performed at all, comedies and tragedies in the French style were favored. In addition, the actors were predominantly French and Italian. As Ute Daniel writes in her important study on Hoftheater: “Die Zahl der deutschen Höfe [. . .], die diese Phase des exklusiven italienisch und französisch geprägten Hoftheaters durchliefen, war gering und beschränkte sich von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen auf den kaiserlichen


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Hof in Wien und die Höfe der weltlichen und geistlichen Kurfürsten, also gewissermaßen die politische ‘Elite’ der deutschen Höfe.”15 Before various court theaters began to open their stages to German plays in the mid-1770s, thereby making it also attractive to young authors to write plays, it was the “Wanderbühnen” or “Wandertruppen” that made theater accessible to the public. These “Wandertruppen” were comedians and actors who moved from one town to the next to perform improvisational comedies on marketplaces. They were hired and fired by a Prinzipal or entrepreneur, and only a few of these troupes reached regional importance. These were usually known by the name of their Prinzipal, for example Friederike Caroline Neuber (1697–1760), Heinrich Gottfried Koch (1703–1775), Ernst Konrad Ackermann (1710–1771), or Abel Seyler (1730–1800). Their theatrical performances were often spontaneous skits and did not follow the authority of a written or fixed text. Actors were treated as social outcasts, and actresses in particular were often seen as little better than prostitutes. Especially in Protestant areas, the Wanderbühnen had to overcome religious prejudices against theatrical entertainment, which was considered frivolous and sinful. In other words, theater as presented by these troupes was more a social entertainment than an aesthetic event. It was Gottsched, professor of poetry and philosophy at the University of Leipzig, who initiated a new concept for a theater that had an effect on some of these itinerant theater companies. In his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst he sets strict rules for plays written in German: they should be based on reason and probability and should be morally acceptable for the bourgeoisie. According to Gottsched’s understanding of Aristotle, tragedy is restricted to representing only the class of nobility, whereas comedy can represent only the common people. He further stipulates that plays have to adhere to the unities of time and place and above all, should restrict themselves to one Fabel (plot).16 All these regulations aim against the irrational, fantastic, grotesque, and unruly. Reasoning meant for Gottsched following probability, meaning that everything presented on stage has to be common sense and rational. Above all, theater should have as its main goal a moral message.17 Therefore he attacked not only the popular figure of the harlequin as obscene and irrational but especially the (Italian) opera at court theaters as fantastic, pompous, and “unnatural” for all its outrageously expensive theatricality.18 Instead he wanted to establish bourgeois morals and social standards as those of the theater. Gottsched, in his undertakings to reform German theater, is typical of the Enlightenment in that he wanted to eliminate irrationality, believing that this would better people and enhance society at large. In other words, he pushes for moral standards and social norms of the emerging bourgeoisie by utilizing the theater for these purposes.

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To advance his agenda, Gottsched undertook to translate and write tragedies19 and to influence and engage with actors. He temporarily found a congenial ally in Friederike Caroline Neuber. In 1727, she became the Prinzipalin or entrepreneur/director of a theater group that was allowed to establish itself in Leipzig.20 Like Gottsched, she fought against the widespread figure of the harlequin and spontaneous skits. Instead, she introduced French tragedies with their alexandrine verse to the audience and imitated aristocractic behavior on stage, thus introducing a body language considered to be graceful. However, Neuber’s and Gottsched’s intentions did not mean that the audience was ready for this paradigm shift toward moral entertainment as exemplified in Gottsched’s Der Sterbende Cato (The Death of Cato, 1732) with its rather rigid adherence to the three unities and alexandrine verse. It also did not mean that their combined efforts could hide the discrepancies between Gottsched, the professor, and Neuber, the actress and theater manager. After 1741, she accused Gottsched of pedantry in his setting of rules and regulations and actually ridiculed him in one of her unpublished Vorspiele.21 She was not alone in criticizing Gottsched’s attempts to create a moralistic theater, for it was Lessing who formulated the final and sharpest rejection of Gottsched’s attempts to improve the theater in Germany. Lessing writes in his famous “17. Literaturbrief” (1759): Es wäre zu wünschen, daß sich Herr Gottsched niemals mit dem Theater vermengt hätte. Seine vermeinten Verbesserungen betreffen entweder entbehrliche Kleinigkeiten, oder sind wahre Verschlimmerungen. Als die Neuberin blühte, und so mancher den Beruf fühlte, sich um sie und die Bühne verdient zu machen, sah es freilich mit unserer dramatischen Poesie sehr elend aus. Man kannte keine Regeln. [. . .] Unsre Staats- und Helden-Aktionen waren voller Unsinn, Bombast, Schmutz und Pöbelwitz. Unsre Lustspiele bestanden in Verkleidungen und Zaubereien; und Prügel waren die witzigsten Einfälle derselben. Dieses Verderbnis einzusehen, brauchte man eben nicht der feinste und größte Geist zu sein. [Gottsched] wollte nicht sowohl unser altes Theater verbessern, als der Schöpfer eines ganz neuen sein. Und was für eines neuen? Eines Französisierenden; ohne zu untersuchen, ob dieses französisierende Theater der deutschen Denkungsart angemessen sei, oder nicht.22

Lessing claims that Gottsched’s attempts to change the wretched state of German theater had only made matters worse. He complains that Gottsched was not so much interested in reforming German theater as in creating a new one based on French models; Gottsched did this, Lessing adds, without considering whether or not the French style suited the German character. According to Fick, this polemical attack on Gottsched is not as original in its content as it is in its style.23 However, it marks sharply


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the aesthetic demands of a new generation, and documents that this generation too was ready to utilize public theater for its causes.

Advancing to a Deutsches Nationaltheater in Hamburg, and Its Failure Regardless of Lessing’s strong and pointed attack on Gottsched’s positions, he criticizes Gottsched not for his endeavor to shape the theater as a public institution of aesthetic and moral values as defined by the bourgeoisie. Instead, like Gottsched, Lessing thinks that the theater as a public domain is most suitable for promoting his enlightened ideas. Furthermore, Lessing, like Gottsched, understands and defines theater first and foremost through literary texts and not by its performative quality. Defining theater as a staging of a literary text sets up the author and not the performing artist as the authority for theater. This was an idea that did not match the realities of the Wanderbühnen. Finally, Lessing, like Gottsched, argued for a whole new canon of dramatic literature. The generational rupture between Lessing and Gottsched begins with the fact that Lessing wanted to express his generation’s own aesthetic, social, and political thinking. Lessing tried to accomplish these goals in two ways: writing plays that suited the “deutsche Denkungsart” and reflected issues important to his generation and to the bourgeoisie. To echo his generational temperament, Lessing promoted a new aesthetic that favors the concept of a writing genius not bound by narrow rules such as those prescribed by Gottsched.24 To achieve his first concern — a new repertoire — he envisioned a new form of theatrical institution that embraces and advances this new canon of plays. For Lessing, establishing a new form of theater and the enhancement of plays in German went hand in hand. Into Lessing’s demand for plays that reflect the “deutsche Denkungsart” slips a form of patriotism that in recent years has been newly evaluated by literary scholars.25 Lessing is indeed far away from being chauvinistic or nationalistic, as Fischer-Lichte points out;26 nevertheless he intentionally sets the agenda of establishing a German identity through the institution of the theater in his “17. Literaturbrief,” when he argues vehemently against following the model of French theater and instead promotes the notion of a theater that should reflect the “deutsche Denkungsart.” Lessing had two things in mind. First of all, he was generally against the dominance of French over German culture, and in particular against plays that were either translated from French or that imitated French classicist style (like Gottsched’s did). The fact that Lessing translated plays by the French philosopher Diderot is evidence that Lessing’s

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anti-French stance was not a chauvinistic one but was instead only aimed at resisting undue influence of French forms over German theater.27 Returning to the “17. Literaturbrief” is critical in order to prevent premature labeling of Lessing’s efforts towards a Nationaltheater as nationalistic. After ridiculing Gottsched’s efforts, he continues: [Gottsched] hätte aus unsern alten dramatischen Stücken [. . .], hinlänglich abmerken können, daß wir mehr in den Geschmack der Engländer als der Franzosen einschlagen; daß wir in Trauerspielen mehr sehen und denken wollen, als uns das furchtsame französische Trauerspiel zu sehen und zu denken gibt; daß das Große, Schreckliche, das Melancholische, besser auf uns wirkt als das Artige, das Zärtliche, das Verliebte [. . .].28

Lessing’s rejection of French theater, as he describes it above, carries as a subtext a criticism and rejection of the rococo tastes of the aristocracy.29 Lessing’s preference for the English dramatists — by which he means chiefly Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (1574–1637) — as supposedly closer to the German “national spirit” equally implies another subtext: the young intellectual bourgeoisie wants to push its new aesthetic agenda. Lessing’s polemical analysis is of course a calculated exaggeration. By rejecting the French theater of Racine and Corneille as models for the German stage, Lessing actually has something else in mind: he asks for plays in the German language that are of equal aesthetic value as the French. Lessing’s desire to create a canon of plays according to a “deutsche Denkungsart” and therefore to urge discourse on a German national identity implied yet another trajectory that goes beyond class and aesthetic values. It is aimed at promoting national identity in a Germany that was divided into many separate states of different political weight. The negligible County of Schaumburg-Lippe was as much part of the Heiliges Römisches Reich deutscher Nation as was the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg; the powerful Electorate of Saxony as much as the ever more mighty Prussia; the dominating Habsburg dynasty as much as the small duchy of SaxonyThuringia. Considering the lack of strong central political institutions, Lessing and his contemporaries envisioned the theater as a public forum in which the audience begins to experience itself as one nation, as an audience that shares the same cultural values in its own language. Thus, the theater was conceived by Lessing and similar-minded intellectuals as a cultural and public domain that tied aesthetics and politics together. The “deutsche Denkungsart” culminated in the agenda of a “Deutsches Nationaltheater.” Whereas the word German in this phrase refers to the promotion of plays written in German (as opposed to those translated from French), the “Nationaltheater” raises the notion of Germanness to the next level: the theater as a public institution that should enable the bourgeoisie to experience and participate in the discourse of a national identity.


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In 1767 Lessing had reason to believe that this project could be realized in Hamburg. A board of twelve merchants along with the artistic director and former Prinzipal Johann Friedrich Schröder and the dramaturgical advisor Lessing founded the first Deutsche Nationaltheater. Everything seemed in place: the city of Hamburg as a proud and independent city of trade that was ruled by a wealthy bourgeoisie and not by a feudal class,30 the artistic experience of actors like Caroline Neuber and the much celebrated Konrad Ekhof. Lessing, however, struck a moderate tone, and with good reason, since he was aware of the state of German theater and the many hurdles it would need to overcome before achieving respectability: “Der Stufen sind viel, die eine werdende Bühne bis zum Gipfel der Vollkommenheit zu durchsteigen hat; aber eine verderbte Bühne ist von dieser Höhe [. . .] noch weit entfernt: und ich fürchte sehr, daß die deutsche mehr dieses als jenes ist.”31 In the “Ankündigung” to the Hamburgische Dramaturgie Lessing also defines his own role as critic: “Diese Dramaturgie soll ein kritisches Register von allen aufzuführenden Stücken halten, und jeden Schritt begleiten, den die Kunst, sowohl des Dichters, als des Schauspielers, hier tun wird.”32 Especially in the beginning of his weekly Dramaturgie, he follows his own plan, that is, evaluating and reviewing the plays and their performances. Soon, however, Lessing neglects the actors and the critique of their acting styles and particular performances, because most of them did not appreciate Lessing’s “Unparteilichkeit.”33 Instead, he soon begins to concentrate in great detail on criticizing the plays themselves and their inherent dramaturgical logic, based on a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics. If Lessing neglected the actors and the performative aspect of the plays, he neglected another group all together: the audience. But there is no institution that can live on without its clientele. Lessing realized this only a year later, in 1767, when the Nationaltheater failed because of financial troubles. It was at the end of his Dramaturgie that he criticized the audience harshly: Wenn das Publikum fragt; was ist denn nun geschehen? und mit einem höhnischen Nichts sich selbst antwortet: so frage ich wiederum; und was hat denn das Publikum getan, damit etwas geschehen könnte? Auch nichts; ja noch etwas schlimmeres, als nichts. Nicht genug, daß es das Werk nicht allein nicht befördert: es hat ihm nicht einmal seinen natürlichen Lauf gelassen. — Über den gutherzigen Einfall, den Deutschen ein Nationaltheater zu verschaffen, da wir Deutsche noch keine Nation sind! Ich rede nicht von der politischen Verfassung, sondern bloß von dem sittlichen Charakter.34

Lessing complains that the audience has not supported the national theater, and suggests that it had been naïve to believe that one could create such a theater for a people lacking not only political unity, but also unity in

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the cultural realm. His disparaging remarks about the theatergoers highlight the entire dilemma in which he and his contemporary artists were caught: a gap between the high-minded aesthetic goals set by intellectuals and the audience’s desire to be entertained. When the artistic director Schröder, for example, tried to abolish Vor- and Nachspiele in order to emphasize the artistic value of the plays he staged, the audience insisted on retaining them.35 Furthermore, the audience also frequently attended productions of the competing French theater group in Hamburg, further undercutting the Deutsche Nationaltheater’s enterprise of imagining a national community through theater.36 Fischer-Lichte summarizes this dilemma when she notes that the small, self-anointed elite of bourgeois writers was not able to present its ideas on theater in such a way as to convince the wider bourgeois public: “Die kleine selbsternannte Elite bürgerlicher Schriftsteller vermochten sich mit ihren Vorstellungen von Aufgabe und Funktion des Theaters beim breiten bürgerlichen Publikum letztlich nicht durchzusetzen.”37 A decade later the first major “Nationaltheater” were established in Vienna in 1776, in Mannheim in 1777, and in Munich in 1778 as “Hoftheater” or court theaters organized by the aristocracy — although they were partially open to the bourgeoisie, carrying out to some extent the bourgeois ideals of a “Deutsches Nationaltheater” for which Lessing, along with others, had fought.38

Bridging the Gap between Emotions and Rational Thought Lessing’s remarks at the end of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie make his disappointment obvious. This might be the reason why he never again wrote a major theoretical text on drama and theater. However, his theoretical positions had a long-lasting effect. Not only were his own plays quite successful,39 but his dramaturgical writings strongly influenced such important authors as Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792), Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832), and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), as well as the more commercial and popularizing playwright and actor August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and the popular dramatist August von Kotzebue (1761–1819). Lessing’s theoretical writings on drama, performance, and theater helped to re-define the genres of tragedy and comedy; these writings center on three major, interconnected components that I will address in the final part of this introduction to Lessing’s theory on drama. According to Lessing, the drama should first instigate a sensation within the individual that balances emotion with reasonable thinking. Second, the drama should reflect and negotiate concerns of the bourgeoisie.


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Third, it should adhere aesthetically to the concept of a natural and realistic performance. Lessing was one of the first to create the new genre of a “bürgerliches Trauerspiel,”40 which implied nothing less than disregarding the “Ständeklausel” (class clause), which Gottsched had upheld. According to Gottsched only aristocratic characters could legitimately portray the emotions of fear and sympathy in a high-minded tragedy.41 Lessing, instead, declares in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie: Die Namen von Fürsten und Helden können einem Stücke Pomp und Majestät geben; aber zur Rührung tragen sie nichts bei. Das Unglück derjenigen, deren Umstände den unsrigen am nächsten kommen, muß natürlicher Weise am tiefsten in unsere Seele dringen; und wenn wir mit Königen Mitleiden haben, so haben wir es mit ihnen als mit Menschen, und nicht als mit Königen.42

Lessing rejects the idea that in a tragedy only kings or statesmen are qualified to evoke strong emotions in the viewer. Instead it is the “Mensch” (human being), independent of his or her social class, with whom we should feel “Mitleid” (pity). The emotional state of “Schrecken” (fear) that the tragedy should cause can only be effected because the viewer can identify with the character on stage as a human being. Following Aristotle’s Poetics and his definition of tragedy, the emotional effect of a play, created by the genius of the author rather than any set of rules, is at the center of this concept;43 for Lessing, the disregard of social barriers and psychological identification of the audience with the characters become inseparable. Lessing, however, goes a step further in explaining why the emotional state of “Schrecken” should transform into “Mitleid.” Eleven years earlier, in 1756, in his Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, Lessing had explained and qualified his new approach to his friend and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn as follows: [. . .] so sage ich nunmehr, die Bestimmung der Tragödie ist diese: sie soll unsre Fähigkeit Mitleid zu fühlen, erweitern. Sie soll uns nicht bloß lehren, gegen diese oder jenen Unglücklichen Mitleid zu fühlen, sondern sie soll uns weit fühlbar machen, daß uns der Unglückliche zu allen Zeiten, und unter allen Gestalten, rühren und für sich einnehmen muß. [. . .] Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch, zu allen gesellschaftlichen Tugenden, zu allen Arten der Großmut aufgelegteste. (Lessing’s emphasis)44

Lessing emphasizes the quality of the feeling that the tragedy should incite; he claims the emotional state of “Mitleid” as a moral value in and of itself for his own class: the bourgeoisie. When Lessing uses the word “Mensch,” he disregards the strict social barriers of his feudal society. He overcomes the social difference between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy by

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asserting the superior moral standards of his own social class. Even more, he argues that the tragedy can and should incite the best moral behavior in the spectator, thus raising the social and moral standing of the bourgeois audience. With this approach, Lessing justifies a “bürgerliches Trauerspiel” like his own Miß Sara Sampson (1755) or Emilia Galotti (1772) in which the main protagonists are from the bourgeoisie and from the author’s time period. Considering Lessing’s expansion of the realm of the tragedy to include the “bürgerlich,” it is not a surprise that in both plays he portrays the moral values of the bourgeoisie as superior to those of the aristocracy. It is Lessing’s genuine accomplishment that he combined all three elements in one concept: a new genre of tragedy expressing new class values within a new institution. In other words, Lessing’s aesthetics of drama is inextricably linked to a progressive social and political program as part of the larger project towards Enlightenment. Whereas Gottsched defines the main purpose of a tragedy as presenting a moral message via a catharsis, a cleansing of emotional turmoil, of “Schrecken,” Lessing makes a subtle but nevertheless crucial shift in regard to the economy of feelings within the spectator. He raises the status of affect from accidental to instrumental by reflecting on and validating the emotional sensibilities of the spectator. This means that Lessing, influenced by the philosophers Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), attributes an inherent quality of “Erkenntnis” (cognitive capacity) and “moral sense” to feelings.45 Whereas for Gottsched, feelings were only important as long as they helped to transport the moral message of the tragedy, for Lessing achieving an emotional sensitivity in and of itself became a goal. For him, it was crucial to achieve a state of empathy and sympathy so that a reflective mode conducive to reasoning could be excited. It is possible to evaluate this shift as progressive since it aims to overcome the strict hierarchy of reason versus emotions, as is evident in the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, for example. Instead of disciplining the affective and emotional side, Lessing validates this anthropological aspect as an integral part of the project of Enlightenment. Moreover, Lessing’s position on a new type of tragedy, the “bürgerliche Trauerspiel,” can be understood as progressive since it inherently criticizes the aristocracy and therefore the feudal system. This critical, yet integrative and even utopian side of Lessing is what inspired authors like Lenz, Schiller, and Goethe. More recently, however, scholars have argued that Lessing’s claim for emphatic and sympathetic feelings can be evaluated as regressive, since it can lead to mere sentimentality and “Kitsch.” From this viewpoint, Lessing overstates the value of emotions so that all the critical impulses of drama and theater result in nothing but an affirmation of society’s status quo.46 Iffland’s and Kotzebue’s sentimental comedies, which are indebted to


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Lessing and which reigned in the theater repertoire of the time, seem to support this thesis. The qualitative elevation of emotions, however, does not mean that Lessing wants the viewer to be absorbed and swept away by feelings alone, nor does it mean that his characters are driven exclusively by emotions, or that the actors should bathe in sentimentality. Lessing aims to balance reason and emotion not only in the text, but in the actor’s portrayals and so in the minds of the audience. Fick sensitively interprets Lessing’s endeavor to balance reason with emotion in his “Literaturbriefe.”47 This integrative approach is apparent in another of Lessing’s theoretical positions on drama. Lessing argues for “vermischte Empfindungen” (mixed feelings) where tears of joy and painful recognition can be indivisible (“unzertrennlich”).48 We can attest to the same rationale in Lessing’s defense of the “rührende Lustspiel,” when he writes in the Theatralische Bibliothek (1754), “Ja, ich getraue mir zu behaupten, daß nur dieses allein wahre Komödien sind, welche so wohl Tugenden als Laster, so wohl Anständigkeit als Ungereimtheit schildern, weil sie eben durch diese Vermischung ihrem Originale, dem menschlichen Leben, am nächsten kommen.”49 A mixture of feelings most closely approximates life. Likewise, Lessing creates characters in his “bürgerliches Trauerspiel” like Marwood in Miß Sara Sampson, Marinelli in Emilia Galotti, or Daja in Nathan der Weise: the viewer wants to criticize them rationally or morally for their actions while, at the same time, they evoke positive feelings of identification because they portray humans whose behavior is sometimes at odds with their good intentions. Bridging the gap between emotions and rational thinking is, finally, also applicable to the art of acting. In the beginning of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Lessing is mostly concerned with the performative quality of theater.50 He argues for a natural style of acting that moves away from formalized and rhetorical gestures in which, for example, anger can only be represented by loud speech and with exaggerated gestures or trembling lips.51 In this context natural means for Lessing that the body language of the actor is caused by her/his inner emotional state and that a good actress/actor has to synthesize body language with inner emotions through a rational process of observing nature. He explains why an angry character should integrate reasoning while a calm one should include emotional presence.52 In other words, the mixing (“Mischung”) of rational thought and emotion does not only apply to the characters themselves as the author creates them on paper but also to their representation on stage. Lessing asks the actor and actress to integrate in their acting rational thinking and a seemingly natural representation of inner emotions. Therefore, a natural style of acting is based on mimesis and on a theater that evokes the illusion of realism. This mimesis or realism should, however, not be confused with a realistic imitation. Whereas imitation is merely a

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reenactment, mimetic realism requires an analysis of emotional states and the study of psychophysical reciprocity by the actor. The acting should be at once spontaneous and studied. Furthermore, Lessing demands that acting should follow a logical sequence — like the plot of a good drama should show a logical motivation of action. In representing these actions on stage, he asks that one action should be psychologically linked to the next.53 This applies, for example, to those characters on stage who are silent for a while. Instead of just standing in the background — as was often the rule — the actor should move according to her/his role and situation and relate to the other actors on stage; in other words, Lessing argues for ensemble playing. Ensemble acting might serve as an allegory for Lessing’s theoretical positions on drama, performance, and theater, in which all three aspects are interconnected. Likewise, his theoretical writing on theater is connected with the praxis of it. Thus, Lessing should have the last word, but only in order to praise the drama as a performance. After all, it is the performance that gives the theater its aesthetic value. In his “13. Stück” of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Lessing reviews his own play, Miß Sara Sampson. With his usual wit, he first refers to himself as the author who hardly tolerates cuts in the text of his play, before he praises the wellknown actress Miss Sophie Friederike Hensel’s (1738–1789) portrayal of Sara. Hensel’s acting, as an interpretation of the author’s text, evokes pity in the viewer by integrating a studied reflection of her emotional state when she is dying. Above all, it highlights the fact that performance cannot be replaced by mere reading. As Lessing wrote, describing the gestures of the actress Hensel as she portrayed the dying Sara on stage: Madame Henseln starb ungemein anständig; in der malerischsten Stellung; und besonders hat mich ein Zug außerordentlich überrascht. Es ist eine Bemerkung an Sterbenden, daß sie mit den Fingern an ihren Kleidern oder Betten zu rupfen anfangen. Diese Bemerkung machte sie sich auf die glücklichste Art zu Nutze; in dem Augenblicke, da die Seele von ihr wich, äußerte sich auf einmal, aber nur in den Fingern des erstarrten Armes, ein gelinder Spasmus; sie kniff den Rock, der um ein weniges erhoben ward und gleich wieder sank: das letzte Aufflattern eines verlöschenden Lichts; der jüngste Strahl einer untergehenden Sonne. — Wer diese Feinheit in meiner Beschreibung nicht schön findet, der schiebe die Schuld auf meine Beschreibung: aber er sehe sie einmal!54

Notes 1

See Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1784), in Immanuel Kant, Werke, vol. 4, edited by Artur Buchenau and Ernst Cassirer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1913), 167–76.


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2

Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen, in Schriften zur Literatur, edited by Horst Steinmetz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972).

3

Literary historians focus to a great extent on Lessing’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics, as found throughout his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (specifically 74.-80. Stück). See Monika Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 282–84 and 291–93.

4

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert. 8 volumes. (Munich: Hanser, 1972), vol. 4, 674. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations are from this edition (G) and will be indicated in notes with volume and page number, for example G 4, 674.

5

See Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 170.

6

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 461–62.

7

Rainer Lewandowski, “Concerning the Current Status of German Theatre,” Text & Presentation, vol. 21 (2000): 145–46. 8

Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, “Ankündigung,” 233.

9

Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Helen Zimmern (1890), with a new introduction by Victor Lange (New York: Dover, 1962).

10

See Friedrich Schiller, “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, edited by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 818–31.

11

G. E. Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, G 5, 259.

12

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (Tübingen, Basel: Francke, 1993), 88–107. 13

See Reinhart Meyer, Das deutsche Trauerspiel des 18. Jahrhunderts: Eine Bibliographie (Munich: Fink, 1977). See also Bibliographia dramatica et dramaticorum, edited by Reinhart Meyer, 1. Abteilung: Werkausgaben, Sammlungen, Reihen, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986). 2. Abteilung: Einzeltitel, vol. 1–. (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1993–). 14

Reinhart Meyer, “Von der Wanderbühne zum Hof- und Nationaltheater,” in Hanser Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, edited by Hans Grimminger, vol. 3 (Munich: Hanser 1980), 204.

15

Ute Daniel, Hoftheater: Zur Geschichte des Theaters und der Höfe im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995), 66. See Meyer, “Von der Wanderbühne zum Hof- und Nationaltheater,” 199. See also Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 112; and Sybille Maurer-Schmoock, Deutsches Theater im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982).

16

See Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, 153–75.

17

“Der Poet wählt sich einen moralischen Lehr-Satz, den er seinen Zuschauern auf eine sinnliche Art einprägen will.” Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, 161.

18 19

See Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 89.

See Johann Christoph Gottsched, Sterbender Cato, ein Trauerspiel (1732), edited by Horst Steinmetz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964).

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20

Caroline Neuber staged in Leipzig Lessing’s second comedy Der junge Gelehrte in 1748. See Willi Jasper, Lessing: Aufklärer und Judenfreund. Biographie (Berlin, Munich: Propyläen, 2001), 58.

21 Vorspiele and Nachspiele are usually short one-act plays that were performed before or after the main play of the evening. They were standard practice for most theater groups and a popular comic and/or satirical genre. Their popularity documents the high demand for lighthearted entertainment. See David G. John, The German “Nachspiel” in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991). 22

G. E. Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, G 5, 70–71.

23

See Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 163–64; Jasper, Lessing, 64.

24

See G. E. Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, G 5, 72–73.

25

See Peter Höyng, “ ‘Was ist die Nationalschaubühne im eigentlichen Verstande?’ Thesen über die Nationaltheater im späten 18. Jahrhundert als Ort eines NationalDiskurses,” in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität 1750–1871, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), 209–11; Katharina Meinel, Für Fürst und Vaterland: Begriff und Geschichte des Münchener Nationaltheaters im späten 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Utz, 2003).

26

See Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 109–10.

27

This translation also helped Lessing to develop his own ideas of tragedy and sentimental comedy. See Lessing, “Vorrede des Übersetzers zu: Das Theater des Herrn Diderot” (Preface by the Translator: The Theater of Mister Diderot, 1760/1781), G 4, 148–51. See also Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 210–11. 28

G. E. Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, G 5, 71.

29

See Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 80. Stück, 605–7. See Jochen SchulteSasse, “Poetik und Ästhetik Lessings und seiner Zeitgenossen,” in Hanser Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, edited by Hans Grimminger, vol. 3 (Munich: Hanser 1980), 320. 30

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, “Ankündigung,” 231.

31


32


33


34

Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 101.-104. Stück, 698.

35

See Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 110.

36

Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 110.

37

Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 98.

38

For an excellent discussion on the concept and history of a particular Nationaltheater, see Katharina Meinel, Für Fürst und Vaterland.

39 See Veronica C. Richel, The German Stage, 1767–1890: A Directory of Playwrights and Plays (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). 40

See Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 135–36.

41

See Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, 157.

42

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 14. Stück, 294.


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43

Passions should not be described, according to Lessing, but instead should “vor den Augen des Zuschausers entstehen und [. . .] in einer so illusorischen Stetigkeit wachsen [. . .]: das ist es, [. . .], was das Genie, ohne es zu wissen, ohne es langweilig zu erklären, tut [. . .].” Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 1. Stück, 235. “Der Ausdruck der Leidenschaften, auf welchen alles dabei ankömmt, ist noch einzig das Werk des Genies.” Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 26. Stück, 352.

44 G. E. Lessing, Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, G 4, 163. The private correspondence (1756–1757) was not published until 1794. See Fick, LessingHandbuch, 135. 45


46

See Schulte-Sasse, “Poetik und Ästhetik Lessings und seiner Zeitgenossen,” 315–18; Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 285–86.

47

Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 170.

48

G. E. Lessing, Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, G 4, 166.

49

G. E. Lessing, Theatralische Bibliothek, G 4, 55.

50

As Fischer-Lichte remarks, after all, people went to the theater to watch and enjoy specific actors. Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters, 131–32.

51

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 3. Stück, 246.

52

“Denn dort muß das Raisonnement in Affekt entbrennen, und hier der Affekt in Raisonnement sich auskühlen.” G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 3. Stück, 247. 53 See Alexander Košenina, Anthropologie und Schauspielkunst: Studien zur ‘eloquentia corporis’ im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 201–19. He analyzes Lessing’s stage instructions for Emilia Galotti, of which there are over two hundred! 54

G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, G 4, 13. Stück, 293–94.


Emilia Galotti, 2003, Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin, directed by Ralph Reichel. Bettina Schneider as Emilia Galotti and Jakob E. G. Kraze as Hettore Gonzaga. Photo credit: Peter Festersen. Courtesy of Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin and Peter Festersen.


I

and formal innovations, Lessing’s dramatic works have been canonized as important proponents of the new bourgeois value system and modern gendered identity.1 Lessing’s plays create these gendered individualities in their most important social contexts, the familial value system and a new understanding of love.2 As we will see, while Lessing participated in establishing these new forms of gendered identities and their gender specific forms of social communication, he was not a simplistic champion of the bourgeois ideology informing them but was sensitive to the darker sides and contradictions of this new model.3 In particular, Lessing seemed to be suspicious not only of absolute values in general — the blind adherence to certain fixed norms within the schematic vice-virtue opposition — but also of the desirability of ascribing specific characteristics and behaviors to gender (gender stereotyping). In the wake of Descartes and growing philosophical and theological skepticism came the need to assess the position and the stability of the individual, which prompted the modern concept of an individual identity.4 Our contemporary understanding sees identity as the imagined or discursive coherence of the person, which is socially constructed and maintained by intelligible norms, cultural symbols, and discursive formations.5 Unlike psychoanalytic studies of identity that read Lessing’s plays themselves as representing the father’s striving for “the stability or validity of his dream of masculine wholeness and unity,”6 the present essay attributes this quest only to the father figures in the plays, while their creator, Lessing, seems suspicious of such seemingly stable identities based on absolute value systems. In the following I will discuss gender, identity, and the critique of absolute virtue in Lessing’s dramas. First, however, I begin with an explanation of some terms and concepts. Gender is one of the historically constructed norms that stabilize “identity.” Judith Butler asserts that identity is always gendered and that one therefore cannot speak about identity without considering gender.7 My approach to gender studies emphasizes gender as a constructed historical and cultural phenomenon, the culturally and historically shaped interpretation of the physical body, and explores the construction and function of gendered individuality. N ADDITION TO THEIR LITERARY

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A gender studies approach considers the creation of cultural meaning as organized through gender differences and consequently places gender at the core of the analysis. Gender is a social construct, a culturally shaped cluster of attributes and behaviors, mental and emotional characteristics and roles distributed between female and male. These gender assumptions are based on the two-sex-model of biological difference. The term sex refers to the particular physiology of a person while the term gender refers to the process of socialization. Gender roles are learned and acquired (not innate or “natural”) as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out as early as 1952, giving rise to the notion that gender is the culturally and historically shaped interpretation of the physical body (the non-essentialist view of gender).8 The distinction between anatomical sex and socio-cultural gender was employed to identify and question the “natural” distinction between femininity and masculinity, limiting it only to the biological differences.9 Yet this distinction tends to leave the biological body not only seemingly natural and outside of culture but also largely unexamined. More recent theoretical accounts such as Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) consider this separation as a problematic continuation of the body-mind dualism of Western thought.10 The philosophical tradition from Plato to Descartes insisted on the ontological distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and the body. By linking women with the body and men with the spirit and reason, this tradition also stabilized the gender asymmetry and hierarchy.11 Psychoanalytic studies associate the maternal body with corporeal fragmentation and chaos that threaten the stability of the masculine cultural ideal.12 Feminist criticism during the 1980s focused on this ideological relegation of women to the private domestic sphere of the family and considered it a significant curtailment of women’s power and social position.13 The association of the higher faculties of reason and thought with the male gender and the lower faculties of emotions with the female gender (the issue of gendered identities) goes to the core of one of the central issues of Lessing’s thought — and that of his age: the relationship between body and soul and its ethical implications. As Monika Fick recently asserted: “Immer mehr schärft sich das Bewußtsein dafür, wie sehr körperliche Regungen das Gemüt, die Stimmung, die ‘Psyche’ beeinflussen. Auch findet die Erkenntnis Zuspruch, daß ‘Glück’ von der Fähigkeit, es zu empfinden, abhängt, demnach auf elementare Weise mit ‘Gefühl,’ mit ‘Sinnlichkeit’ zu tun hat.”14 One of the great tasks of Enlightenment (popular) philosophy was to envision the relationship between rationality and sensuality (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume). Acknowledging the limits of reason, English sensualism focused instead on sensual perceptions and the objects that provoke them — physical objects, emotions, and passions. For Lessing, the question becomes what role sensuality was to play in the construction of identity. “Der tragische Konflikt entzündet sich an der

GENDER AND IDENTITY IN LESSING’S DRAMAS

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Reibungsfläche zwischen den Leidenschaften der Figuren und den Geboten der Vernunft” (Fick 41). One answer to this conflict could be found in the concept of moral sense (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) in which morality has become a sensual reaction and no longer requires reflection. Lessing derived his understanding of “Mitleid” from Moral Sense theory. The tension between the irrational forces (desires, passions) and rational convictions, between “Kopf und Herz,” manifests itself in the body/mind dualism of Western thought. The re-negotiation of the body/mind dualism has implications for gender roles in a culture that not only associates the mind with masculinity and the body with femininity but also subjugates the body and its desires and senses to the supremacy of reason. Popular philosophy stabilized this hierarchy between the genders by way of a renewed emphasis on gender stereotyping according to which certain character traits are considered “natural” for each gender (Geschlechtscharaktere). Literary discourse plays a central role in placing sensuality in the service of rational insight. It stands to reason that these simple binaries will not remain uncontested as Lessing wrestles with the integration of reason and the senses, mind and body. In terms of its ideological function in human society, the body is a historically, culturally, and politically inscribed entity, a focal point for social discipline and social empowerment or the lack thereof.15 When gender roles are inscribed onto bodies, ideologies about women’s and men’s bodies (such as “maternal instincts” and “rationality”), as well as about their relationships (the discourse on “sentimental love” and on the new “nuclear family”) are perceived as constructed (and not natural) and thus negotiable. The eighteenth century has been a fertile ground for gender analyses because it is the historical site when the modern notion of “opposite” sexes, the two-sex-model, originated.16 Earlier, men and women were seen homologous, as different on a continuum in which females figured as less perfectly shaped males, an inferior and inverted version of the male indicating the female’s inferior place in the great chain of being. With regard to texts and images from medical history, Londa Schiebinger points out that until the eighteenth century there was little interest in portraying the female body as essentially different than that of the male.17 Just as medical science began to level out the hierarchical relationships of the view that females are less fully developed males by regarding each sex as unique and different, this difference received a new hierarchical form in the concept of Geschlechtscharakter, according to which women were “by nature” more suited to the domestic and emotional tasks of the home. Thus this reinterpretation of women’s physiology — in particular, reproductive biology — solved problems in social and political thought.18 The separation of tasks based on gender implies a hierarchical relationship. One set of tasks — like paid work,

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scientific and intellectual accomplishment, and political participation — was linked to only one gender and was valued higher than another cluster of tasks. Affording power and privilege to one gender and declaring the other unfit for public life enabled the modern social, economic, and political order.19 This concept of gendered identities (Geschlechtscharaktere), postulating the innate character and disposition differences between men and women, linked women with the domestic sphere. Men were expected to function in both the realm of work and that of the domestic sphere. This construct attributed activity and rationality to men and passivity and emotional-relational values, “Demut, Geduld, Nachgiebigkeit, Emotionalität, Freundlichkeit, and Fürsorglichkeit” to women.20 Women were entrusted with and made responsible for creating a harmonious domestic sphere as a complementary sphere to that of work and public discourse.21 In the internalization and seeming naturalization of these values, literature played a decisive role, creating and stabilizing the modern family.22 Thus the redefinition of both genders creating modern self-identity was closely linked to the emergence of this new social organization. Gendered identities and the emerging modern discourse on the family were part of the differentiation and specialization of modern society. The eighteenth century saw the beginning of the transition from a feudal society to a modern society organized according to function into two distinct spheres: (1) The professional and specialized sphere of work away from the household and (2) the realm of intimate family life.23 Each serves a different function and requires a distinct value system. This new social system was organized through gender differences within the family as the core of bourgeois identity formation. Efficiency, utility, and profitability governed the professional life of the middle class (men) while the family became the site for happiness, harmony, and sympathetic sociability. The family as a refuge allowed for the structural transformation of society because it compensated for the deficits in solidarity, social stability, and a sense of community in the public sphere. As we will see below, social historians point to the beginnings of the modern separation of paid work and consumption, which frees the family unit to focus on emotive and social values in a compensatory function fulfilling the demand for happiness. In this social context, the new gender roles facilitated the development from a society based on conceptions of divinely ordained “stations” in the world to one grounded in specialization, differentiation, and mobility. Among others, the literary discourse anticipates and helps to bring about these changes in identities, which then can foster social change. Gender roles can be best observed in their dominant site of interaction, the social context of sentimental (“empfindsame”) love, the new concept of marriage based on love (“Liebesehe”), and the emotionalized family. The social historian Lawrence Stone characterizes the modern


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family as displaying intensified affective bonding of the nuclear core at the expense of the extended kin, and a strong sense of individual autonomy and the right to personal freedom and the pursuit of happiness.24 Niklas Luhmann in his sociological study on the development of love as a historically changing code of social communication examines a variety of European texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. He concludes that the eighteenth century in Germany was a time of stagnation in the transformation of the love paradigm. For him the decisive replacement of gallantry with the concept of friendship emerged in England early in the century.25 Yet the negotiation of (familial) love in Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson (1755) and Emilia Galotti (1772) represent important stages in the development of the discourse of love in Germany. Günter Sasse, who focuses on German literature of the eighteenth century, distinguishes three phases of love: “vernünftige Liebe,” “zärtliche Liebe,” and “romantische Liebe” in the course of the eighteenth century in Germany.26 The first concept of love as the basis of marriage is closely tied to the older alliance model (Luhmann). The rational, reasoned selection of a partner in the early Enlightenment is based on the moral character of the lovers, which requires a close and deliberate examination of the qualities of a potential marriage partner. Reasoned fulfillment of the social roles (competence, honesty, and a pleasant agreeable personality for women and the ability to provide well, supervise the proper working of the household, a moderate temper for men) dominated the selection. The resulting marriage stressed the proper distribution of tasks and responsibilities between men and women and disciplined passion and sexuality in both genders. As will become clear in the interpretations of Lessing’s text, these various representations of love do not simply replace each other in clearly distinguishable stages but overlap and contain traces from earlier paradigms. This rational model served as the social context for Lessing’s early comedy Der junge Gelehrte (The Young Scholar, 1754)27 where the son wants to develop his own identity and disassociate himself from the authority of the father. The emphasis is on the transition of authority from the male head of household, Chrysander, to the next generation, the son Damis. The father, a merchant, wishes above all to secure the financial and social position of his son. To this end, he seeks to manipulate him on the one hand into a marriage with a well-to-do woman, Juliane, who is also his god-daughter, and on the other to dissuade Damis from his (comic) aspirations of becoming an intellectual (“Gelehrter”). In his initial rejection of women, the bookish twenty-year-old considers courtship as unbecoming of a “scholar” and he repeats every negative gender stereotype encountered in his extensive yet undigested consumption of books: “Wenigstens ist es keine Ehre, besonders für einen Gelehrten. Mit wem man umgeht, dessen Sitte nimmt man nach und nach an. Jedes Frauenzimmer ist eitel,

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hoffärtig, geschwätzig, zänkisch und Zeitlebens kindisch, es mag so alt werden, als es will. Jedes Frauenzimmer weiß kaum, daß es eine Seele hat, um die es unendlich mehr besorgt sein sollte, als um den Körper. Sich ankleiden, auskleiden und wieder anders ankleiden; vor dem Spiegel sitzen; seine eigenen Reize darinne bewundern; auf ausgekünstelte Mienen sinnen; mit neugierigen Augen müßig an dem Fenster liegen; unsinnige Romane lesen und aufs höchste zum Zeitvertreibe eine Strücknadel in die Hand nehmen; das sind die wichtigsten seiner Beschäftigungen” (1, 149). For the father, economic stability — achieved by selecting a reasonable profession28 and by an equally compatible marriage based on the similar background and economic status of groom and bride (Damis and Juliane are almost like brother and sister) — are prerequisites to becoming a successfully socialized man. Chrysander portrays his god-daughter as a properly socialized woman: she is pretty, virtuous, honest and will be a pleasure to her future husband. Utilizing the genre conventions of comedy, the excessive attention on the economic aspects (Chrysander) and the superficial focus on learning (Damis) to the detriment of familial emotional values is ridiculed, suggesting that for a meaningful bourgeois masculinity to emerge, both Crysander’s focus on economic interests — he wishes to secure Juliane’s inheritance for his son — and Damis’s excessive celebration of narrowly defined pedantic learning masked as “reason” need to be corrected. Enhancing the emotional underpinnings of the family to provide more balance is the corrective to this undesirable, exaggerated materialism on the one hand and bookishness on the other. After much comical intrigue, which ridicules both positions, Juliane marries her previous suitor, Valer, who loves her unconditionally and with or without her inheritance. In Die Juden (1754)29 the daughter is brought up in the remote country estate of her father without the influence of a mother or other women. She is portrayed as pure nature, naive, intuitive, direct, trusting and devoted to her father. He tells the traveler: “Sie ist wenig unter Leuten ihresgleichen gewesen, und besitzt die Kunst zu gefallen, die man schwerlich auf dem Lande erlernen kann, und die doch oft mehr als die Schönheit selbst vermag, in einem sehr geringeren Grade. Es ist alles bei ihr noch die sich selbst gelassene Natur” (1, 458). When her father is rescued by a stranger, he develops a friendship with his rescuer. In gratitude and friendship, he offers him his daughter’s hand in marriage. The daughter is happy to comply as she has developed an emotional attachment to the stranger. When it is revealed that the new friend is a Jew, the anti-Semitic father acknowledges his prejudice and admits his error of judging a man by anything other than his character, in which his ethnicity is not supposed to play a role. However, the marriage is no longer mentioned, as would be expected in an eighteenth-century context when sanctions on both sides prohibited intermarriage between Jews and Christians.30


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This comedy represents a transition from the model of familial alliance (in which the families arranged marriages based on social and economic compatibility and interests), and toward the sentimental love paradigm (Luhmann), based on emotional attraction and friendship. While this model is invoked as an ideal (private value), the social context — including the law — precludes the marriage. The author points to the limitations of the discursive construction of sentimental love when it is pitted against social, political, ethnic, and religious forces. The portrayal of the daughter as pure nature and heart merely intensifies the earlier female gender characteristics, while the father figure becomes more complex. He gains a new emotional dimension through his friendship with a man who is not socially acceptable. This forces him to place emotions, an ethics of the heart, above social norms. In Der Freigeist (The Freethinker, 1749),31 the father, Lisidor, hopes to marry off his daughters, Juliane and Henriette, to Adrast and Theophan, whom he considers similar in temperament to his two daughters. In this play emotional attraction of the lovers — not necessarily their similarity in temperament — is emphasized as the deciding factor and the best possible indicator of future happiness. Basing marriage on emotional attraction and friendship are hallmarks of the sentimental love paradigm (“zärtliche Liebe”). With the de-emphasis of the alliance model, the couple itself became increasingly important in initiating a successful love match that could lead to marriage. Günter Sasse and Jutta Greis consider this the dominant model in the eighteenth century. “Zärtliche Liebe” is fostered by the literary and cultural movement of “Empfindsamkeit” with its heightened sensibilities. These new mentalities — symbolized in the cultural practices of friendship and empathy — governed the new interpersonal value system.32 The more intimate family life that followed required significant changes in the relationship and self-definition of men and women. In the comedy Der Freigeist, which is not a typical “Verlachkomödie” ridiculing and correcting a character flaw or vice, the conflict arises from an innocent misreading of the psychology of love and attraction. Lessing emphasizes the inner values in a range of character traits — all portrayed as positive middle-class characteristics. In extensive descriptions both men and women discuss the character and personality traits that attract them to their lovers. One daughter is characterized by her father as a born pastor’s wife, pious, simple, and innocent and the other one as pretty, lively, with significant social skills and pleasant talents: “Die Juliane ist eine geborene Priesterfrau; und Henriette—in ganz Deutschland muß kein Mädchen zu finden sein, das sich für Ihn, Adrast, besser schickte. Hübsch, munter, fix; sie singt; sie tanzt; sie spielt; kurz, sie ist meine leibhaftige Tochter. Juliane dagegen ist die liebe heilige Einfalt” (1, 371). Yet the playwright departs from this stereotype and differentiates his female characters, allowing for a larger range of virtuous femininity. Adrast

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points to the simplistic nature of the father’s characterization of his daughters: “Juliane? Sagen Sie das nicht. Ihre Vollkommenheiten fallen vielleicht nur weniger in die Augen. Ihre Schönheit blendet nicht, aber sie geht ans Herz. Man läßt sich gern von ihren stillen Reizen fesseln, und man biegt sich mit Bedacht in ihr Joch [. . .] Alle Tugenden scheinen sich in ihrer Seele verbunden zu haben” (371). While the father initially assumes that his two daughters might be best off marrying compatible, similar characters in arranged marriages, it turns out that they are attracted to their opposites, that is, the designated suitor of the other sister. Theophan is a young pastor and Adrast a freethinker and skeptic, whom the former seeks to befriend and dissuade of what he considers a superficial skepticism. Theophan attributes the other’s values to his education “in der großen Welt” (383) and does not see them as part of his nature. After Adrast’s financial house is in order, the two men reveal to each other that they are attracted to the women promised to the other. The attraction is mutual, so all ends well as the father is happy to comply with their wishes. He is emotionally attached to his daughters and has their happiness in mind. Even after he hears that Adrast has little money left after he paid his debts, the father dismisses the economic concerns as less important and the play ends with the blessing from the women’s grandmother who praises these new love matches as beneficial. She argues that Adrast and Henriette need partners who are morally strong and help them find the right path in life. Thus the sentimentalized family becomes a site of self-fulfillment and happiness. Conforming to the genre, the play can end in harmony because there is no fundamental conflict; everybody gets what he or she truly needs and desires. The transition from the birth family (grandmother and father) to the conjugal families of the daughters is a smooth one. Within the genre of bourgeois tragedy, Lessing is able to address the conflicts inherent in this new model of gender relationships and the tension between the emotionalized relationship to parental authority and the erotic love paradigm. Here, Lessing negotiated the emotional socialization of values and gender. Lessing’s concept of love (and that of others) represents a hybrid. Closest to the model of “zärtliche Liebe,” it displays traits from the first two paradigms (“vernünftige Liebe” and “sentimentale” or “zärtliche Liebe”) while also giving voice to the dangerous undercurrent of sexuality and passion. To distinguish this hybrid form from these established paradigms, this concept of love will be referred to as erotic love. In Miß Sara Sampson (1755)33 love is pitted against both the older alliance model and the mentality of sentimentality. We detect contradictions within the sentimental love paradigm, as sentimental love (Zärtlichkeit) and desire (Wollust) are no longer clearly distinguished.34 The text problematizes this strict separation by pointing to the role of desire and the suppression of desire and to the need to reexamine the


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traditional opposition of love and passion (Wollust). Consequently, the understanding of virtue with regard to both men and women has to be reexamined. Sara as an intensification of Lessings’s earlier daughter-figures is guided by her nature and emotions. Yet, when her emotional and erotic feelings draw her to a forbidden and potentially unworthy love object, the libertine Mellefont, the emotionalized modern family is put to the test. Sara is ill equipped to negotiate the emerging conflict. Pulled by erotic love, she goes against her own better judgment, her religious and moral value system, and follows the libertine, hoping against hope that her love has reformed him and that her precarious situation can be remedied by their marriage. Yet her nightmarish dream tells her what she already knows but does not want to acknowledge: that she has become like Mellefont’s former lover Marwood. She is fundamentally conflicted by the tension between her sentimental and erotic love for Mellefont and her moral value system. The intimate birth family, fostering highly charged emotional bonds between father and daughter, not only created the desire for the transference of these strong bonds to a lover in the conjugal family (in the resolution of the Oedipal stage) but also creates guilt for having betrayed her father. Sasse, focusing on a different aspect, argues that the conflict arises from the elimination of sexual desire from the sentimental love paradigm. Greis agrees, and considers the tension between sexuality and sentimentality to be the moment of crisis in this play. Sara’s desire for Mellefont cannot be integrated into her birth family’s bourgeois model of marriage, and Mellefont is not able to create a conjugal family because he fears the disappearance of passion and status—the latter is less emphasized in this play but will reemerge in Emilia Galotti, where it is more explicitly addressed.35 Socialized in the alliance model, Mellefont’s resistance to matrimony is indicative of marriage in this older paradigm and is contrasted with the modern sentimental family model and its concept of “Liebesehe” that Sara envisions. In the courtly alliance model, love and marriage cannot be reconciled, because marriage is a durable socio-political contract, whereas love and passion are fleeting emotions.36 Yet here the crisis is no longer created directly by the socio-political concerns of the alliance model — even though they are addressed in the play.37 On the one hand it is brought on by Mellefont’s inability to depart from his socialization, and by the instability of his identity, which shifts uneasily between two mentalities, and on the other by Sara’s conflicted position between erotic love and virtue, between father and lover. Lessing portrays Mellefont as more complicated than the stereotypical libertine, the seducer without a conscience. Mellefont’s failure to truly reinvent his own masculine identity by aligning himself with bourgeois masculinity makes him a conflicted character. The fact that he has developed the

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sense of guilt associated with bourgeois ethics (as seen, for example, in his love for his daughter and his pangs of guilt and sympathy toward Marwood and the expectation that she could be sincere) makes him vulnerable. Mellefont’s misreading of Marwood’s motives gives her access to Sara, which will eventually lead to Sara’s murder and his own suicide. Torn between two worlds, Mellefont fails to see Marwood’s intrigue. He is unable to depart completely from the concept of masculinity associated with his earlier life, but at the same time he is no longer comfortable with his earlier habits. His identity has become unstable. Another important aspect of Mellefont’s earlier identity was his sexual freedom with its (fleeting) passion, which was separate from marriage. When his desire and passion were drawn to Sara, a different kind of woman from the courtly Marwood — characterized by virtue and her “bourgeois naturalness” — he could delight in the fusing of erotic passion and the emotive power of the sentimental values of “Empfindsamkeit,” yet he is unable to unite them with the permanence of marriage: “Sara Sampson, meine Geliebte! Wie viel Seligkeiten liegen in diesen Worten! Sara Sampson, meine Ehegattinn! — Die Hälfte dieser Seligkeiten ist verschwunden! Und die andere Hälfte — wird verschwinden” (318). He not only realizes that bourgeois feminine virtue is achieved by the repression of sexuality, which is, of course, part of its attraction, since it allows desire to be maintained; he also fears that once sexuality is sanctioned in marriage, erotic love loses half of its attraction and habituation will destroy the rest of desire. Using images of enslavement and incarceration (“auf Zeit Lebens gefesselt zu seyn,” 318), he senses that the domestication of sexuality in marriage represents a danger to erotic desire. While moral philosophers at the time were busy arguing for domesticating desire,38 Mellefont sees this domestication as a challenge to personal freedom and as a destructive aspect of the new identity he is forging. Not just in Mellefont but also in Sir William (and in Waitwell) masculinity is shown in a transitory state. Sir William’s masculinity has been interpreted both as a virtue and as a weakness. In this character, the author departs from the norm of an authoritarian masculine father figure who has to protect the virtue and social position of his family, in particular his daughter. Instead, he is shown to become an ideal sentimental (“empfindsamer”) father. Steven Martinson sees him as “a positive enlightened authority figure,”39 arguing: “Whatever else it may be, Miss Sara Sampson includes the development of a positive enlightened authority figure, of a father who transcends the either-or imperative of a conventional morality through an essential Christian act of forgiveness and whose newly won moral authority is both a cause of Sara’s dilemma and a source of inspiration for her own heroic deed of forgiveness.”40 Helmut Peitsch also considers this transitional masculinity to be a positive development as he sees Sir William as governed by altruism and sympathy.41


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Critics commonly link Sir William’s humanity with the bourgeois value system, which Lessing helped to create.42 Sampson loosens the restrictive morality of the bourgeois order.43 For Peter-Horst Neumann, the negotiation of authority is indicative of the larger issue of how rationally to legitimize authority and how to combine this with a wish for emancipation (“Mündigkeit”).44 Bengt Algot Sørensen’s Herrschaft und Zärtlichkeit examines the structural elements of patriarchal authority and the changes that the concept underwent in the name of sentimentality.45 Yet one could also note Sir Sampson’s failure in his normative duties as patriarch protecting the virtue and social and economic position of his daughter. This weakened masculinity arises perhaps on the one hand from aging, frailty, and increased emotional needs (“Ich würde doch lieber von einer lasterhaften Tochter, als von gar keiner, geliebt seyn wollen,” 268) or on the other out of self-interest,46 which Sir Sampson acknowledges in the end: “Soll ein Vater so eigennützig handeln? Sollen wir nur die lieben, die uns lieben? Tadle mich, liebste Sara, tadle mich; ich sah mehr auf meine Freude an dir, als auf dich selbst” (347). Denis Jonnes argues that the father-daughter relationship mirrors the destructive social conditions of the time, which are informed by self-interest.47 Wurst and Gail Hart point out that the sentimental family paradigm in which authority is no longer enforced by threats and punishment represents merely a re-interpretation of, not an abandonment of authority. Instead authority is enforced by the anticipation of the wishes of others and by emotional ties. Sentimental patriarchs gain psychological power over their families in addition to their legal and economic powers.48 It is easier to leave an irate father than one who is saddened by the behavior of his daughter.49 As we have seen in Miß Sara Sampson, the familial relationship becomes all-important and binds its members to each other with emotional ties. More importantly, the underlying, socially and culturally defined concept of “virtue” that conditions these ties requires from all participants significant degrees of self-control before they speak or act.50 The failure to place the interest of others over one’s own may result in massive guilt, as Sara’s conflicted position demonstrates. Lessing shows that Sara’s exclusive focus on emotional and relational values is ineffective when dealing with two opposing emotional demands, the familial love to the father and the erotic attraction to the lover. The exclusive sentimentalized family relationship and its emotional value system is not effective in solving (social) conflicts of interest. Miß Sara Sampson also emphasizes the emotional socialization of the daughter by the servant Waitwell and his non-traditional masculinity. Waitwell, the male “mother figure,” takes care of the emotive and physical work usually done by the mother in the bourgeois household. He is the one who holds her as a child and who admires her smiles and first sounds (267). Feminist historians like Karin Hausen have pointed out that while

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masculinity and femininity were supposed to form the ideal basis of Enlightened society in their complementary spheres, the effects of this separation were repressive for women because it tied them to the house and family. Lessing’s construct of masculinity challenges these traditional gender stereotypes. The play links domestic tasks to the masculine identity of the servant instead of linking tenderness and nurturing to a woman figure. Thus the play departs from gender stereotyping and attributing certain virtues to one or the other gender. Instead, the playwright links certain personal characteristics (nurturing) to tasks and behaviors in their social context rather than to gender itself. While Waitwell is shown as quite an effective “mother-figure,” Marwood is decidedly “unmotherly,” as she instrumentalizes her daughter by using her as a pawn in her calculating plan. Lessing’s complex refracting of “gender characteristics” does not follow a simple binary model, and thus represents an early readiness to dissociate certain characteristics from gender, for instance domesticity from the concept of femininity or “motherliness” from motherhood as constructed by convention. Just as Lessing questions essentialist notions of social roles for the respective genders, the tragic ending does not allow the spectator to indulge in the unqualified celebration of emotion as the privileged means to transcend power relationships. He refrains from linking emotion to virtue and rationality to vice but instead insists on the contextualization of either in order to determine whether the use of reason or emotion is virtuous. The one-act tragedy Philotas (1759) seemingly speaks to heroic sentiments of the Seven Years’ War, condemning the irrationality of passion, even in the name of the noble sentiment of patriotism.51 The young prince Philotas is governed by enthusiasm and his passions to such a degree that his imagination takes on a life of its own in his hallucinations (“Schlachtenrausch”), which destroy him.52 His capture in battle spurs his troops to heroic efforts. Despite his self-absorption and excessive passion, the audience feels empathy (“Mitleid”) with Philotas because they can understand the psychological motivation that drives him into suicide as self-sacrifice.53 When Philotas hears that the opposing king’s son has also been captured by his father and that King Aridäus is willing to exchange Philotas for his own son, Polytimet, Philotas—driven by exaggerated honor and bravery—decides to kill himself in captivity so that his father retains a bargaining chip in the negotiations and will emerge victorious. The absoluteness of his irrationality and passion — his failure to invoke the mediating powers of reason — turns the virtue of patriotism into a vice. Selflessness is closely aligned with selfishness. If Philotas’s youthful vision of adulthood misreads it as determined by heroic masculinity instead of responsible, productive conduct,54 it is the responsible masculinity of adulthood that is under scrutiny in Minna von Barnhelm (1767).55 A similar condemnation of absolute virtues and their link to gender informs that comedy. Lessing calls into question existential


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values that his characters have raised to the level of absolute principles and pursue slavishly. Placing it at the core of the play, Sasse explores the relationship between men and women in their distinct spheres of work/public life on the one hand and the emotional values of the family and the couple, with their gendered value systems, on the other.56 It is true that the crisis arises from the potential loss of honor caused by Tellheim’s financial dealings related to the war, which would implicate Minna as his wife. Thus Tellheim’s honor needs to be restored before a marriage is feasible: “. . .wenn meiner Ehre nicht die vollkommenste Genugtuung geschieht; so kann ich, mein Fräulein, der Ihrige nicht sein. Denn ich bin es in den Augen der Welt nicht wert, zu sein. Das Fräulein von Barnhelm verdient einen unbescholtenen Mann” (680–81). As long as he is not rehabilitated he is not a full member of his social circle and neither would be his wife. Yet he pursues his honor excessively by refusing to let others help him or even pursue what is owed him. His virtue, his stubborn blind insistence on honor as an absolute value—even if it means giving up Minna — is in danger of turning virtue into a vice, into false pride: “Ich empfinde eben, daß es mir unanständig ist, diese späte Gerechtigkeit anzunehmen; daß es besser sein wird, wenn ich das, was man durch einen so schimpflichen Verdacht entehret hat, gar nicht wiederverlange—Ja; ich will den Brief nicht bekommen haben. Das sei alles, was ich darauf antworte und tue! (im Begriffe, ihn zu zerreißen)” (699–97). If Minna initially reacts to their meeting with the spontaneous language of emotion, she is not limited to the stereotypical “Natürlichkeit” or “Zärtlichkeit” but does not shy away from designing an intrigue to beat Tellheim at his own game, exaggerated pride. She feigns having been disinherited by her uncle and guardian for following Tellheim. She mirrors back Tellheim’s rhetorical strategy—blindly insisting on the absolute virtue of honor—by insisting on handling her own problem, her pretended state of dishonor for following him. But Tellheim is quick to point to stereotypical gender differences rather than recognizing the parallels: Das Fräulein: “Wollen Sie es wagen, Ihre eigene Rede in meinem Munde zu schelten?” Von Tellheim: “Sophistin! So entehrt sich das schwächere Geschlecht durch alles, was dem stärkern nicht ansteht? So soll der Mann alles erlauben, was dem Weibe geziemet? Welches bestimmte die Natur zur Stütze des andern?” (697)

Brigitte Prutti correctly points out that Minna is defending her own subjectivity and her desire.57 To this end, she uses both reason and emotion. Furthermore, her decisive action and resolve produce a breakthrough in Tellheim’s identity dominated by rigid absolute value (his sense of exaggerated honor), which allows him to open up to new possibilities.58 In both Tellheim and Minna, Lessing creates more complex characters that do not adhere to the limiting gender characteristics.

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In Emilia Galotti (1772)59 the negotiation of gender norms addresses the previously de-emphasized aspects of the passions and sexuality as part of identity construction for both men and women.60 Sexuality is chaotic and unpredictable and is traditionally associated with courtly passion.61 But not only the Prince and Orsina are driven by passion; Emilia’s sensuality also becomes a powerful presence in the play. Likewise, her father is driven by passion. His blind, rigid morality and rage both cloud his judgment and cause him to neglect his duties, that is, to protect his family from harm and dissolution. He thus fails in his masculinity. As in the other plays, the figures negotiate between conflicting norm and value systems. Courtly masculinity embodied by the Prince is undermined and destabilized by his attraction to bourgeois values.62 Because the Prince allows himself to be attracted to Emilia’s virtue (that is, the bourgeois value system), he plunges into social disorientation.63 When we first meet the Prince, he attributes his melancholic restlessness to his attraction to Emilia. Sørensen views the catastrophe in the play as the erroneous connection between human private values and feudal power. As the Prince is distracted by his infatuation with Emilia Galotti, he is unable to fulfill his political duties as judge and he decides the cases before him not on the basis of the law and without due deliberation. Instead, he decides in haste on a capital case no less and pardons another simply because the petitioner has the same first name as his beloved just so he can return to his daydreams quickly. His attraction to Emilia and the bourgeois virtues she embodies render him ineffectual. Instead of relying on his advisor Marinelli to execute the intrigue designed to procure Emilia for the Prince, his desire makes him impatient and he interferes by approaching Emilia in church and thus derailing the plan. Emilia Galotti demonstrates the illusionary nature of trying to educate rulers, and also the political impotence of morality.64 Furthermore, the play alludes to the enormous costs that were associated with the bourgeoisie’s retreat into the exclusive domesticity and intimacy of the couple removed from the larger social context. Both Appiani and Emilia approach their wedding day with melancholic premonitions. Emilia dreams that her sparkling colorful gems—a present from Appiani and a symbol of their love—turn into pearls and pearls signify tears. Appiani fears that although he seems close to his union with Emilia, much can still go wrong—as indeed it does. These uneasy premonitions suggests that all is not well in this idyll of domesticity in the paternal valleys. While the bourgeoisie was successful in attacking the nobility with regard to their sexual lasciviousness, demonizing sexuality also robbed the bourgeoisie of an important dimension of their own identity.65 The perceived lasciviousness of the court, especially the ways that it consigned passion and marriage to different codes, was a central point of the critique leveled by the bourgeoisie against the courtly aristocracy and the absolutist system, which sought to found instead a humane society


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based on “natural” conceptions of virtue — Tugend — and, most notably, a sexual morality that resolved the conflict between passion and social stability in a marriage based on mutual love and the sanctity of the family. Because the dynastic absolutist system depended on often loveless political marriages leaving rulers to satisfy their passions with successions of extravagant mistresses, sentimental love based on friendship, personal attraction, and fidelity became an important strategic moment in the attack against courtly society,66 in the process helping to define bourgeois individuality. This aspect finds expression in the virtue of the bourgeois daughter with its connotation of sexual purity — which is hardly surprising since philosophy associated women with the body and emotions. Odoardo demands absolute virtue from his daughter, which is directed against life because it is based on the complete repression of the senses.67 His victory—the Prince is deprived of his prize and thus his prestige and power is diminished—comes at a high price, the life of his beloved daughter. Wierlacher argues that Lessing criticizes this repressive virtue at the core of bourgeois femininity and argues that both Emila’s enjoyment of life, her Lebensfreude and her faith with its fear of sin are part of her socialization.68 Fick suggests that in the end it is not Emilia’s virtue that she confirms with her death but her absolute helplessness in light of the social demands placed on virtuous idealized femininity. A vital part of her gendered identity is her dependency, which does not allow her to act but only to react. She is shown several times asking for guidance from her mother and father. The messages she repeatedly receives are that the world outside of the family is lascivious and lacks virtue, that she is dependent on the protection of the family to guard her virtue, and that on her own, she is unable to protect herself. When her father fails to protect her, she is helpless.69 Fick goes on to argue that Emilia internalized the message that she is unable to determine her own fate and that she is a helpless victim in light of male desire (338). Her socialization is indicative of the gender-specific education within the new intimate family. The ambivalent authority of the father wavering between suspicious authority and oedipal attraction70 is responsible for this femininity defined by a lack of self-confidence. Although Emilia tries to flee from the power of her suppressed desires, fleeting thoughts, unrest, and fantasies continue to haunt her. Instead of acknowledging their power and confronting them, her gendered socialization, linking femininity and dependency, does not allow her to trust her instincts. The passions can become overpowering because bourgeois ideology excludes them from virtuous identity, for both men and women, but especially the latter. Following Foucault, Greis calls it a “yearning gaining its power from having been declared taboo” (“Begehren, dessen Macht sich gerade aus der Tabuisierung herleitet”).71 In the relationship between Appiani and Emilia there is therefore no room for sexuality and sensuality. Sensuality is repressed, yet it remains a

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strong undercurrent, which Emilia senses. It surfaces in her encounter with the prince, the symbolism of the wedding dress, and in her acknowledging her sensuality and sexuality (“warmes Blut”). Yet, the rigorous morality implied by Odoardo’s sense of the imperatives of his masculinity obliges him to live with his family far from the Prince’s court. He chastises his wife, Claudia, for allowing their daughter access to the house of the Grimaldi and the forms of entertainment that Emilia encountered there.72 Odoardo’s rigorous male virtue and his need to control, his suspicions, passionate rage, and desire for revenge overpower his rationality and his better judgment. He fails to calm himself, despite repeated attempts. TerNedden is thus correct in his assessment that the play does not center on the vice-virtue contrast but shows how both are found in bourgeois and noble circles. Lessing’s political message is thus, according to Ter-Nedden, not how to eliminate the feudal system and Absolutism but how to educate the individual to a higher sense of morality (not unlike Schiller).73 The play itself does not model this higher sense of morality but points at the flaws of the existing one, thus offering a challenge rather than suggesting answers. Odoardo’s rigorous rejections of the ambivalences associated with the court and its pleasures, the reason why he delights in Appiani’s decision to move to the country with Emila (“in seinen väterlichen Thälern sich selbst zu leben,” 396), turn out to be no solution for the future. The younger version of the father, the soon-to-be son (-in-law), remains strangely nondescript and ineffectual, suggesting that the politics of refusal and repression hold little promise. The masculinity that Appiani embodies is clearly attracted to Emilia’s sensuality. This is suggested in the cultural symbols that bespeak her identity when he first met her: the simple “natural” dress (“fliegend und frei,” 404), and her flowing hair as the traditional symbol of women’s sexuality (“In seinem eignen braunen Glanze; in Locken, wie sie die Natur schlug,” 404). Yet his unease and depression on his wedding day suggest reluctance to see their future as happy.74 His sense of dread and melancholy is paralleled by Emilia’s dream, in which the sparkle and fire of the gemstones turn into the muted sheen of pearls, suggesting the transformation of erotic desire and sensuality into disembodied friendship (403–4). Emilia’s dream suggests that the values of sentimental love turn into sorrow in an absolute and exclusive ascetic relationship devoid of a larger social context and its pleasures. This double trepidation problematizes the exclusion of sensuality in the construction of femininity and masculinity. The mood suggests that the grand expectations for the happiness and self-fulfillment of the couple as the ideal site of bourgeois intimacy remain unfulfilled in this play — even before the catastrophe of the plot. The mother figures in eighteenth-century plays have not fared well in their portrayal by the authors and even worse in their reception. The negatively portrayed mothers in the Storm and Stress plays, at first glance


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apparently modeled after Claudia Galotti (like Evchen Humbrecht’s mother), seem to have cast a dark shadow backwards onto Claudia. Yet a closer inspection reveals that regarding her as a self-serving character without morality would be to adopt Odoardo’s problematic perspective. Instead, I would argue that Lessing conceptualized her as a mixed character, who is mindful of the context of the given values rather than insisting on their absoluteness. Her contextualized values are by necessity, at times, unreliable and contingent. She is aware of her husband’s dangerous flaw of insisting on the absoluteness of virtue, his destructive rage, his damaging suspicions, his rigorous condemnation of all joy and pleasure. She also anticipates the effect of his disposition on his daughter who is socialized by an internalized fear, creating insecurity and dependency on her family. In the scholarship on Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779)75 the issue of gender is, of course, overshadowed by the concerns with the topic of (religious) tolerance and the intersection of the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religions.76 However, many of the aspects of (religious) tolerance also shed a light on a new understanding of gender roles. Peter Demetz attributes the power of the ring — an opal symbolizing divine grace in the alchemist tradition77 — to the wearer’s trust (“Zuversicht”) in its powers.78 If we apply this insight to the understanding of virtue, then the active pursuit of virtue and personal engagement rather than a reliance on absolute values and dogma (as historically constructed truths) are at the core of true humanity. After all, humanity’s theoretical grasp of truth is limited and this insight should spur humanity to act ethically.79 Three instances of ethical action are portrayed in the play: Nathan adopts Recha, Saladin spares the Templar’s life, and the Templar rescues Recha from the fire. In all instances, benevolence reaches beyond rigorous individual norms and religious values. At the same time, in the Templar, for example, we see the frailty of absolute virtue. Divine providence can only be realized in humanity’s active recognition of it and above all in their ethical deeds.80 Furthermore, the Templar demonstrates the fragility of rationality when passions reign. The desirable integration of reason and emotion in an activist sense of ethics is embodied in Nathan’s masculinity. Despite Nathan’s despair over the murder of his family by the hands of the Christians, his reason returns and with it his trust in providence (“doch dann kam die Vernunft allmählig wieder. Sie sprach mit leiser Stimm’: ‘und doch ist Gott!’” 139).81 The realization that evil is part of the divine order and the resolve to continue striving for ethical choices arising from this insight is a manifestation of human free will and reason.82 It is the ethical task (the virtue) of ideal masculinity to help create the best of all possible worlds and in this striving to come as close to the divine as possible. Unlike Sir William and Odoardo, Nathan does not retreat to the presumably apolitical sphere of the country but remains active in his business and trade. As part of his identity, his work does not allow him to indulge in

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this ideology of refusal. This position is embodied in Al-Hafi instead, whose vision of living in holy retreat by the Ganges is devalued. Furthermore, the family in this play is not created by blood but by benevolence. As Helmut Schneider argues, the universal, symbolic family is based on the exclusion of the sexual bodily aspects “indem sie die Körper aus der physischen Zersplitterung ins vergeistigte Symbol versammelt.”83 The family as the traditional site for biological reproduction becomes the site for obscuring biological heritage in favor of the symbolic (Schneider 315). Consequently the relationship between the Christian Daja, who takes the place of a mother figure in this family, and Nathan is one based on negotiation. Unlike Odoardo, Nathan does not order Daja to adopt his position but he tries to convince her with arguments and generosity (gifts). Similarly, the relationship between Nathan and his adoptive daughter, Recha, is characterized by more respect. In contrast to Odoardo’s demanding inquiry to know the whereabouts of his daughter at all times, Nathan inquires whether Recha is busy or whether she is inclined to see him. Nathan respects Recha as an independent person who can consent to a meeting or refuse. Recha, on the other hand, seems content to be as close to Nathan as possible and dependent on his wisdom and guidance. Nathan is trying to convince her to be more independent and to rely less on his opinions. He attempts to convince her by rational argumentation because he fears that she is guided predominantly by her heart.84 Nathan strives to dissuade her of her propensity to indulge in sentiment and emotion and to bring her instead to achieve a balance between “Kopf” and “Herz.” He departs from the celebration of female virtue as passivity, obedience, and emotionality. Virtue as an active sense of ethics is more complex than the narrow sense of morality embodied by Odoardo and Emilia. While the Pariarch exemplifies the rigorosity and inflexibility of absolute virtue, Nathan’s virtue is activist and contextualized.85 If we interpret the “Ringparabel” as a statement on ethics, as Helmut Fuhrmann has done,86 and not only on religion, we come to the conclusion that similar to the religious views expressed in the parable, not only is true virtue activist and in need of constant pursuit but it is also essentially unstable and fragile. Virtue requires continual striving and reexamination within the given — ever-changing — context. After all, in addition to the symbolism of the ring and the stone as a symbol of grace, the other associations that accompany the opal — its fragility, its marbled, unpredictable, multi-colored appearance — allude to the lack of uniformity and stability, and—underscored by the fact that there are three rings — essentially to its pluralist interpretation.87 In Nathan masculine virtue and strength are considerably more complex than in Sir William and Odoardo. If Sir William’s virtue was too passive and showed signs of weakness, and Odoardo’s one-dimensional sense of morality was too extreme, rigorous, and lacking the temperance of


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rationality,88 Nathan embodies a range of traits that approximate ideal enlightened masculinity: humility, patience, the ability to forgive, and empathy. These are, however, exactly those values that have become linked to femininity,89 pointing to the problematic nature of stereotypical notions of gender, and possibly suggesting that human virtues have to transcend gender boundaries. While the eighteenth-century discourse calls on women to create the intimate family (and Lessing’s early comedies hint at this), Lessing’s bourgeois tragedies suggest that for truly humanitarian social interaction to occur in the domestic sphere of the family, both genders must participate in its creation. Furthermore, virtue is less genderspecific than in the earlier plays, where, just as in the contemporary discourse, virtue for women was associated with sexual purity, while for men, it was linked with honor. In Nathan, Lessing departs from a portrayal of women (as daughters) as competent caring housekeepers, delightful flirts, and naive daughters of nature. Instead, Nathan’s loving criticism of his adopted daughter, helping her to become more self-reliant, hints at the need for both women and men to become more complex and to reexamine their identities. Instead of absolute abstract and specific virtues, a complex sense of practical ethics defines the essence of humanity and leaves less room for gender differences.

Notes 1

See also the thematic study on identity by Astrid J. Vonhausen, Rolle und Individualität: Zur Funktion der Familie in Lessings Dramen (Bern: Lang, 1993) in passim. She argues from a psychological model informed by Erik Erikson, Donald Winnicot, and Erich Neumann. 2 Jutta Greis, Drama Liebe: Zur Entstehung der modernen Liebe im Drama des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), 4. 3

Karin A. Wurst, Familiale Liebe ist die ‘wahre Gewalt’: Die Repräsentation der Familie in G. E. Lessings Dramatischem Werk (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988) in passim and Greis, who also points to the code-critical moments in Lessing’s dramatic works — in her case with emphasis on the love relationships (Greis, Drama Liebe, 11).

4

“Wird die Moderne durch eine Leugnung aller vorgegebenen Gewißheiten gekennzeichnet, durch das Vorherrschen einer prinzipiellen Skepsis und eines Zweifels an dem Wissen von der Welt, so folgt aus dieser Annahme unmittelbar die Notwendigkeit der Befragung des Orts und der Stabilität des eigenen Ichs — und damit die Identitätsproblematik.” Peter Wagner, “Fest-Stellungen: Beobachtungen zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskussion über Identität,” Identitäten, vol. 3, ed. Aleida Assmann and Heidrun Friese (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 44–72; here 52.

5 Wagner, “Fest-Stellungen,” 45. For the distinction between individual and collective identity and for a summary of the current concept of personal identity see

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Aleida Assmann and Heidrun Friese, “Einleitung,” Identitäten, vol. 3, ed. Aleida Assmann and Heidrun Friese (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 11–23; here 12. 6 Susan E. Gustafson, Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995), 14. In psychoanalytic terms, the “unity of the male body and masculine imagination is the precondition of culture and subject formation” (Gustafson, 16). Yet this basic developmental assertion or theory does not allow for historical variations, regarding the degree of stability, the ability to incorporate varying amounts of chaos and fragmentation that identity formation can absorb. 7 Judith Butler argues that it “would be wrong to think that a discussion of ‘identity’ ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that ‘persons’ only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 16. 8

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1973), 301.

9

Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole S. Vance (New York Routledge, 1984), 267–319. 10

Thus, Butler also regards the biological body as historically and culturally constructed; sex itself is produced. Not only is gender created in cultural performance, but sex, too, exists only as a result of social practices: “Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 7). 11 For a documentation of the cultural association of the body with femininity see Elizabeth Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8:1 (Spring 1982): 109–31. 12

Gustafson, Absent Mothers, 16.

13

Barbara Duden, “Das schöne Eigentum: Zur Herausbildung des bürgerlichen Frauenbildes an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert,” Kursbuch 47 (1977): 125–40; Susan Cocalis, “Der Vormund will Vormund sein: Zur Problematik der weiblichen Unmündigkeit im 18. Jahrhundert,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Germanistik Bd. 10. Gestaltet und Gestaltend, ed. Marianne Burkhard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), 33–55; Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frauen und Literatur in Deutschland von 1500–1800 (Munich: dtv, 1989); Heidi Rosenbaum, Formen der Familie: Untersuchungen von Familienverhältnissen, Sozialstruktur und sozialem Wandel der deutschen Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982); Claudia Honegger, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen und das Weib. 1750–1850 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1991); Wurst, Familiale Liebe, and Karin A. Wurst, Frauen und Drama um 1800 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991). 14 Monika Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 42. Additional citations are in the text.


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15 According to Butler, gender “as a shifting and contextual phenomenon [. . .] does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 10). Therefore she argues that “there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” and she goes on to clarify: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, as a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (25, 33). Because the eighteenth century attached significant value to “naturalness” (“Natürlichkeit”) as defining characteristics of bourgeois men and especially women it is worth exploring how gender characteristics become naturalized. Foucault points to the exertion of power onto the biological body through discourse during the eighteenth century, suggesting also that effort is necessary to create the appearance of “naturalness.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 34–35. And Ulrike Döcker in her study of conduct literature, which foregrounds personal behavior in an attempt to properly socialize the youth, examines the many techniques that these texts described to produce the ideal of “naturalness,” through careful, disciplined, and frequent physical and mental practices. “Die Fülle an Ratschlägen, wie man lernen könne, seinen Körper zu beherrschen, bezeugt unübersehbar, daß die gefordete Natürlichkeit der körperlichen Beherrschung von den Angehörigen des Mittelstandes erst angeeignet werden mußte.” Ulrike Döcker, Die Ordnung der bürgerlichen Welt: Verhaltensideale und soziale Praktiken im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1994), 90. 16

Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 1–41, here 2–3. 17

Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Gallagher and Laqueur, 42–82.

18 19

Gallagher and Laqueur, “Introduction,” The Making of the Modern Body, viii.

Jürgen Habermas’s seminal study on the transformation of the public sphere, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), points to the family as the central nexus between the public and the private sphere. The family served as a model of humanitarian values for the public sphere. In particular the seemingly benevolent relationship of the bourgeois father to his children, which was based on familial love and respect was to serve as a political model for the benevolent enlightened ruler (the notion of “Landesvater”). As Reinhard Koselleck argued: “In der politischen Anonymität der Vernunft, der Moral usw. lag ihre politische Eigenart und Wirksamkeit. Unpolitisch zu sein ist ihr Politikum.” Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (1959; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1973), 123. “Wenn das bürgerliche Drama Standesunterschiede — im Vergleich mit moralischen Werten — als belanglos darstellt oder auch seine Personen sehr oft aus dem Adel statt aus dem Bürgertum wählt, erobert also die Geistigkeit des Bürgertums trotz seiner Passivität in der

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politischen Öffentlichkeit im Grunde die anderen Stände; das Bürgertum suchte gesellschaftliche und politische Gleichheit, indem es seine Moral als überlegenes Ethos, als den höheren Adel, darstellt und alle Stände als der moralischen Allgemeinmenschlichkeit fähig zeigt . . .” Gerhard Sauder, “Bürgerliche Empfindsamkeit?” Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung 7 (1981: 149–64; here 156–57.) Although this political utopia linked to the family is an important context for the construction of bourgeois identity in the eighteenth century as I have argued elsewhere (Wurst, Familiale Liebe), this article focuses on the social and ethical implications of identity. 20

Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 147. See also in passim Karin Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’: Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976): 363–93; Susan Cocalis, “Der Vormund will Vormund sein,” 33–55; Barbara Duden, “Das schöne Eigentum”; Inge Stephan, “ ‘So ist die Tugend ein Gespenst’: Frauenbild und Tugendbegriff im bürgerlichen Trauerspiel bei Lessing und Schiller,” Lessing Yearbook 17 (1985): 1–20; and Claudia Honegger, Die Ordnung der Geschlechter. 21

See also Karin A. Wurst, “Abwesenheit-Schweigen-Tötung: Die Möglichkeiten der Frau? Lessings Funktionalisierung literarischer Klischees,” Orbis Litterarum 45 (1990), 113–27 in passim.

22

“Im populärphilosophischen Diskurs fällt die Gesamtverantwortung für die emotionale Arbeit, von der das Gelingen der harmonischen Privatsphäre abhängt, allein der Frau zu. Die emotional verbundene Familie, die auf dem Grundpfeiler der Liebesehe ruht, wird als Gegenbild für die ständig wachsende Entfremdung des Menschen — sprich des Mannes — von der Natur und von seiner Arbeit und für die Trennung der privaten und der öffentlichen Sphäre insgesamt gesehen. Sie ist ironischerweise Symptom und Heilmittel zugleich.” Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 51.

23

Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 89. See also Siegfried Schmidt, who utilizes the systems theoretical approach of Niklas Luhmann for his description of changes in the self-organization of literature: “In der umfangreichen soziologischen und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Literatur über das achtzehnte Jahrhundert wird der soziale Wandel, der sich in diesem Zeitraum vollzieht, weithin übereinstimmend gekennzeichnet als Übergang von einer ständisch geordneten (stratifizierten) zu einer funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft: Aus einer überkomplex gewordenen Gesellschaft differenzieren sich schrittweise Funktionen aus, die sich in Form eigenständiger sozialer Systeme organisieren.” Siegfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 16. 24

Lawrence Stone, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 22.

25

Niklas Luhmann, who examined European documents, considers the development of love and with it marriage in Germany as having been stagnant during the eighteenth century. Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982).


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26 Günter Sasse, Die Ordnung der Gefühle: Das Drama der Liebesheirat im 18. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 11. As examples for the first, Sasse quotes Johann Christoph Gottsched’s theoretical texts in Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen (Teil 1, 45. Stück, p. 359), for the second, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Die schwedische Gräfin von G. and Sophie LaRoche’s Die Geschichte des Fräulein von Sternheim, while the last paradigm is associated with Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. 27 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Der junge Gelehrte, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), 1, 139–237. Subsequent citations are in the text. Other citations from this edition are listed as Ba. The play was first performed in 1748 in Leipzig. 28

Reasonable in the sense that chances are good that it is suitable to one’s disposition and social position and thus is likely to be successful. 29

G. E. Lessing, Die Juden, Ba 1, 447–88. Written in 1749.

30

For a discussion of the socio-historical and religious context see Karl S. Guthke, “Lessing: Die Juden,” in Dramen vom Barock bis zur Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 275–94; here 277–81.

31

Ba 1, 361–445.

32

For further discussion see Nikolaus Wegmann, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit: Zur Geschichte des Gefühls in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). 33

G. E. Lessing, Miß Sara Sampson, in G. E. Lessing, Sämtlich Schriften, eds. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker. 23 vols. (Stuttgart/Leipzig: Göschen, 1886–1924), 2, 264–352. Subsequent citations are in the text. Other citations from this edition appear as LM and volume and page number. 34

“Hierin liegt eine Radikalisierung des Liebesdiskurses, welche erstmals Widersprüche zwischen Empfindsamkeit und Liebe hervortreibt. Die Fluchtgeschichte sprengt die bisher gültigen Regeln des empfindsamen Liebescodes, der durch eine scharfe Opposition von Zärtlichkeit und zärtlicher Liebe zu ‘Wollust’ gekennzeichnet war.” Greis, Drama Liebe, 52. 35

Sasse, Die Ordnung der Gefühle, 198; Greis, Drama Liebe, 25.

36

“. . .im galanten Code können Liebe und Ehe nicht zusammengedacht werden.. . . Ehe zielt als Konstitution auf Allianz und Kontinuität . . . Liebe auf sinnlich emotionale Befriedigung außerhalb der Ehe” (Greis, Drama Liebe, 55). 37

The economic concerns — such as Mellefont’s inheritance, which creates the necessity of marrying his relative for alliance purposes — do not create the crisis. 38

Stephan Schindler, Eingebildete Körper: Phantasierte Sexualität in der Goethezeit (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001), esp. 53–71.

39

Steven Martinson, “Authority and Criticism: Lessings Critical and Pragmatic Procedures,” in Humanität und Dialog, ed. Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Lawrence G. Lyon (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979), 143–53; here 148.

40

Martinson, “Authority and Criticism,” 148.

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41 “Das Verhalten, das als Tugend gilt, ist gekennzeichnet durch Natürlichkeit, sein Bezugspunkt ist das Gewissen; göttliches Gebot und Natur des Menschen fallen in ihm zusammen. Sein eigentlicher Inhalt ist Altruimus, die selbstlose Hilfe für den anderen und das Verständnis für ihn, sein Affekt ist das Mitleid, das sich in Tränen äußert. Das Kriterium der Tugend bildet somit mitleidsvolles Verhalten als eine Form von Beziehungen zwischen Menschen in der Privatsphäre.” Helmut Peitsch, “Private Humanität und bürgerlicher Emanzipationskampf: Lessings Miß Sara Sampson,” in Literatur der bürgerlichen Emanzipation im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Gert Mattenklott and Klaus Scherpe (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1973), 184–85. 42

Dieter Borchmeyer, “Lessing und sein Umkreis” in Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 1, ed. Viktor Zmegac (3rd ed., Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1992), 105–49; Karl Eibl, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: “Miß Sara Sampson. Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel” (Frankfurt am Main, Athenäum, 1971); Wolfram Mauser, “Lessings Miß Sara Sampson. Bürgerliches Trauerspiel als Ausdruck innerbürgerlichen Konflikts,” Lessing Yearbook 7 (1975): 7–27; Hinrich Seeba, Die Liebe zur Sache: Öffentliches und privates Interesse in Lessings Dramen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973).

43

Lothar Pikulik, “Bürgerliches Trauerspiel” und Empfindsamkeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1966).

44

Peter-Horst Neumann, Der Preis der Mündigkeit: Über Lessings Dramen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1977). 45

Bengt Algot Sørensen, Herrschaft und Zärtlichkeit: Der Patriarchalismus und das Drama im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1984). 46

Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 111–12.

47

Denis Jonnes, “Solche Väter: The Sentimental Family Paradigm in Lessing’s Drama,” Lessing Yearbook 12 (1980): 157–74. 48

Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 132. See also Gail Hart, Tragedy in Paradise: Family and Gender Politics in German Bourgeois Tragedy 1750–1850 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), 6. 49

“Die Güte schafft ein Schuldverhältnis, das moralisch abhängig macht. Sara weiß intuitiv, daß die Vergebung nur durch ein ebenso großes Opfer vergolten werden kann” (Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 121). “Die reale Macht des Vaters wird ideologisch verschleiert durch Konzepte wie Elternliebe, und die Gefahr der direkten Konfrontation — wie es bei einer gewaltsamen Ausübung der väterlichen Macht durchaus möglich ist — wird so vermieden. Durch die Änderung von individuellen Symptomen wird das System an sich nicht tangiert, ja man kann sogar davon ausgehen, daß es stabilisiert wird, weil einer Konfrontation aus dem Wege gegangen wird. In diesem Sinne verdecken diese Reformen die eigentlichen Machtstrukturen und wirken so systemstabilisierend” (32).

50 “Die Tugend als das vorzeitige Innehaben des Wohls der anderen verlagert gesellschaftlich auszutragende Konflikte in den Gewissenskonflikt vor. Den Gewissenskonflikt auszutragen hindert aber daran, sich mit den gesellschaftlichen Konflikten auseinanderzusetzen; er führt zu Handlungshemmung” (Jochen Schmitt-Sasse, Das Opfer der Tugend: Zu Lessings “Emilia Galotti” und einer “Literaturgeschichte der Vorstellungskomplexe” im 18. Jahrhundert [Bonn: Bouvier, 1983], 21).


255

51 Conrad Wiedemann, “Ein schönes Ungeheuer. Zur Deutung von Lessings Einakter Philotas,” Germanisch-Romanische-Monatsschrift 17 (1967), 381–97. 52


53

See also Gunter E. Grimm, “Philotas — Struktur und Gehalt,” Ba 4, 791–95, here 792. 54 Helmut J. Schneider, “Aufklärung der Tragödie. Lessings Philotas.” In Horizonte. Festschrift für Herbert Lehnert zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 10–39. See also Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 150. 55

G. E. Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm, in G. E. Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert Göpfert. Vol. 1 (Munich: Hanser, 1970), 604–704. Subsequent references are in the text.

56 Günter Sasse, Liebe und Ehe. Oder: Wie sich die Spontaneität des Herzens zu den Normen der Gesellschaft verhält. Lessings “Minna von Barnhelm” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). Subsequent citations are in the text. 57 Brigitte Prutti, Bild und Körper: Weibliche Präsenz und Geschlechterbeziehungen in Lessings Dramen: “Emilia Galotti” und “Minna von Barnhelm” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996). 58

As Fick summarizes, Minna is able to bring Tellheim to question his rigorous position and with it his masculinity: “Minnas Intrige, so wurde es immer wieder gesehn, löst Tellheim aus seiner Erstarrung und bringt ihn zu sich selbst zurück, öffnet ihn für die eigenen Möglichkeiten” (Lessing-Handbuch, 253).

59

G. E. Lessing, Emilia Galotti, LM 2, 377–450. Subsequent citations are in the text.

60

“Emilia Galotti ist ein Trauerspiel über die Widersprüchlichkeit der empfindsamen Liebe, die das Begehren aus ihrer Semantik ausgeschlossen hatte” (Greis, Drama Liebe, 104). Furthermore, in the discourse of the time, love and passion function as a means of distinction between the bourgeoisie and the courtly world.

61

Greis, Drama Liebe, 107.

62

Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Literarische Struktur und historisch-sozialer Kontext: Zum Beispiel Lessings “Emilia Galotti” (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1975), 57. As Koselleck argued, the political direction of private moral values was intended to undermine the power of the public sphere and thus render the feudal system superfluous (Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, 22–30; Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 319). 63

Karl Eibl, “Identitätskrise und Diskurs. Zur thematischen Kontinuität von Lessings Dramatik,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 21 (1977), 138–91. 64

Scherpe sees the intellectual experiment to educate the absolute ruler as a political failure. Klaus Scherpe, “Historische Wahrheit auf Lessings Theater, besonders vom Trauerspiel Emilia Galotti,” in Lessing in heutiger Sicht: Beiträge zur internationalen Lessing Konferenz (1976), ed. Edward Harris (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977), 259–78; here 267–70.

65

“Im Bereich sexueller Moral half es dem Bürgertum, sich von der Lasterhaftigkeit und Mätressenwirtschaft der Fürstenhöfe zu distanzieren — aber eben auf Kosten der Frau und unter Verzicht auf eine Emanzipation menschlicher Sinnlichkeit überhaupt.” Andreas Huyssen, “Das leidende Weib in der dramatischen Literatur von

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Empfindsamkeit und Sturm und Drang: Eine Studie zur bürgerlichen Emanzipation,” Monatshefte 69 (1977): 163. 66


67

Gerd Hillen, “Die Halsstarrigkeit der Tugend: Bemerkungen zu Lessings Trauerspielen,” Lessing Yearbook 2 (1970): 115–34. 68

Alois Wierlacher, “Das Haus der Freude oder Warum stirbt Emilia Galotti?” Lessing Yearbook 5 (1973): 147–62.

69 Günter Sasse, Die aufgeklärte Familie: Untersuchungen zur Genese, Funktion und Realitätsbezogenheit des familialen Wertesystems im Drama der Aufklärung. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 174–215. 70 Prutti, Bild und Körper, in passim. See also Fick: “Seine Erziehungsmaxime, die Bereitschaft zum ‘Fehltritt’ bei jedem ‘Schritt’ vorauszusetzen zeugt von einer fatalen Mischung aus Repression der Sinnlichkeit und dem lüsternen Aufspüren jeder sexuellen Regung, um sie als ‘Sünde’ zu brandmarken” (Lessing-Handbuch, 338). 71


72

The fact that she is so charming that the fruit of his virtuous socialization, her bourgeois femininity attracts the attention of the Prince seems to confirm Odoardo’s condemnation. (“[. . .] von ihrer Munterkeit und ihrem Witze so bezaubert,” 397). “Wenn sich auch die Bürgerfamilie also auch von der repräsentativen Öffentlichkeit abgrenzt, erzeigt sie doch eben dadurch Werte, die selbst und gerade den Adel faszinieren und am Ende verbürgerlichen” (Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 34).

73

Gisbert Ter-Nedden, Lessings Trauerspiele: Der Ursprung der modernen Dramatik aus dem Geist der Kritik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 196. 74 His dark mood is only in part justified by his explanation that he is conflicted about telling his Prince about the mesalliance — after all he is quick to decline the “honor” to serve the Prince on his wedding day. 75

G. E. Lessing, Nathan der Weise, LM 3, 1–177. Subsequent citations are in the text.

76

Fick summarizes Lessing’s theological views as a “Vertrauen [. . .] daß eine vernünftige, theoretisch abgesicherte Gotteserkenntnis möglich sei. Diese Gotteserkenntnis ist der Ausgangspunkt für Lessings Vergleich der Religionen” (Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 406).

77

Morton Nierenberg, “The Opal: Lessing’s Ring Re-Examined,” Modern Language Notes 85:5 (1970), 686–96 in passim.

78

Peter Demetz, “Lessings Nathan der Weise: Wirklichkeiten und Wirklichkeit” in Nathan der Weise, ed. Klaus Bohnen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 168–218, here 206.

79

Dominik von König, Natürlichkeit und Wirklichkeit: Studien zu Lessings Nathan der Weise (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976), 124–26. 80 81

König, Natürlichkeit und Wirklichkeit, 74.

Fick offers an insightful comment on this passage: “Inmitten seiner Verzweiflung wird Nathan die Erkenntnis abverlangt, das ‘auch das’ ‘Gottes Ratschluß’ war, daß Gott auch bei dem Entsetzlichen seine guten Ziele verfolgt. Dabei liegt der Akzent auf der Regsamkeit der Vernunft und des Herzens. Denn es ist dies keine neutrale


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Erkenntnis, sondern sie involviert eine aktive und wertende Reaktion auf das Geschehen” (Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 419). 82

“Das menschliche Wollen erscheint nicht länger (wie bei Leibniz) im Licht der Unterworfenheit unter den göttlichen Willen, sondern es erscheint im Lichte der Teilhabe an ihm. Wo Leibniz Gott und Mensch weit voneinander trennt, fließen in Nathans Sätzen menschliche und göttliche Sphäre zusammen” (Fick, LessingHandbuch, 420).

83

Helmut J. Schneider, “Lessing’s Nathan der Weise,” in Interpretationen: Dramen vom Barock bis zur Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 294–32; here 312. He goes on to argue: “Mit dem Postulat der familiären Verbundenheit aller Menschen verallgemeinert das Drama die Sozialisation der modernen Kleinfamilie, wie sie sich im 18. Jahrhundert herausbildete” (312). 84 “Nathan nennt Rechas Abhängigkeit [. . .] beim Namen; er weist sie auf ihre Unselbständigkeit [. . .] hin. Im Gegensatz zu den Vatergestalten, die wir bisher kennengelernt haben, ist ihm nicht dran gelegen, die Tochter in Unmündigkeit zu halten” (Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 152). 85

Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 166.

86

Helmut Fuhrmann, “Lessings Nathan der Weise und das Wahrheitsproblem,” Lessing Yearbook 15 (1983): 63–94; here 69–70. 87

“Die in der Ringparabel zum Ausdruck kommende Pluralisierung der Tugend und Moralkonzeption und ihre jeweilige Bindung an die Situation schränkt die Rigorosität, die Emilia Galotti das Leben kostete, entscheidend ein” (Wurst, Familiale Liebe, 159).

88

The rigidity of moral norms is embodied in the negatively portrayed quintessential patriarchal authority — the Patriarch, who would rather see Recha dead than brought up in a Jewish household — which, in his estimation, will result in her eternal damnation.

89 Silvia Bovenschen uses these terms to describe feminine virtues. Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).

Reception


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into Hans Schweikart’s film Das Fräulein von Barnhelm (1940), Prussian soldiers march past a hill on which a large windmill stands. The camera cuts back and forth between the marching soldiers and the windmill, which fills the screen with sails suggestive of an enormous swastika. Viewers familiar with Lessing might think not of Nazi iconography on seeing the windmill, however, but of Lessing’s description of himself in the Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts (Letters of Antiquarian Content, 1768–69) as a windmill standing alone on a sand hill, helping — and wishing to be helped by — no one. Lessing employs this description in his rebuke of the classical philologist Christian Adolf Klotz and the art historian Friedrich Justus Riedel, who had brazenly cast him as the principal member of what they regarded as a despotic school of Berlin literary critics. If he had been in the audience to see how the windmill in Das Fräulein von Barnhelm is meant to symbolize Prussia as the forerunner of Nazi Germany,1 Lessing might well have used the windmill motif once more, both to assert his autonomy and to express his ire over the misappropriation of his views. His cultural meta-presence creates, and may well have done so for many at the time, an incongruous subtext in the film — one in which a defiant Lessing rejects the Nazi falsification of his work. This unintended ambiguity is emblematic of Lessing’s peculiar place in the Nazi literary landscape. With works such as Die Juden (The Jews, 1754) and Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), Lessing necessarily stood, like a solitary windmill, outside of a Nazi canon that hailed race and the Volk. But he was also too large a figure to be erased from the panorama of German literature and thought, and his efforts to improve the German theater were easily exploited in the Nazi glorification of German cultural achievements. While he is at times ignored or rejected by literary critics and party officials, he is also frequently fashioned into a model of Nazi Germanness, particularly toward the end of the thirties. His tolerant attitude toward the Jews is variously dismissed as un-German, excused with only mild disapprobation as a naive and misguided expression of German charity, or, especially in the case of Nathan, downplayed as merely an exercise in abstract religious philosophy. By contrast, Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is transformed into a piece which champions patriotic allegiance to Volk and Führer, and both Minna

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and Philotas (1759) are made to represent the fighting spirit and willing selfsacrifice of the German soldier. Lessing’s denunciation of French drama in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–69) becomes a heroic emancipation of the German spirit from foreign cultural domination, and the dramatic theory set forth there is used, together with the aesthetic principles in Laokoon (Laocoön, 1766) and Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (How the Ancients Portrayed Death, 1769), to legitimize Nazi film theory. The perceived relevance of Lessing to the Third Reich is further demonstrated in the frequent calls for a “new Lessing,” whose tireless pursuit of truth and justice would lead him, in the twentieth century, to defend the Aryan race against Jewish oppressors, or who would accomplish for German film what Lessing accomplished for the theater. These and other aspects of the reception of Lessing in the Third Reich have received only sporadic attention in secondary literature, although as J. C. Gibson’s article “The Greatness of Lessing and His Position in Germany” (1936) attests, the topic was already of interest to Germanists writing in the 1930s.2 Instead of giving a detailed analysis of Nazi portrayals of Lessing as “un-German” (158), however, Gibson only briefly mentions such portrayals and then discredits them by recounting Lessing’s principal contributions to German literature and thought. Whereas entire volumes have been devoted in recent decades to the Third Reich’s reception of authors both central (e.g. Herder, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, and the Romantics)3 and peripheral (e.g. Büchner)4 to the Nazi canon, the most comprehensive overview of the Nazi reception of Lessing remains Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt’s informative article “Das Lessingbild im Dritten Reich” (1991).5 Brief summaries of the topic can be found in standard works on Lessing, such as Karl Guthke’s Der Stand der Lessing-Forschung; Monika Fick’s Lessing-Handbuch; and Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung by Wilfried Barner, Gunter Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, and Martin Kramer.6 Unfortunately, few documents from the Nazi period are included in reference works such as Edward Dvoretzky’s Lessing. Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte 1755–1968 and Horst Steinmetz’s Lessing — ein unpoetischer Dichter,7 and of the handful of studies that concern the reception of particular works by Lessing in the Third Reich, almost all have dealt with Nathan der Weise. Of these, Barbara Fischer’s examination of the Jewish reception of Nathan in the 1930s; Martin Loiperdinger’s article on the National Socialist Party’s protests against Manfred Noa’s film Nathan der Weise (1922); and Ferdinand Piedmont’s article on the reception of Nathan on the twentieth-century German stage are particularly insightful.8 Of the several excellent analyses of Schweikart’s Das Fräulein von Barnhelm, most have appeared in publications aimed at an audience of film rather than Lessing scholars, and the considerable influence of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Laokoon, and other critical texts on Nazi film theory has been almost completely overlooked.9

LESSING AND THE THIRD REICH

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In light of these gaps, a comprehensive study of the reception of Lessing in the Third Reich would be a welcome contribution to Lessing scholarship.10 This essay does not aspire to be comprehensive, however, but aims instead to give a detailed overview of the principal themes that surface in Nazi portrayals of Lessing and his works. Although there is no neat chronological development according to which these themes can be traced, Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt has observed that portrayals of Lessing in the early 1940s tend to be neutral, with little or no overt attempt to make Lessing conform to Nazi ideology.11 As this study will show, there is also a general tendency for Lessing to be dismissed or criticized in the first years of the Third Reich and then refashioned as an exemplary German toward the end of the 1930s. Thus it is not surprising that J. C. Gibson, writing in 1936, seeks to overturn Nazi portrayals of Lessing as “un-German,” but makes no mention of Nazi attempts to promote Lessing as a model of the fighting German spirit; although numerous nineteenth and early twentieth-century commentators promote Lessing in this way, within the Nazi Period such depictions appear primarily in the late 1930s. The tendency to reject or ignore Lessing in the early 1930s and refashion him toward the end of the decade corresponds with the main phases in the Nazi regimentation of literature identified by J. M. Ritchie. As Ritchie observes, the Nazi Party first struggled in the years preceding 1933 to fight “democratic literature with chauvinistic and anti-Semitic slogans,” and then engaged in a “period of purges and control machinery between 1933 and 1936” which resulted in “the totally NS period after 1936.”12 After briefly surveying the reception of Lessing in Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic, this study will trace these phases with reference to interpretations of Lessing in the popular press, the school curriculum, scholarly literature, film, and theater. I shall first examine rejections of Lessing and, in particular, Nathan to approximately 1936, and then study attempts to downplay Lessing’s philoSemitism and depict him as quintessentially German toward the end of the 1930s. Finally, I explore the use of Lessing’s theoretical texts to legitimize Nazi film theory in the late 1930s and analyze Schweikart’s film Das Fräulein von Barnhelm and its reception in the early 1940s.

Lessing and the Nation, 1871–1933 Lessing reception in the Third Reich builds upon the politicizing of Lessing in the nineteenth century.13 In the decades before and after the founding of the German Reich in 1871, several commentators depict Lessing as a warrior for the German Volk. To Adolf Stahr, Lessing’s sense of justice and equality, regard for truth, rejection of court life, and even his masculinity demonstrate that he was, in spirit, a republican. In Ferdinand Lassalle’s reading, Lessing is a worldly Luther whose intellectual achievements, together with Frederick

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the Great’s political influence, embody the German Enlightenment. Although Heinrich von Treitschke laments Lessing’s lack of patriotic zeal, he, too, pairs Lessing with Frederick, portraying both figures as trailblazers for Germany’s political future. It is not surprising that those who project an image of Lessing as a pioneer of German nationalism tend to downplay his philo-Semitism, while Jews such as Abraham Meyer Goldschmidt view Lessing’s friendship with Moses Mendelssohn as symbolic of a wished-for relationship between Christians and Jews in Germany. Still others reject Lessing as a “Judenfreund” or attempt to prove that he was Jewish. Failing to consider that many Jews had taken the name Lessing in honor of the author of Nathan, for example, the fanatical anti-Semitist Eugen Dühring claims that the existence of Lessing as a name among Jews indicates that Lessing himself was of Jewish descent. Apart from the various portrayals of Lessing as the embodiment of Germanness, a promoter of Jewish emancipation, or a traitor to the German Volk, Lessing also becomes an intellectual champion of the bourgeoisie, as for example in Franz Mehring’s Lessing-Legende.14 Commentators writing in the Weimar Republic tend to place greater emphasis on irrational aspects of Lessing’s thought than in previous decades, but their appraisals of Lessing do not otherwise differ significantly from the various politicized interpretations of Lessing in Wilhelmine Germany. In particular, Germany’s defeat in the First World War leads to further images of Lessing as a defender of German nationalism against foreign domination. In the speeches given in 1929 to mark the 200th anniversary of Lessing’s birth, Lessing frequently appears in Prussian, and even Friderican, guise. To Arnold Berger, for example, Lessing is a Saxon who discovered his “preußisches, richtiger ‘Fritzisches’ Herz” in Berlin.15 But while Berger and others perpetuate the image of Lessing as political Kämpfer, commentators such as Franz Schultz espouse the view that, having suffered defeat, Germans need to embrace Lessing’s regard for a humanity that transcends national borders. Lamenting the factionalism of the early twentieth century, Schultz celebrates Lessing’s regard for an “Ausgleichung” or reconciliation, which he explicates with reference to Falk’s statement in Ernst und Falk (1778–80) that among the goals of that figurative or “true” Freemasonry of which he speaks is to do good deeds in hopes of making good deeds superfluous, and thus to minimize the various social differences that separate human beings.16

From Ausgleichung to Gleichschaltung Nathan der Weise in the Third Reich Lessing’s notion that individuals should see beyond social roles such as religion and nationality to embrace a common humanity stands in obvious


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conflict with Nazi Party doctrine and its emphasis not on Ausgleichung, but on Gleichschaltung — the coordination of all aspects of life with Nazi ideology. Fashioning an image of Lessing that would conform to Nazi ideology concerning the Volk entailed removing Lessing’s philo-Semitism — and in particular Nathan der Weise — from the general cultural consciousness. Efforts to ban Nathan appear as early as 1923, when members of the Nazi Party tried to prevent the screening of Manfred Noa’s film Nathan der Weise (1922). The Jüdische Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Alliance) in Berlin performed Nathan in October 1933, but the Nazi Party banned the play from public theaters soon after obtaining power and also removed it from the school curriculum.17 By contrast, The Merchant of Venice was performed by twelve theater companies in 1933 alone.18 In these and other ways, Lessing was downgraded in the early years of the Third Reich, whereas Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, Herder, Hamann, and Claudius figured prominently in the Nazi canon. In 1933, the Lessing Prize was reduced from 15,000 to 5,000 Reichsmarks following the founding of a prize in memory of Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), the German writer and friend of Hitler. It was also decided that the Lessing Prize would be given only every three years, and only to Aryans. As for the Lessing-Gesellschaft (Lessing Society), the office of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg expressed concern in 1935 that a “cult of Lessing” might form if the society became too prominent, and determined that the society could continue to exist only if it was brought under the umbrella of a Nazi cultural organization.19 The portrayals of Lessing in literary histories, scholarly studies, and the popular press in the early 1930s recall anti-Semitic accounts of Lessing in the preceding decades, with the main difference that the diatribes against Lessing’s philo-Semitism become even more vitriolic. Although the first edition of Adolf Bartels’s Lessing und die Juden (1918) is already saturated with racist ideology, Bartels published a revised edition in 1934 in which he makes a point of emphasizing that his hostility to Lessing has grown even greater.20 Lessing is now hopelessly outdated, read only by the Jews, and qualifies not as a serious author, but only as an undistinguished writer or journalist. Despite this added rhetoric, the portrayal of Lessing is essentially the same in both the earlier and the later editions. Bartels attacks Lessing for creating in Stich and Krumm (in Die Juden) what he avows is a falsification of the German moral disposition. Moreover, he finds Nathan’s noble-mindedness exaggerated, and considers Recha’s initial effusiveness and subsequent “Kaltblütigkeit” toward the Templar as proof that her character is that of an actual Jew, and not of someone merely raised in a Jewish household. The play as a whole is marred by “Jewish” sentimentality and a “Jewish” tendency toward “grands et bons mots” (150). Despite these and other criticisms, Bartels concludes that Lessing aimed not to promote tolerance of the Jews, but to chastise Christians who

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had been disloyal to the spirit of Christianity. To draw attention to the moral failings of such individuals, Lessing chose to use sharply contrasted characters; his purpose in portraying the Jews in the play as morally superior to the Christians was not to make the Jews appear virtuous, but rather to enable the Christians to recognize their faults and resolve to improve themselves. Bartels further excuses Lessing by contending that his strong “German” notion of friendship and loyalty blinded him to the dangers of associating with Jews, and he dismisses the claim that Lessing himself was of Jewish descent by using physiognomic analysis to “prove” that Lessing was a German with Slavic ancestry. Lessing’s fighting spirit, evident in his polemical essays and his rejection of French drama, provides further evidence of his Germanness, as does Minna von Barnhelm, which Bartels (like other nationalistic authors writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) considers to be thoroughly German in inspiration and execution. In view of Lessing’s passionate defense of those he deemed oppressed or misunderstood, Bartels conjectures that Lessing would defend the Germans against their Jewish oppressors if he were alive in the twentieth century. Indeed, he styles himself as the forerunner of a “new Lessing” who will rise up in the name of the German Volk. Bartels’s notion that Lessing would defend the German Volk in the twentieth century is echoed elsewhere in the Third Reich. In his speech “Von der Auffassung über nationalsozialistische Erziehung” (On the Conception of National Socialist Education, 1934), the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg lauds Lessing’s notion of humanity in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race, 1780), but alleges that the epigones of the nineteenth century turned this notion into a hollow internationalism and applied it unbiologically.21 In this manner, Rosenberg, like Bartels, suggests that Lessing would restrict his notion of humanity to the Aryan race if he were alive in the twentieth century. Whereas Bartels rejects what he views as the Jewishness of works such as Nathan (and Rosenberg is hardly an enthusiastic promoter of Lessing), the fanatical anti-Semite Mathilde Ludendorff depicts Lessing and his works as utterly German in her self-published book Lessings Geisteskampf und Lebensschicksal (1937).22 Ludendorff interprets Lessing’s extracurricular interest in German poetry while a student in Meissen as an attempt to free himself from a course of studies which, she alleges, was aimed chiefly at Judaization, and also claims that Moses Mendelssohn used his friendship with Lessing to plunder Lessing’s ideas for philosophical treatises. In addition, she arrives at the outrageous conclusion that Lessing did not die of natural causes, but was poisoned by Freemasons operating under the orders of Jews. As for Lessing’s advocacy of tolerance toward the Jews in Nathan and Die Juden, she (like Bartels) asserts that it reveals a typically German generosity toward one’s foes and insists that Nathan was not intended as a political statement regarding the Jews. However, whereas


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Bartels claims that Lessing instead wished to make a political statement regarding the Christians, Ludendorff suggests that the play should be understood only in abstract poetic terms. Such attempts to make Nathan palatable by abstracting its message of religious tolerance become increasingly prevalent toward the end of the 1930s, as do portrayals of Lessing as a fighter for the German Volk. Lamenting that commentators have written little on Nathan in the preceding years, Heinrich Koch writes in his chapter on Lessing in Günther Stöve’s Wir wollen nicht vergessen sein (1939) that one should remember the play chiefly for its beautiful poetry.23 The fact that Nathan is Jewish has no bearing on the worth of the drama, which Koch (like Ludendorff) views in abstract philosophical terms: “So ist der Nathan ein religionsphilosophisches Gedicht und nicht, wie er gern dargeboten wurde, ein philosemitisches Schauspiel” (57). Koch further excuses Lessing for living at a time in which the Jews were viewed not as a race, but as a religious community, and suggests that Lessing’s transgressions are minimized by his status as “das Vorbild eines kämpferischen Dichters und Denkers” (55). Ernst Suter resolves not to sidestep the political implications of Die Juden and Nathan, but like Koch and other commentators he regards Lessing’s “failings” in both plays as the result of virtuous German traits. Lessing, in Suter’s reading, becomes “ein moderner Faust” whose perfections and imperfections are inextricably bound: “Lessing hat viel geirrt, weil er viel gestrebt hat.”24 Precisely because of his inexhaustible striving, his warlike spirit, and his indomitable will, Lessing is the most Nordic of all German authors. Indeed, Suter identifies Nordic traits not only in Minna, but also in Odoardo’s stubborn virtue in Emilia Galotti (1772) and in Philotas’s martyrdom. Whereas many commentators in the Third Reich ignore Emilia because of its depiction of authority as corrupt,25 Suter takes the stance that the critique of the court in Emilia is meant both as a rejection of the French court in particular and as a call for a more benevolent absolutism as realized, in his view, in the court of Frederick the Great. Unlike his defense of Emilia, Suter’s praise of Philotas as a “Symbol ewiger Deutschheit” is typical of Nazi interpretations (419). Writing in 1936, Waldemar Fellman argues for substituting Philotas for Emilia or Miß Sara Sampson (1755) in the Gymnasium curriculum.26 Whereas Emilia and Sara are merely of historical interest, according to Fellman, Philotas’s refusal to allow his father to place his son above the welfare of his country offers a worthy example of German heroism, and Lessing’s sharp prose reveals his own fighting spirit. Other accounts of the role of Lessing in the curriculum contain a similar emphasis on Lessing’s courage in the face of opposition: Wilhelm Poethen writes in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Bildung that it is not the Lessing who wrote Emilia Galotti and Nathan der Weise who belongs in the schools, but the “Nordic” Lessing who rescued the German spirit from French domination.27 Similarly, in the Prussian school

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curriculum published in 1938, students are to read Minna von Barnhelm and excerpts from Lessing’s polemical essays and correspondence as examples of the fight for the independence of the German spirit.28

Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Laokoon, and Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet Lessing and Nazi Film Theory The image of Lessing as an emancipator of the German spirit is afforded particular prominence in Nazi film theory, where it is used to legitimize the Nazis’ conception of film as propaganda. In a speech delivered on March 5, 1937, at the first annual convention of the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich Chamber of Film), Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels claims that art had become ever more isolated from and irrelevant to the people in the years preceding 1933. He lauds Lessing for having had the courage, in a time of comparable cultural weakness, to articulate aesthetic principles that enabled German drama to become more relevant to the life of the people.29 Although Goebbels makes brief reference to Schiller, it is Lessing whom he holds up as a model for others to emulate. By appropriating the principles set forth in Lessing’s dramatic criticism to film, he suggests that the Nazis’ promotion of film will result in an efflorescence of German artistic achievement like that which occurred in the eighteenth century. The distinguishing feature of Lessing’s dramatic theory, according to Goebbels, is its practicality: instead of engaging in abstract philosophizing of the sort that only a genius could follow, Lessing formulated a set of sensible and straightforward principles without which “das praktische, lebendig vorhandene, reale deutsche Theater” would not exist.30 Oversimplifying Lessing’s dramatic theory and exaggerating its influence, Goebbels claims that the Hamburgische Dramaturgie exerted a fundamental influence not only in Germany, but also on world theater. He portrays Lessing’s dramatic theory as entirely responsible for what he styles as the current supremacy of the German theater over other national theaters: “Die Vormachtstellung unseres deutschen Theaters auf dem Gebiet der Theaterkunst in der ganzen Welt ist eigentlich nur auf diese kritischen Gedankengänge des großen Hamburger Denkers zurückzuführen. . . .” (40). Like other Nazi Party officials who invoke Lessing in detailing their views on the proper function of film, Goebbels overlooks key features of Lessing’s dramatic theory (such as his notion of pity), and instead focuses on relatively minor aspects, which he also tends to misinterpret. For example, he ignores the fact that Lessing’s interpretation of the unities of time and place (in Sections 44–46 of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie) is hardly


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rigid, since Lessing stresses adherence to the spirit, and not to the letter, of these precepts. Instead, Goebbels depicts Lessing as the author of unbreakable rules concerning the unities, and maintains that these rules forever changed world theater: “Als Lessing damals das Prinzip einer Einheit des Ortes, der Handlung und der Personen fixierte, bedeutete das eine schroffe Kampfansage gegen das zu seiner Zeit fungierende deutsche und Welttheater” (41). While it is certainly true that Lessing emphasizes the importance of plausible characters and well-motivated plots, Goebbels also exaggerates both the deficiencies of the European theater in the eighteenth century and Lessing’s success in remedying them when he suggests that the use of a deus ex machina was not merely a common, but indeed a customary practice that Lessing single-handedly put an end to: “Bis dahin war es Sitte, daß Dichter einen Konflikt schürzten und, wenn sie im dritten, vierten oder fünften Akte gar keinen Ausweg mehr wußten, irgendeine bis dahin unbekannte Person auftreten ließen, die den Konflikt löste. Das war von Lessing ab nicht mehr möglich” (41). Further endeavoring to emphasize both what he views as the practical nature of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie and Lessing’s relevance to Nazi Germany, Goebbels characterizes Lessing as a critic for the common man of the 1930s. Because of Lessing’s accomplishments, he explains, spectators in the Third Reich not only sense that a drama that fails to adhere to principles such as the three unities is second-rate, but are also able to articulate why the drama is inferior. Like Bartels calling for a “new Lessing” who will defend the Germans against Jewish domination, Goebbels prophesies — using overtly religious terminology — that a man will rise up to accomplish for German (and world) film what Lessing achieved for the theater. Just as Lessing’s dramatic theory continues to be relevant to twentieth-century spectators, the firm and unalterable principles that this Lessingian film theorist will set forth will influence film for centuries: “Ich habe die felsenfeste Überzeugung, daß irgendwo und irgendwann in Deutschland einmal der Mann aufstehen wird, der nun auch dem Film sein ehernes und unabänderliches Gesetz verleihen wird und daß diese Gesetze auch wieder das Vorbild für eine jahrhundertelange Entwicklung in der ganzen Welt bedeuten werden” (59). Similar attempts to designate a successor to Lessing appear in a discussion of film director Carl Junghans’s speech “Lessings Laokoon und der Tonfilm” (Lessing’s Laocoön and the Sound Film) that appeared in Film-Atelier on January 31, 1936.31 Well-known for his silent film So ist das Leben (Such is Life, 1930), Junghans had presented the speech on 15 January as the first of several guest lecturers on film at the LessingHochschule in Berlin. He subsequently delivered the same speech on numerous occasions, and although the Reichfachschaft Film (Reich Professional Film Association) planned to publish it, Hans-Jürgen Brandt has speculated that Alfred Rosenberg prevented publication from taking

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place.32 Although the speech is largely apolitical, the Film-Atelier writer attempts to use Junghans’s analysis of Lessing both to legitimize state censorship of film and to equate the achievements of Nazi filmmakers with Lessing’s in drama and aesthetic theory. In particular, the writer claims that Lessing’s comments on poetry and the plastic arts are of such striking relevance to film in the 1930s that it was often difficult, during Junghans’s speech, to determine whether he was conveying his own sentiments or quoting Lessing. This association of Junghans with Lessing becomes further pronounced as the writer suggests that Junghans’s analysis of Laokoon represents “die Frucht . . . eines harten Kampfes um die dramaturgischen Grundgesetze des Films” (2), just as Lessing’s criticism represents a fight for the establishment of sound dramatic and aesthetic principles. Like Lessing’s philo-Semitism, Junghans’s earlier connections with the Communist Party and his marriage to a Jew go unmentioned; instead, the writer portrays both figures as model Germans in their cultural achievements. Although the Film-Atelier writer portrays Junghans and Lessing as so identical in their thought as to be mistaken for each other, obvious disparities exist. Junghans first reiterates Lessing’s observation that poetry portrays a succession of moments, but not the material body, while the plastic arts portray the body, but captured in only one moment; he then claims that film is superior to both poetry and the plastic arts because it portrays bodies in motion. With the appropriate use of music, film becomes a universal form of expression — a Gesamtkunstwerk to which Junghans gives the name “dynamische Malerei.”33 This term echoes Lessing’s designation of drama as “lebendige Malerei,” but Junghans fails adequately to consider Lessing’s comments concerning the aesthetic limitations of drama in the fourth chapter of Laokoon. There, Lessing reasons that the dramatist should adhere closely to the rules of the plastic arts, since the spectator does not read of the writhing pain of a suffering character, but sees this pain enacted on the stage. Like the painter or sculptor, the dramatist should therefore avoid portraying the moment at which suffering becomes so intense that it manifests itself in ugly grimaces or contorted limbs, and instead portray a milder form of pain, such as sighing. While Lessing acknowledges an exception to this rule in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, he remains skeptical that an actor could fully convey the illusion that a character is suffering intense physical pain. In his reading of Lessing, Junghans overlooks the likely argument that the film director, like the dramatist, must be judicious in deciding how to portray subjects such as suffering. For Lessing would most probably argue that the mere fact that film, like drama, is capable of portraying both space and time does not mean that film is a more desirable medium for portraying each and every subject. Instead of acknowledging such aesthetic limitations of film, Junghans devotes much of his speech to arguing that film must free itself from the conventions of the theater, by which he principally


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means dialogue. Whereas silent films frequently contain too many subtitles, sound films are cluttered with too much dialogue, as in the theater, and should instead show more action. Junghans also suggests that film rely more heavily on internationally understood interjections, which he views as the vestiges of an Ursprache, as well as on workers’ songs that fuse music with poetry by rhythmically imitating the motion of work. Despite the flaws in Junghans’s application of Laokoon to film, his speech is significant because it attempts to use Lessing’s aesthetic distinctions between poetry and the plastic arts as a framework for exploring the distinguishing features of film (particularly in relation to the theater), before theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim and Béla Bélazs did the same.34 The speech is also interesting as a testimonial to Nazi Gleichschaltung: in an obligatory affirmation of Nazi ideology, Junghans cites Lessing’s statement in Laokoon that the state has a right to control art, since the purpose of art is not truth, but pleasure. Most likely wishing to avoid controversy, he nevertheless omits Lessing’s admonition that it is tyrannical for the state to attempt to subjugate truth.35 It is striking that the paragraph summarizing his (and Lessing’s) comments regarding the state’s censorship of art is the only one in the Film-Atelier review that is printed entirely in boldface. Like Junghans, Heinrich Koch misappropriates Laokoon in Von deutscher Filmkunst. Gehalt und Gestalt (1943).36 In addition to using numerous passages from Lessing’s poetry, drama, and dramatic criticism to establish aesthetic principles for film, Koch invokes Lessing’s comments in Laokoon both to justify the state’s censorship of art and to assert the superiority of film. In particular, he misunderstands Lessing’s observation that the sculptor or painter can portray the body acting in only one moment, and should therefore portray that moment which is most pregnant. To Lessing, this “pregnant moment” is that which frees the imagination of the viewer; the pregnant moment does not capture the most intense expression of a particular emotion or sensation, but enables the viewer to imagine a higher level of intensity. Koch’s misunderstanding of this concept surfaces in his transformation of the pregnant moment into “pregnant moments.” Maintaining that photography could not have adequately portrayed the atmosphere, drama, and athletic heroism of the 1936 Olympic marathon, he considers film to be a perfect medium because it can portray entire sequences of action: “Der Olympia-Film [by Riefenstahl] dagegen, hat den atemraubenden Kampf der Läufer in seinen ‘fruchtbarsten Augenblicken’ festgehalten.”37 Failing to acknowledge that the portrayal of entire actions might in some cases hamper the imagination of the viewer, Koch, like Junghans, gives little thought to such aesthetic considerations, and instead simply assumes that the ability of film to portray the body in action makes it superior to other media. Just as Goebbels, Junghans, and Koch frequently misappropriate Lessing or exaggerate his influence, Reich Film Director Fritz Hippler

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takes Lessing’s comments concerning the portrayal of death out of context in his book Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen (1942).38 In a chapter on the portrayal of death in film, Hippler endorses Lessing’s suggestion, at the end of Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, that modern artists should refrain from using skeletons to symbolize death and instead return to the more serene portrayals of death in classical antiquity. Hippler’s intent is to use Lessing to justify the sanitized depictions of death in Nazi war films, where, as Hilmar Hoffmann has shown, images of bells, war memorials, the swastika, or the Führer are often used to associate dying pro patria with the greater glory of the Third Reich.39 In Schweikart’s Das Fräulein von Barnhelm, for example, bells peal and Frederick the Great appears in the Charlottenburg Palace church to celebrate victory against the Austrians, after which there is a cut to a night scene in which Tellheim, framed by the flickering flames of campfires, speaks to soldiers about their fallen comrade Marloff (who, like Frederick, appears in the film but is not an on-stage character in the play); immediately following this comes a daylight scene in which people decorate Minna’s estate with garlands. The bells, Frederick’s appearance in the church, and the jubilant scene at Minna’s estate connect Marloff’s death with victory, suggesting that the price that he and others paid in giving their lives has enabled Prussia to triumph. In light of the nationalistic readings of works such as Minna and Philotas in Nazi Germany, it is not surprising that Hippler fails to acknowledge that in Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet Lessing does not condone portrayals that glorify dying pro patria, and that in Minna, Philotas, and numerous passages in his critical writings he rejects the glorification of war and martyrdom.

Schweikart’s Das Fräulein von Barnhelm Marloff’s and Frederick’s appearances in Das Fräulein von Barnhelm are just two of the film’s countless deviations from Lessing’s play. Whereas Lessing sets Minna von Barnhelm in 1763 after the Seven Years’ War, the action in Schweikart’s film begins when Prussia attacks Saxony in 1761, and almost the entire first half of the film treats this pre-history to Lessing’s play. As the film opens, the Prussian soldiers march past the windmill, while Minna (played by Käthe Gold) has tea with Saxon noblewomen. She is seated with her back to the camera in her first appearance in the film, and this pose is emblematic of her diminished role there: in contrast to the play, it is not her blend of love and good sense that drives the action, but what in the film becomes the military heroism of Tellheim (played by Ewald Balser). Subservient and self-sacrificing in the film, Minna brings food and drink to wounded Prussian soldiers and distributes bread to Saxon


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refugees. To contribute to the war reparations required by Prussia, she also sells the wedding rings that had belonged to her parents. Because this action (which is not in the original play) is performed for the good of the state, it detracts from the romantic comedy associated with the later mix-up of the rings (which, in the film, Tellheim acquires after being told that they belonged to Minna’s family). Tellheim’s manly resolve surfaces in his order that a soldier who has been caught stealing be hanged, and his loyalty to the German Volk is evident in his decision to lend money to the Saxons on the grounds that they, too, are Germans.40 The film takes similar liberties with other characters. Depicted as a schemer and blackmailer, Riccaut de la Marlinière is no longer a comic figure, but instead becomes an embodiment of the French enemy. And whereas Marloff appears in the film but not in the play, his wife appears in the play but not in the film. Although her minor role is essential to the exposition of Tellheim’s generosity, as a war widow her character was most likely too disheartening to be included in a film released in 1940, as Karsten Witte has suggested.41 As for Frederick’s brief appearance, the scene is striking because there is no verbal reference to him and no character in the film sees him, as Linda Schulte-Sasse has observed. Instead, his solitary figure is visible only to the film viewer, who, in light of the Third Reich’s fascination with Frederick, is assumed to have no trouble identifying him.42 The ending of the film is similarly falsified: just as the dominant motif toward the beginning of the film is the windmill — a motif that Lessing associates not with Prussian might, but with the autonomy of the individual — the most striking motif toward the end is the Brandenburg Gate, a structure that did not exist at the time that Lessing’s drama takes place.43 And whereas Tellheim opts for the private sphere of life in Lessing’s play, he is mounted on his horse in the final scene of Schweikart’s film, committed to giving further service to king and country. Although Heinrich Koch complains that the film’s extensive treatment of the pre-history to Minna von Barnhelm unsuccessfully transforms a drama into an epic, most critics in the Third Reich were sympathetic to Schweikart’s adaptation.44 In his book Der Film. Vom Werden einer neuen Kunstgattung (1943), Edmund T. Kauer regards the film as “das Beispiel einer freien Einfilmung eines vom Klassiker vorgeprägten Themas” — a formulation which downplays Lessing’s role as author by suggesting that he merely molded pre-existing subject matter.45 Kauer’s appendix with parallel texts of Act V, Scenes 5 and 6, of Minna von Barnhelm and the corresponding scenes in Schweikart’s film reveals the liberties that the screenplay writers (Ernst Hasselbach and Peter Francke) take with the original dialogue.46 Tellheim’s important speech “So dacht’ ich, so sprach ich, als ich nicht wußte, was ich dachte und sprach”47 is entirely absent in the film, and his statement “Gleichheit ist immer das festeste Band der

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Liebe” is also removed.48 Because the omission of these and other important speeches minimizes the conflict between love and injured honor in the play, the few lines that do remain from the original become mere platitudes. In a statement only slightly modified from a line in Act V, Scene 9, of the play, Tellheim describes Minna as “das süßeste, lieblichste Geschöpf unter der Sonne,” but because his ensuing comments concerning her occasional mischievousness and willfulness are absent in the film, the passage underscores her role there not as a strong-willed individual, but as a subservient helpmate to Tellheim and the military cause.49 In light of the film’s emphasis on Tellheim’s military heroism, it is not surprising that Kauer grossly misinterprets Minna von Barnhelm when he describes it as a play about the importance of providing state pensions to war veterans. Discussing the poet’s ability to perceive the inner motivation that makes a topic or event of relevance to the larger world, he writes, “Diese Lage ist, seit Lessing in die Welt der Griechenimitation, der Haupt- und Staatsaktionen, der Agathone und Kleomenen sein Zeitstück Minna von Barnhelm hineinpflanzte, seit er dem Theater die menschliche Bedeutsamkeit der Tatsache erschloß, daß die Helden des Siebenjährigen Krieges ohne Zivilversorgungsschein blieben — seither ist diese Lage unverändert.”50 As Kauer’s analysis suggests, Minna von Barnhelm served as a convenient vehicle through which to bolster wartime morale, particularly once it was transformed into a work about military valor and the unity of the German Volk. But although Minna achieved particular prominence in the Nazi cultural canon with Schweikart’s film, it was a darling of the Nazi theater already in the early years of the Third Reich, with 280 performances in the 1934–35 season and 212 performances in the 1936–37 season. The Nazis also exported the play, taking traveling German productions of Minna to Paris in 1940 and to Oslo in 1941, and arranging a Croatian premiere in Zagreb in 1943 and a Greek premiere in Athens in 1944.51 Although Minna is the only work by Lessing to have been filmed during the Third Reich, commentators have pointed to the influence of Emilia Galotti on Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940) and to elements of Miß Sara Sampson in Harlan’s Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942).52 More striking, however, is Lessing’s appearance as a character in G. W. Pabst’s film Komödianten (Traveling Players, 1941), about Caroline Neuber’s theatrical troupe. Although the character of Lessing is relatively minor within the story, it is nevertheless important insofar as it functions as the embodiment of German creative genius.53 For in the film, Neuber’s efforts to improve the situation of theater in Germany pave the way for Lessing to create his masterpiece Emilia Galotti, which (in an historical inaccuracy comparable to the appearance of the Brandenburg Gate in Das Fräulein von Barnhelm) he writes as a tribute to Neuber shortly after her death. As


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in many other interpretations of Lessing in the Third Reich, the Lessing who appears in Komödianten is a champion of Germanness whose achievements bring about a blossoming of German culture still tangible in the Third Reich.

Conclusion Like Schweikart’s adaptation of Das Fräulein von Barnhelm, the dominant image of Lessing in the Third Reich is a falsification. Nazi commentators press him into service as a fighter for the Volk and invoke his name to add credibility to the Nazi cultural agenda. They also frequently and flagrantly misinterpret his dramatic and aesthetic theories and overstate their influence, and several interpreters attempt to downplay or even deny his philo-Semitism. It is not surprising, of course, to find in Nazi readings of Lessing an emphasis both on the Volk and on the cultural achievements that allegedly served as precursors to the triumph of the Third Reich, since these and related themes are a feature of Nazi ideology. But the extent to which Nazi commentators distort Lessing to make him into a representative of these themes is nevertheless striking. For as their distortions suggest, the question of what to do with Lessing receives no comfortable answer in the Third Reich. Although his notions of tolerance and humanity stand in obvious opposition to Nazi doctrine on race, he was too central a figure in German literature and thought to be ignored, and therefore had to be refashioned, however awkwardly, into a model of Nazi Germanness. Since every reading is shaped in part by the time in which it is written, such ideological refashioning is hardly unique to Nazi Germany. Indeed, although postwar portrayals of Lessing in East and West Germany dismantle the blatant falsifications of him in the Third Reich, both the depoliticized image of Lessing in the Federal Republic of Germany and the image of Lessing in the German Democratic Republic as a pioneer in the fight against feudalism are themselves reductionist interpretations influenced by the respective political realities in Western and Eastern Europe.54 While it is still too early to define the image of Lessing emerging from reunified Germany, his message of tolerance remains relevant to the increasingly multicultural societies of the West, as well as to efforts to promote greater cultural understanding between Eastern and Western societies in the new millennium. The challenge is to redefine his relevance in light of these and other developments while refraining from transforming Lessing — a thinker who valued his autonomy and viewed labels as inherently reductionist — into a champion of the day’s political ideology.


Toppled Lessing statue on the Gänsemarkt, Hamburg, after the Allied bombing raids of 18 June 1944. Photo credit: Hugo Schmidt. Courtesy of Fotostudio Schmidt-Luchs, Hamburg.


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Notes 1

As Anke Gleber observes in her article “Das Fräulein von Tellheim. Die ideologische Funktion der Frau in der nationalsozialistischen Lessing-Adaption” (German Quarterly 59:4 [Fall 1986]: 547–68), the windmill in Das Fräulein von Barnhelm, like the windmill near Sanssouci in Der alte und der junge König (The Old and Young King, 1935) symbolize the order, industriousness, and national aims of the Prussian state as antecedents to the glory of the Third Reich (562). Although the windmill in Das Fräulein von Barnhelm is that of Franziska’s father in Saxony, the film looks ahead to the nineteenth century in treating Saxony as a virtual dominion of Prussia.

2 J. C. Gibson, “The Greatness of Lessing and His Position in Germany,” Modern Languages 17 (1936): 156–59. 3

See Claudia Albert, ed. Deutsche Klassiker im Nationalsozialismus: Schiller. Kleist. Hölderlin (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994); Rolf Klausnitzer, Blaue Blume unterm Hakenkreuz: Die Rezeption der deutschen literarischen Romantik im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999); and Jost Schneider, ed. Herder im “Dritten Reich” (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994).

4

See Dietmar Goltschnigg, ed. Büchner im Dritten Reich: Mystifikation — Gleichschaltung — Exil. Eine Dokumentation (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1990).

5 Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt, “Das Lessingbild im Dritten Reich,” Lessing Yearbook 23 (1991): 69–78. 6

See Wilfried Barner, Gunter Grimm, Helmuth Kiesel, and Martin Kramer, Lessing. Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1975), 373–77; Karl Guthke, Der Stand der Lessing-Forschung: Ein Bericht über die Literatur von 1932–1962 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), 10; and Monika Fick, Lessing-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 27–28. 7 Edward Dvoretzky, ed. Lessing: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte 1755–1968. Teil II. (Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1972); Horst Steinmetz, ed. Lessing — ein unpoetischer Dichter: Dokumente aus drei Jahrhunderten zur Wirkungsgeschichte Lessings in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1969). 8

Barbara Fischer, Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von “Nathan der Weise” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000), chap. 7; Martin Loiperdinger, “Nathan der Weise: Faschistische Filmzensur, Antisemitismus und Gewalt anno 1923,” Lessing Yearbook 14 (1982): 61–69; Ferdinand Piedmont, “Unterdrückt und rehabilitiert: Zur Theatergeschichte von Lessings Nathan der Weise von den zwanziger Jahren bis zur Gegenwart,” Lessing Yearbook 19 (1987): 85–94. 9 Excellent studies of Schweikart’s film include Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996), 109–10; Karsten Witte, “How Nazi Cinema Mobilizes the Classics: Schweikart’s Das Fräulen von Barnhelm (1940),” in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, edited by Eric Rentschler, 103–16 (New York and London: Methuen, 1986); and Anke Gleber, “Das Fräulein von Tellheim.” As both Gleber and Witte observe, David Hull’s brief analysis of the film in his Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema 1933–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of

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California P, 1969) completely overlooks the falsification of Lessing’s drama (see Hull, 203). The only extensive analysis of Lessing’s influence on film theory in the Third Reich is Hans-Jürgen Brandt’s examination of Carl Junghans’s speech “Lessings Laokoon und der Tonfilm” in chapter 5 of his study NS-Filmtheorie und dokumentarische Praxis: Hippler, Noldan, Junghans (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987). However, Brandt fails to point to the flaws in Junghans’s reading of Laokoon. 10 Also valuable would be a study of the reception of Lessing by Germans in exile, a topic that I do not include in this essay. For a summary of performances of Nathan by German émigrés, see Fischer 139–40. 11

Eckardt, 74.

12

J. M. Ritchie, German Literature under National Socialism (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 71.

13

For more extensive summaries of Lessing in the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras than can be given here, see Barner et al, 354–372, and Fick, 25–27. See also the documents in Steinmetz, 337–465. For an analysis of the reception of Nathan der Weise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Fischer, chapters 5 and 6.

14 See Adolf Stahr, excerpt from G. E. Lessing: Sein Leben und seine Werke (1859; Steinmetz, 339–44); Ferdinand Lassalle, Lessing vom culturhistorischen Standpunkt (1861; Steinmetz 348–363); Heinrich von Treitschke, excerpt from Lessing (1863; Steinmetz 373–80); Abraham Meyer Goldschmidt, excerpt from Rede zur Lessingfeier in Leipzig (1860; Steinmetz, 346–48); and Eugen Dühring, excerpt from Die Judenfrage als Frage der Racenschädlichkeit für Existenz, Sitte und Cultus der Völker (1881; Steinmetz, 390–96). 15

Arnold E. Berger, Lessings geistesgeschichtliche Stellung (Darmstadt and Leipzig: Ernst Hofmann, 1929), 20.

16

Franz Schultz, Lessing und unsere Zeit: Rede zur Feier des 200. Geburtstages von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing anläßlich der Gründungsfeier des Deutschen Reiches am 18. Januar 1929 (Frankfurt: Englert & Schlosser, 1929), 13. 17

For a study of the production of Nathan by the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Berlin, see chapter 7 of Fischer. See also Piedmont, 88–89.

18

See Joseph Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn, 1964), 256. 19

See Bernhard Zeller, ed. Klassiker in finsteren Zeiten 1933–1945: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar, 2 vols (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1983), vol. 2, 136; and Boguslaw Drewniak, Das Theater im NS-Staat: Szenarium deutscher Zeitgeschichte 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983), 168–69. It is significant that neither the Lessing Prize nor the Lessing-Gesellschaft is mentioned in the otherwise comprehensive lists included in an SS study of Germanistik compiled in 1938–39. See Gerd Simon, ed. Germanistik in den Planspielen des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS: Ein Dokument aus der Frühgeschichte der SD-Forschung (Tübingen: Gesellschaft für interdisziplinäre Forschung Tübingen [GIFT], 1998), 26–52.


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20 Adolf Bartels, Lessing und die Juden: Eine Untersuchung, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Theodor Weicher, 1934. Orig. pub. 1918), 229. Subsequent citations are in the text. See also Bartels’s Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 19th ed. (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann, 1943), 145–48. 21

Alfred Rosenberg, Gestaltung der Idee: Blut und Ehre. Vol. 2: Reden und Aufsätze von 1933–1935, edited by Thilo von Trotha (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1936), 47.

22

Mathilde Ludendorff, Lessings Geisteskampf und Lebensschicksal. Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1937.

23 Heinrich Koch, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,” in Wir wollen nicht vergessen sein: Essays über wenig gelesene große deutsche Dichter, edited by Günther Stöve, 45–61 (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark, 1939). Subsequent citations are in the text. As Stöve indicates in his preface, the title of the collection is inspired by Lessing’s well-known adaptation of Martial’s epigram. 24

Ernst Suter, “Lessing politisch gesehen,” Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 52 (1938): 414–20 (416). Subsequent citations are in the text.

25

See Drewniak, Das Theater im NS-Staat, 169.

26

Waldemar Fellman, “Wer ist ein Held? Ein Hinweis auf Lessings Philotas,” Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 50 (1936): 96–97. As Boguslaw Drewniak observes, the English setting of Miß Sara Sampson made it unpopular in the Third Reich, and the piece was renamed Clarissa after war broke out in 1939 (Das Theater im NSStaat, 169). 27

See Klassiker in finsteren Zeiten, vol. 2, 25.

28

Erziehung und Unterricht in der höheren Schule: Amtliche Ausgabe des Reichsund Preußischen Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1938), 66–67. 29

The speech is reprinted in Gerd Albrecht, ed. Film im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Karlsruhe: Doku-Verlag, 1979), 32–60; and Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1969), 447–65.

30

Albrecht, Film im Dritten Reich, 40. Subsequent citations are in the text.

31

“Schon die alten Griechen. . .! Homer als Drehbuchautor, Lessing und der Tonfilm — Überraschende Entwicklungsreihen der Kunstgesetze,” review of Carl Junghans’s speech “Lessing’s Laokoon und der Tonfilm,” Film-Atelier (Berlin), 31 January 1936, 1–2. Subsequent citations are in the text. Although there is no published edition of Junghans’s speech, it is extensively excerpted in Brandt, NSFilmtheorie, 156–70.

32

Brandt, 17.

33

“Schon die alten Griechen,” 2.

34

See Brandt, 156–57.

35

See Brandt, 170.

36

Heinrich Koch and Heinrich Braune, Von deutscher Filmkunst: Gehalt und Gestalt (Berlin: Verlag Hermann Scherping, 1943).

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Ibid., 1; see also Koch and Braune, 15, note 1.

38

Fritz Hippler, Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen, 5th ed. (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1943; orig. pub. 1942). 39

See Hilmar Hoffmann, “Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit”: Propaganda in NS-Film (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), 150. See also 155–56. 40 My analysis in this and the following two paragraphs is indebted to Linda Schulte-Sasse’s and Karsten Witte’s interpretations of Das Fräulein von Barnhelm. I wish to thank Linda Schulte-Sasse for helping me to obtain a copy of the film. 41

Witte, “How Nazi Cinema Mobilizes the Classics,” 110.

42

Schulte-Sasse, 109–10.

43

See Witte, 112.

44

Koch, Von deutscher Filmkunst, 9.

45

Edmund T. Kauer, Der Film: Vom Werden einer neuen Kunstgattung: Mit Proben aus Drehbüchern und vielen Bildern (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1943), 240. For an analysis of other attempts to gloss over the obvious disparities between the play and the film, see Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938–1945: Ein Gesamtüberblick (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987), 492. See also Witte, 113.

46

See Kauer, 284–93.

47

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm. In G. E. Lessing, Werke, edited by Herbert G. Göpfert, 8 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1970–79), vol. 1, 689. 48

Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm. In Werke, vol. 1, 690.

49

Kauer, 289.

50

Kauer, 156–57.

51

For information concerning the many foreign and domestic productions of Minna von Barnhelm during the Nazi period, see Drewniak, Das Theater im NSStaat, 109, 125, 130–31, 169.

52

See Schulte-Sasse, 54–55, and Robert C. Reimer, “Turning Inward: An Analysis of Helmut Käutner’s Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska; Romanze in Moll; and Unter den Brücken,” in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich, edited by Robert C. Reimer, 214–39 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000). See especially 223. 53 For a penetrating analysis of the character of Lessing in Komödianten, see Schulte-Sasse, 199–202. 54

As Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt points out (75–76). See also Barner et al, 378–85. For an example of the image of Lessing prevalent in GDR interpretations, see Anna Seghers, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,” in Anna Seghers, Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 2, edited by Sigrid Bock (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1971), 62–69.


Ernst Deutsch as Nathan and Luitgard Im as Recha in the Karl Heinz Stroux staging of Nathan der Weise, Schiller-Theater, Berlin, 1955. Courtesy of Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung of the University of Cologne, Schloss Wahn, Germany.

Lessing on the German-Speaking Stage in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, 1945–1990 Reinhart Meyer

German Theater: A Historical Perspective

T

of German drama and theater has been shaped by its own history. Staatsbühnen, that is, theaters financed by central or local government resources rather than by investment on the part of the directors or other participants, did not exist until the 1920s. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opera and theater were financed privately by the nobility and professional Wandertruppen. With the isolated exception of the short-lived Nationaltheater in Hamburg, private citizens did not finance culture at all, and that did not change in the nineteenth century. However, the “private theaters” of the nobility were boosted with major building projects and generous grants to such an extent that, except in Vienna, privately financed theater companies could not compete. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries even the strongest private theaters seldom survived more than fifteen years. The temporary democratization in Germany after its defeat in the First World War placed the former court theaters under the supervision of the new republican states, which however maintained this cultural heritage without giving it any clear new direction. Buildings and their architecture, including traditional stages as well as the division of the auditorium according to social class and often with the sovereign’s box directly opposite the stage, remained unaltered, as did the concept of theater being a business based on subsidies. These subsidies constituted indirect censorship. After the First World War, theatrical innovations came from the few privately owned theaters, but these were eliminated after 1933. At that time a very large number of dramatists, script writers, and directors emigrated. These included Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Ernst Toller, Therese Giehse, Fritz Kortner, Helene Weigel, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Carola Neher, Erwin Piscator, Max Reinhard, Billy Wilder, and many others. After the war few of the emigrants returned. The “new HE CONTEMPORARY CONDITION

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beginning” of German theater either had to be managed by the elites who had cooperated with National Socialism, or the artists who had gone into “inner emigration,” supported by soldiers who had returned from the war and POW camps. Due to air raids and street fighting, many theaters and opera houses were destroyed or ruined. Postwar German theater was dependent on provisional arrangements and was found at first only in temporary rooms. But the traditional concept of theater did not change. Restored or newly built theaters were constructed according to the same structural framework as theaters of the monarchic or bourgeois eras had been, that is, proscenium stages and auditoriums divided according to classes of spectators as defined by the quality and prices of seats. Once again, the theaters were sponsored by the federal state and the city in which they were located. As was the case after 1919, no reform of statesponsored culture took place due to the unorganized postwar situation and a lack of resources. Not until the 1950s and 1960s was the theater leadership able to consolidate its position with the thorough restoration and building of new theaters. Even then, new buildings were erected according to the old courtly building models, and the financing of the theaters by the various federal states or cities remained unquestioned. German theater people failed to restore contact with the international theater community, a contact that had been interrupted by National Socialism. They also could not deal effectively with the weaknesses caused by that rupture, and thereby lost a tremendous opportunity for theater reform after 1945. Once again, the private theaters had no chance under these conditions. Among the old and new elites of the Federal Republic, no one could be found to finance a theater or an orchestra. These conditions have still not changed significantly to the present day: the theater business remains unreformed. It is run by the state or local politicians, and is dependent on the prevailing party-political constellations, the government, and city councils. For it is they who appoint the theater managers, regulate salaries, and are responsible for buildings and organization. Private institutions did develop, but they seldom gained any significant importance because the necessary grants were denied. Successful directors or theater managers in Germany, Switzerland, or Austria are employed by the state. They are not employees of open and competitive businesses. The effects of their activity remain of regional importance: neither German theater of the postwar era nor German film has regained its international status. Whoever wants to advance in these fields must work outside of Germany. It goes without saying that these regional and national constraints also determine the reception of Lessing’s dramas. In 1946, Theater der Zeit was founded, the first postwar theater journal to be published on a regular basis. As early as 1947, the journal complained about old-fashioned theater1 and noted in the following issue that the complaints from throughout Germany were the same. With few exceptions, the journal complained,

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there were no daring theater directors, no dramaturges oriented toward the future, no directors willing to take risks, no actors with new methods, and no avant-garde dramatists.2 Like everything else in German society, theater was restored, but continued without serious reform. At first it was hardly noticeable, but for the future of theater it was most significant that alongside the state-run theaters, student groups with repertoires that criticized society were formed at or near universities. Such theaters were viewed with suspicion by the officials and received no support from the cities. A type of theater developed here that was, if not alternative, at least different. This difference was quite apparent because there was little funding available. Here theater people developed the concentration on the “essence” or “core” of the play, which had begun during the Weimar Republic, was interrupted during the Nazi period, and which led to the reform efforts of the 1970s. One thinks here of Martin Walser, who found his literary beginnings at the Regensburger Studentenbühne, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who began his career working in alternative theater in Frankfurt.3 The students and other young people had hardly begun with their work when the first warning signs appeared. Their non-professional, and therefore “unprofessional” work was branded “dilettantish,” without taking into consideration the fact that, in their own lifetimes, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Kleist, and others were regarded as precisely such “dilettantes.” Yet these writers had shaped German theater right from the start, adorning it with some of its most important texts — that, too, is a fairly specific German development.4 Herbert Ihering warned as early as 1947 that student theaters should not attempt to compete with state-sponsored ones, and that even plays with young people as protagonists were better performed by professional actors.5 By 1949 student theaters could already be found in more than ten West German cities.6 Lessing, however, hardly played a significant role, even though many “classical” plays were staged. Just before going out of business, a student theater in Regensburg produced, without commentary, Lessing’s Der Junge Gelehrte (The Young Scholar, 1754). A Lessing play at the end of a season can be staged without any deeper meaning, but one played for a theater’s closing may suggest the incompatibility of Lessing’s oeuvre with the demands of twentieth-century theater sensibilities, a subject to which I will return in this essay. Necessarily, the following history of the reception of Lessing’s plays has to focus on the theaters owned and/or subsidized by the state and the cities, because the relevant media only report about these. I have analyzed the two most important theater journals of the postwar era: Theater der Zeit, beginning in 1946, and Theater heute, beginning in 1960. In addition, I have consulted articles in the national press and the little scholarly literature available.

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Basic Features of Lessing Reception on Stage Only Lessing’s three great plays Minna von Barnhelm (1767), Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) and Emilia Galotti (1772) are of any importance for the repertoires of the Staats- and Stadttheater. This is not a peculiarity of the postwar era, but could already be observed in the eighteenth century.7 The lesser plays Der Freigeist (The Freethinker, 1755) and Der Junge Gelehrte, as well as Miß Sara Sampson (1755) play only a minor role, mainly as fillers for the classical repertoire or in thematically fixed contexts. The latter is especially true for Die Juden (The Jews, 1754). This early Lessing comedy is often staged along with another play addressing similar concerns, and the decision to stage it is based primarily on context and not on the play itself. Productions of the three great plays appear motivated by factors which already guided the stage reception in the nineteenth century. Firstly, Lessing is perceived as a “German” poet, perhaps the most German of them all. This plays an important role in stagings of Minna. Then there is Lessing as an “upright,” “manly” poet, as evidenced by Emilia. Finally, we have Lessing as a cultural symbol, as the champion of humanism, which is primarily true for Nathan. In the production and reception of German culture, this triad is clear and offers guidance in the somewhat unclearly defined realm of the German classics. It provides a handy roster which also applies to those productions that, beginning in the 1970s, attempted either to deconstruct or update the classics. Whether in a historical or a modern context, the German classics serve as an instrument of emancipation from other European countries and at the same time they satisfy the need for tradition and continuity. It is striking that in the early postwar period there were some critics who questioned why Lessing’s dramas should be produced at all, and called them obsolete, mere historic relicts. These same critics claimed that productions of Lessing’s plays resembled funeral ceremonies, the only justification for which was nostalgia for the past. They also criticized Lessing’s plays as untheatrical and artificial. Lessing’s own comments in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–69), in which he asserts that he is more a craftsman than a true poet or artist, encourage this suspicion: “Ich bin weder Schauspieler noch Dichter. Man erweist mir zwar manchmal die Ehre, mich für den letztern zu erkennen, aber nur, weil man mich verkennt . . . Ich fühle die lebendige Quelle nicht in mir, die durch eigene Kraft sich emporarbeitet, durch eigene Kraft in so reichen, so frischen, so reinen Strahlen aufschießt; ich muß alles durch Druckwerk und Röhren aus mir heraufpressen.”8 Lessing’s dramas owe their continued presence in German theaters in large part to secondary influences that lie outside the theater. Lessing enjoys a fine reputation as a theorist, as a “good” German, as a liberal


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humanist, as a productive mind from the “beginnings” of the German theater. (I would argue that this is not true. Between 1700 and Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm approximately 30,000 plays were written and produced in the German Reich.9) Lessing is also known as an economical dramatist who does not overly burden the stage with technicalities and personnel. For all these reasons Lessing’s plays enjoyed a continuous and ubiquitous presence at German-speaking theaters in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from the postwar era until the end of the twentieth century. There were no periods of particularly intensive activity (apart from the festivities on the occasions of Lessing’s 250th birthday in 1979 and the 200th anniversary of his death in 1981), but there was also no significant nadir, and no noticeable dropping off of public interest. On average, between twelve and fourteen new productions of Lessing’s dramas were performed per year in theaters of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. With 150 to 180 commercial theaters that means that Lessing productions maintain a good place in the middle of the field; but it is remarkable that, in general, this figure primarily represents productions of only three plays. But only in connection with the figures for the complete German-language dramatic repertoire does this data have any meaning. In 1990, shortly after the reunification, the German-speaking theaters of the Federal Republic, Austria, and Switzerland (about 180 theaters with up to four stages each) staged a total of at least 2000 new productions; only twenty-three were dramas by Lessing. In 1999, the same theaters staged about 1900 new productions, but only nineteen dramas by Lessing. On average, Lessing’s dramas made up about one percent of the total number of productions in the 1990s. At the top of the popularity chart is Minna von Barnhelm, which occasionally recorded as many as eight or more new productions on German-speaking stages per year. This was followed by Nathan, of which there were three to four new productions on different stages per year. New productions of Emilia Galotti were staged about three times a year on average. The other plays remain marginal; only Die Juden can occasionally draw a certain interest as a gesture of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or dealing with the past. Then it is usually combined with a play with a similar message: the Viennese Burgtheater coupled it with Max Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter (The Firebugs, 1963) in 1977; as early as 1966 it was played alongside Brecht’s Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule, 1930) in Darmstadt. The easy accessibility and adaptability of Lessing’s dramas to prevailing regional conditions and preferences does not change the fact that the major stages of postwar theater history were not shaped by Lessing productions. Shakespeare is clearly in the lead, not only with the most productions in purely numerical terms, but also in view of the controversies that Shakespeare productions invariably aroused. After Shakespeare, dramas by Goethe and Schiller were the next most frequently produced,

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followed by Kleist and Büchner, and innovative productions of works by foreign dramatists. Lessing’s dramas do not move directors to excessive feats of the imagination; productions are not staged in stadiums, slaughter-houses, factories, or on the street. Lessing productions generally observe theatrical conventions, remaining within the confines of the theater and the traditional proscenium stage, thus always face to face with the audience. Lessing was also rarely staged by groups independent of the established theaters and never by emphatically autonomous groups that rejected social or artistic norms. The care of Lessing’s dramas remains without exception in the hands of those theaters that are financed by the various states and cities. The few private theaters that appeared after 1950 and were able to operate (or rather survive) for a longer period of time seldom showed interest in Lessing. Only those official theatrical institutions, which, as I have noted, are in dire need of reform, still uphold Lessing’s reputation as a classical German author. Although theaters staged his dramas on a regular basis, it was usually without excitement, suspense, or scandals. With Lessing, apparently, one can earn respect, but cannot achieve breakthroughs or radical innovations. Lessing provides little incentive for fantasy or creative stage design. His dramas are, without exception, set in small rooms; when their characters are placed on large-scale modern stages, they convey the impression of being lost. Alternatively, the small rooms and dimensions of eighteenthcentury theaters, private houses, and castles are gigantically enlarged and are therefore bereft of their historical accuracy. Lessing offers no underworld (like Gluck), no battles or witch-dances (like Shakespeare or Schiller), nothing monumental like the authors of antiquity, no psychiatric hospitals (like Peter Weiss); but also no conversations like Schnitzler, no agon like Euripides. There is no civic forum as employed by Aristophanes or Terence, and no public assembly with a chorus. There is not even a chance of putting music to any of the scenes. (A popular exception is Nathan due to its exotic setting, which can with relative ease be adapted to grand, almost operatic scenery.) The reasons lie in the structure of the plays as well as in Lessing’s historical situation. All of Lessing’s plays were written for traveling groups with accordingly small companies. The plays usually consist of two major, two supporting, and some minor parts, so that there was little need for large ensembles of performers. In contrast, the important plays of the European theater require significantly larger casts (compare Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe’s Faust, Schiller, among others). Lessing conceived his dramas to fit the possibilities offered by theaters of the eighteenth century. They are therefore essentially incompatible with the possibilities of gigantic modern theaters (both in terms of space and personnel). Only Nathan is once again an exception due to its prominent


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main character and exotic setting. Generally, however, the fact remains that Lessing’s plays do not lend themselves to productions on the large stages common since the nineteenth century. Too much of the space on the stage either remains empty or the stage sets are enlarged to unhistorical size. His plays only reach the stage because of secondary motivations other than their dramatic appeal. Regional factors may play a role (productions in Braunschweig, Göttingen, possibly Hamburg); needs of the repertoire (considerations regarding requests by schools; concessions made for certain subscribers and groups of subscribers); staffing, and other such matters. One cannot fail to notice how the history of the reception of Lessing’s dramas is characterized by a discrepancy between the effect they produce when read privately and the impression they leave when performed on stage, a discrepancy that invariably reflects badly on the theater. (This is a problem that even Goethe had to face again and again, especially with his many musical plays). The literalness of the texts hinders the development of the actor’s genius. The texts are linguistically too dense for an actor to be able to play out their nuances. Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer describes this problem poignantly, noting that she remembers many fine individual performances from Lessing productions, but no Lessing production that, as a whole, had satisfied her: Merkwürdigerweise habe ich nie eine Lessing-Aufführung gesehen, von der ich behaupten könnte, sie sei, auch nur im Rahmen dessen, was man vernünftigerweise verlangen könnte, vollkommen gewesen: einem klaren, klar durchgeführten Regiewillen entsprungen, in allen Figuren gleichmäßig angemessen gespielt. Immer blieb ein Wenn und Aber. In der Erinnerung sind mir hervorragende Einzelleistungen geblieben, nicht ein Ganzes. . . . Man mag aus dieser Erscheinung die Schwierigkeiten ablesen, Lessing wirklich und umfassend zu realisieren.10

Invariable Characteristics of Reception There exist several invariable characteristics of Lessing reception in the postwar West. One is the thematic field surrounding the productions. Most productions of Minna, for example, consciously situate themselves within the framework of the historical Prussian world, adopt positions for or against Frederick II, and, from the vantage point of that context, examine the structure and stability of ethical values. Emilia productions investigate the social tensions between the private and public spheres, and between the everyday and the political. Thus they gain a political dimension with regard to the themes of power/authority and subservience. Nathan is produced, inevitably almost without exception, within the tension of the “Jewish Question,” and therefore, after the Holocaust, also as part of the framework of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

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As for stage presentation, the reception of Minna is determined by the obvious connection of the plot to Prussian history, the openness of the theater for a piece with quaint wigs and costumes, soldiers, uniforms, and ladies with pretty décolletés. On the other hand it can function as a postwar piece in ruins and rags. It can be produced as pro- or anti-Prussian, pro- or anti-monarchical, contemporary or historical, as topical or for pure entertainment. With Emilia the ambiguity of the setting, both in terms of time and place, make it possible to move the play to exotic locations or to centers of present-day crises; to an Italian province or to any contemporary German town or region. This allows the play to be interpreted as condemning authoritarian tyranny, licentious sexuality, and/or the cynicism of power. It can also focus on the vulnerability of the middle class, its lack of self-confidence and suicidal submissiveness. The play furthermore can serve to demonstrate paternal despotism and its fatal consequences, or to portray the threatened domestic life of the middle-class family. Directors have the opportunity to exaggerate Lessing’s terse, epigrammatic style, especially noticeable in Emilia, to the point of parody, or to have the actors deliver their lines in such a way that they appear like marionettes, thus strengthening any interpretation the director may choose. Due to its oriental setting, Nathan can be transported into a utopian distance or it can be turned into a personal tour-de-force for the actor playing the title role, thanks to the way the main character dominates the action. Especially in the postwar era, the reference to the Nazi past becomes unavoidable. Productions in the fifties and early sixties were often clearly designed to demonstrate remorse and atonement (for example, those starring Ernst Deutsch). The play can also be done as a satirical farce that reveals the hopelessness of religious and ideological dogmatism. This can refer to the experiences of the two world wars as well as the later political conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.

Characteristics of Postwar Reception Nathan der Weise and Minna von Barnhelm Productions of Nathan dominated the first wave of reception of Lessing’s dramas after the war. The Deutsche Theater in Berlin re-opened on 7 September 1945 with this play, with Paul Wegener as Nathan and Eduard von Winterstein as the friar. Fritz Wisten directed the play, which had been forbidden for twelve years, as a parable for tolerance towards religious and ideological diversity. In July, Erich Ponto played the lead role in Dresden. A production in Hamburg followed the same year. In 1946, Munich followed suit, as did Frankfurt am Main in 1947. In East Germany, the drama was staged in almost all theaters. Of great importance in the West


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was Ernst Deutsch’s interpretation of the role of Nathan, which he played hundreds of times from 1954–1964 under several directors (including Stroux and Lindberg) and also took on tour.11 The Nathan productions served to convey remorse and atonement for the crimes of the Nazis and often drew strong emotional reactions from the audience. Fritz Wisten’s production, shortly after the war in the Soviet Sector of Berlin, was attended by an audience wearing overcoats and gloves, exhausted and hungry in an unheated theater, but moved to tears at the words of the old Nathan, who pronounced Lessing’s credo.12 These productions also had the function of building a bridge to Germany’s supposedly intact humanistic tradition, to help audiences forget the horrors of the recent past and on some level gloss over National Socialism and the Second World War, erasing them from historical consciousness as an “accident” or as a “youthful mistake.” Nathan productions primarily served to “reconcile” fundamental human differences, but they rarely provided a critical encounter with the past. They purported to continue and renew the old ideals of tolerance and the “goodness of the heart,” which is of course laudable. But directors, actors, and the audience too often avoided the challenge of an honest encounter with the recent historic realities of murder and violence. The central question, one not raised in German Staatstheater for decades, is why the German humanist tradition proved such an inadequate firewall against barbarism. One critic asks whether there might be something in that very tradition that in fact made the barbarism possible: Weshalb haben humanistische Traditionen und überkommene Verhaltensmodelle sich als ein so zerbrechlicher Schutzwall erwiesen gegen die politische Bestialität? Sind sie tatsächlich ein Schutzwall gewesen, oder ist es realistischer, in der humanistischen Kultur etwas zu sehen, was die autoritäre Regierungsform und Grausamkeit ausdrücklich heraufrief?13

By the mid-1950s German theaters had established largely binding patterns for Nathan. Directors and actors could choose to submit to these, to pay lip service to them, or to resist them loudly and conspicuously. Beyond that, however, there were few if any productions with the influence of the postwar stagings. Nathan der Weise remains an institutionalized classic that moves from festival to festival, from the Ruhrfestspiele to the Salzburger Festspiele, from the Sommerfestival in Ludwigsburg to the Ruine in Bad Hersfeld. Only hesitatingly did the insight emerge that humanity is not an abstract value, but rather always part of the historical process of its realization — or destruction. The theatrical realization of this understanding, however, is problematic, since it requires a twofold representation: on the one hand the portrayal of the world at the time the play was written, on the

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other hand its development to the present day. We must ask whether the theater is even the appropriate medium for this. Claus Peymann attempted a production along these lines in Bochum in 1981, as did Karl-Dirk Schmidt in Nuremberg in 1988. Neither found much resonance because of the technique, not necessarily convincing to audiences, of transporting a historical text to a conceptual “meta-level” by altering, rearranging, and cutting it. In 1991 George Tabori wrote and produced the collage Nathans Tod nach Lessing (Nathan’s Death According to/After Lessing; the title in German is purposefully ambiguous), first in Wolfenbüttel’s Lessing-Theater, then in Munich’s Residenztheater.14 Tabori does not produce Lessing’s play, but uses it as a backdrop onto which he projects in shortened and compressed form the story of the Jews until the Holocaust. It is a story of death, destruction, and suicide. Nathan’s house is destroyed, Saladin does not want to hear Nathan’s parable of the rings, and Sittah puts a plastic bag over her head. Tabori eliminates the love story and includes only scenes from the second, third, and fourth acts framed by Geschichtchen, little stories, that Nathan tells as monologues. In the end, his parable of the rings is also told in this way as a prelude to his death. Tabori lets violence destroy all tolerance. There does not seem to be a principle of hope. Strangely enough, Tabori retains Lessing’s starting point regarding the problem of the authenticity of the great religions. He makes Saladin one of the evil-doers, and there seems to be no question that Christians too are essentially murderers and informers. (In Tabori’s version, the Templar betrays Nathan.) Thus Tabori’s play tends towards a mentality of over-simplification, which also contributed to the historical horrors he condemns. Nonetheless, his collage remains one of the most striking cases of Nathan reception of the postwar era, standing alongside the productions put on stage immediately after the end of the war. Until Wolfgang Langhoff’s production in the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin (1960), audiences had no problems with Minna von Barnhelm. It was a rococo play with a certain grace, a certain esprit, and a bit of humor. It could be staged more or less patriotically, but always in a pleasing and conciliatory way, with more or less eroticism or rhetoric. Langhoff’s production took the play firmly into the postwar era and built a bridge from the present of the audience to the past of the play. The result was a shift towards a darker, more pessimistic approach to the play, which also influenced all subsequent West German productions that were not completely committed to the reformist optimism inspired by the Social Democrats (who had recently wrested power away from the conservative Christian Democrats for the first time in the postwar period) in the 1970s. The more topical the productions became, the less comical they were. In some, Minna was in danger of dying in the embrace of slimy landlords, in others of being clubbed by soldiers disabled in the war. The influence of


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East German productions on West Germany was probably not primarily caused by sympathy for the GDR regime, but is rather an indication of the genuinely Protestant core of Lessing’s dramas. Lessing came from a Protestant vicarage, and he is also a theologian when he turns to the stage. So it is not surprising that the preoccupation with his “heritage” was more intensive in Prussia, Saxony, or Thuringia (which constituted East Germany) than, for example, in Munich or Vienna. Regardless of whether one produced Minna in the West or the East, problems remained with each production. One thinks again of Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer’s comment, cited above, that she had seen many Lessing productions that satisfied her in part, but none that satisfied her as a whole. As another critic noted: “ ‘Das einzige deutsche Lustspiel,’ wie man Lessings Stück genannt hat, ist allen deutschen Theaterbesuchern, Regisseuren und Schauspielern ein bißchen Wunsch- und ein bißchen Alptraum. Der Ruf der Minna von Barnhelm, daß sie eminent spielbar sei, ist gerade groß genug, um die immer wieder gemachte Erfahrung zu verdecken, daß sie eminent unspielbar ist.”15 Minna appears to be a play one can easily perform, but directors continually experience the opposite. That is not only true for Minna, but more or less for all of Lessing’s dramas, and is probably the result of his historical position between the Baroque period (founded on rhetoric) and the Classical-Romantic drama (characterized by individualism). The distanced nature of a Baroque play makes the theatrical access easier than does Lessing’s constant imposition of his personal style, which is not yet the style coined later by Goethe and Schiller. Lessing is still too close to us, and yet already too far away, a fact that has nothing to do with chronology because it applies to Shakespeare’s plays only marginally, and those are of course considerably older. Their affinity to the present is obviously (and, in terms of productions, statistically) greater than Lessing’s. Thus almost all reports about productions of Minna and Emilia Galotti reveal a certain ambivalence. It seems as if almost no concept worked completely. Even the opponents of a traditional conception were seldom able to sustain their approach; they often changed it midway or they returned to the familiar tracks of the conventional. In either case they alienated their audiences. As one critic asserted: “Lessings Lustspiel Minna von Barnhelm ist ohne Tücken, aber sehr vertrackt.”16 Emilia Galotti At the end of the 1960s ever fewer people were attending Germanspeaking theaters in the West, and in theater circles a new “crisis of the theater” was proclaimed. Now that most of the postwar reconstruction had been accomplished, people began to have expectations of the theater that went beyond the relaxation and entertainment of the immediate postwar period. There were new demands and higher expectations; audiences were interested in more intense intellectual stimulation, political argumentation,

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and formal experimentation. The theaters could fulfill all this only partially. Here, the institutional immobility of the state- or city-institutions became manifest. As educational opportunities, especially at the university level, became more widely available, and TV and cinema expanded, as well as vacation opportunities, people realized, as one critic noted, that one could do more important things than attend the theater.17 Actors and directors tried to deal with this reduced interest by “destroying the classics,” a kind of aggression against one’s self and one’s past, in order to integrate the shards into a new form of reception. They also sought new forms of communication with the audience, for example in the form of advertising, open rehearsals, and mobile productions. Third, they pioneered a new approach to the old texts by treating them as social documents, whose determinants the theater could reveal. This approach brought interesting results with regard to many playwrights of the past, but Lessing’s plays did not gain much from it. The lack of in-depth historical-sociological research about the eighteenth century proved a hindrance. Universities did negotiate and discuss this research topic, but a useful social history of absolutism in the German Reich does not exist to this day, despite opulently titled works that might suggest otherwise. Consequently, when directors produced Lessing (and even today earlier German writers are only produced occasionally) they had little to guide them save their own often inaccurate impressions. This means they primarily produced clichés of Prussia, absolutism, the situation of “the” woman — who then as now was/is a highly differentiated entity — or “the” man, “the” soldier, “the” prince, “the” absolutist court. Beginning in the late 1960s German theater directors no longer evinced the curiosity with which one starts a journey into the past as to a strange, foreign country; a journey which still largely conforms to what Wieland demanded of the travel literature back in the eighteenth century, namely that insight into the familiar is to be gained by confrontation with the foreign. The dramas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are not accepted by German directors as something “foreign.” They are rather understood as raw material, which becomes available to the carpentry work of the present-day director who planes away everything strange (since it is incomprehensible) and stylizes the remaining torso to something now “comprehensible” but alienated from the historical context of its origins. The work of the director (and actor) is not understood as a Socratic act of dialectical guiding of the audience to the play, but rather as midwifery for the play, a rebirth in a form commensurable to the audience and the critics. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti is the most extreme example of this procedure. Apparently constrained by the tightly structured play and their own lack of energy or imagination, directors conventionally stage it centering on the clichés of the run-down court, its stereotypically corrupt nobility, a lecherous prince, and subjects without power.


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The fictitious setting Guastalla lies in a real Italy, though not directly around the time of the Enlightenment, but rather a bit earlier. Hence every would-be production should begin by gathering the necessary historical information. Hardly any of the postwar productions took into consideration that the play was written and played for the birthday of the sister of Frederick the Great, wife of Duke Carl I of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, who reigned from 1735–1780. Therefore it is a play right from the center of life under princely absolutism — and written by Lessing precisely for this occasion. The political import of the plot, which was recognized later by Heinrich Heine among others, makes the play more interesting, but does not reflect an eighteenth-century intention. The play’s process of creation was a remarkable one, and has been investigated.18 Probably Emilia Galotti would have remained a fragment like so many of Lessing’s dramatic attempts, but in Braunschweig the director Döbbelin had already started with the rehearsals, and the Berlin publisher Voss was already printing the script — even though Lessing himself had only written half of the play. It was supposed to be staged at a courtly festival at the Royal Residence, and Döbbelin threatened to finish the drama himself and to produce it in that form if Lessing did not continue his work. The publisher was also waiting for the manuscript. Thus pressured from two sides, Lessing sent the play piece by piece to the director and the publisher in Berlin, also a Residence. Lessing started the play as an adaptation of the Roman story of Virginia, a topos that had been parodied by Rademin in Vienna quite some time before. (Rademin parodied the character of Lucretia, but there were numerous eighteenth-century re-workings of both the Lucretia and Virginia plots).19 Lessing risked slipping into the same pattern of a tragic, stoic, martyr drama, where, at the end, an innocent girl is sacrificed. Under normal circumstances he would have quit his work. In this case, however, he could not even make retroactive corrections because the printing had already started. Döbbelin’s threat had to be taken seriously. So while continuing the play, Lessing started to make corrections with retroactive consequences also for the first two acts. Emilia was changed from the “most fearful” to the “most determined” of her gender, started to feel and not only to obey, and thus became open for seduction. These later textual and conceptual changes, which primarily concern the character of Emilia, will make any literary interpretation sound contradictory. For directors and actors the results were problems in production and acting that could not easily be solved. These problems, by the way, did not only characterize the productions of the postwar era. Emilia Galotti is not a very logical play due to the history of its creation. It changes, depending on whether it is only being read from beginning to end (as a student might do), or if it is being re-read (in awareness of the ending) and produced accordingly. Only Fritz Kortner staged Emilia with great success, but also after long preparation, in the

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Josefstädter Theater in Vienna in 1970. In 1965, Kortner had put Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784) on stage in Munich; in 1966 Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene (1844) in Berlin; in 1969 Goethe’s Clavigo (1774) in Hamburg, and finally in 1970 the above-mentioned production in Vienna. Kortner had hence taken a long, exhausting path in his effort to understand with ever more exactitude the German bourgeois mentality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Play by play he worked out more and more clearly that it is one of the peculiarities of great German literature to show implicitly the instability, fickleness, and lack of principle of the middle-class protagonists, even and especially when they lament their downfall. Instead of dragging the royal court in front of a tribunal consisting of an audience of the twentieth century — something we are already used to from history books and supposedly progressive plays and movies — Kortner makes clear in his Emilia that it is not so much princely arrogance or the intrigues of a princely servant that are responsible for the killing of a timid girl. Rather, it is the self-destructive anxiety of the members of the middle class, their helplessness and submissiveness; in short, it is the lack of initiative in the bourgeois world. This message was probably not as clear to Lessing himself as it appeared in Kortner’s staging, and self-censorship would have made such a message unspeakable in eighteenth-century Germany. If I interpret reports about this production correctly, then Kortner’s attentive reading brought to light also the dialectic of what Lessing allowed himself to write (independently from the situation at the court of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel). Thus Kortner does not make the prince develop into a power-hungry young man, but into a young nobleman who had never learned to discipline his sensuality. Opposite him is a young female subject (not middle class, but with middle class tendencies), who has never learned to accept her latent sensuality. Accordingly, her father is only able to make her “controllable” by elimination. The adviser Marinelli, who acts like any modern manager without sentimental attachments, develops without inhibition the court as an instrument of power. The mother, as the necessary pawn in the game, has the tendency to be submissive, to obey, even if it is against her innermost feelings or indeed her very own interests. Aware of the play’s complicated and conflicted process of creation, Kortner drew the only possible consequence for his production. He let Emilia’s sensual endangerment, which is voiced only at the end of the play, sound out from the beginning. That might go against the text, but adds, precisely due to this apparent contradiction, a new level, in which the repressed sensuality of Emilia can be defined even more impressively. We can leave open the question as to whether Emilia cannot love Count Appiani because she is in love with the Prince, as Ivan Nagel proposes in his excellent review of Kortner’s production.20 At any rate, Gellert showed in his Leben der Schwedischen Gräfin von G —— (The History of


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the Swedish Countess of G ——, 1747–48) that a woman’s love for one man does not logically rule out her being in love with another. This is the conflict whose abyss Gellert was still able to think through and overcome, but which seemed hopeless for Odoardo Galotti and which Emilia Galotti is therefore not able to solve. These considerations probably go beyond Kortner’s concept, but they are within the framework in which he put Lessing’s play.

Conclusion At the end of this survey of the tendencies, peculiarities, and constants of Lessing theater reception in the West, little remains to be said. After the Nathan productions of the immediate postwar era only Tabori’s Nathan adaptation proved remarkable. There has not been a breathtaking or truly comic Minna production, and for Emilia Galotti only Fritz Kortner has found a convincing concept. Apart from that, hardly any director has managed to transport Lessing’s plays plausibly into the present time. Comparisons to productions of Goethe or Shakespeare show that the problem does not lie with the age of Lessing’s plays. There are structural reasons that I have attempted to outline. There are, however, also problems with our historical consciousness. We see Lessing at the beginning of modern German drama, to which we show a certain respect, but he also appears to be without a historical context, without antecedents. In fact, his dramas do lie in a historical context, whose fullness and diversity has been forgotten, and on which Lessing productions can therefore no longer draw today. The opera house now belongs more to our historical past than does the spoken theater, yet today’s productions of Handel’s operas generate a much greater historical awareness and interest than do Lessing’s spoken dramas. The reasons for this, however, would be the subject of another essay. — Translated by Denise Watkins, Barbara Fischer, and Thomas Fox

Notes 1

Theater der Zeit: Blätter für Bühne, Film und Musik, edited by Fritz Erpenbeck (Berlin: Henschel und Sohn, 1946–). Here: Heinz B. Steffen, “Trott des Theaters,” 2:1 (1947): 30–31. I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara Fischer for her helpful collaboration and suggestions concerning this topic.

2 3

Fritz Erpenbeck, “Nachwuchssorgen,” Theater der Zeit 2:2 (1947): 2.

Cf. Studentenbühne Regensburg 1946–1949. Helmut Pigge, Wolfgang Queck, K.-H. Backhaus, Roswitha Flatz, Richard Triebe, Martin Walser et. al. Eine

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Dokumentation, edited by Reinhart Meyer and Astrid Schärtel (Regensburg: Selbstverlag des Studententheaters, 2001). Materials on R.-W. Fassbinder are now so easily accessible that a reference is not necessary here. 4 The accusation of being dilettantish and unprofessional belongs to the usual inventory of the suppression of innovations. Compare: Franz Roth: Der verkannte Künstler: Studien zur Geschichte und Theorie des kulturellen Mißverstehens, with a preface by Wulf Herzogenrath. (Cologne: Du Mont Buchverlag, 1993). 5

Herbert Ihering, “Akademische Bühnen?” Theater der Zeit 2:11 (1947): 27.

6

G. M. Kaltofen, “Studenten spielen Theater: Fragen der Stückwahl: Fragen der Darstellung.” Theater der Zeit 4:5 (1949): 26–27.

7

The complete dramatic production of the eighteenth century along with its reception is being reassessed by Reinhart Meyer: Bibliographia Dramatica et Dramaticorum (Tübingen: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag, 1986–) Currently, there are 24 volumes. For the productions of Lessing’s plays in the eighteenth century compare Ursula Schulz: Lessing auf der Bühne: Chronik der Theateraufführungen 1748–1789, Repertorien zur Erforschung der frühen Neuzeit, volume 2 (Bremen and Wolfenbüttel: Jacobi-Verlag, 1977). As a precaution I would like to mention that for other authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there are no such Repertorien; so there is a total lack of comparative numbers and materials. A grievous fault in all examinations of the theater is that they neglect the musical theater almost entirely. In any case, Lessing did not dominate the programs of German theaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially not in the twentieth.

8 Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in G. E. Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-), vol. 6, 680. 9 Compare: Reinhart Meyer, Bibliographia Dramatica et Dramaticorum: Einführung, Ergebnisse und Erkenntnisse (Tübingen: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag, 1999). 10

Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 2nd edition, Friedrichs Dramatiker des Welttheaters, volume 11 (Velber bei Hannover: Friedrichverlag, 1972), 125.

11 For the new productions compare Barbara Fischer, Nathans Ende: Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von Nathan der Weise (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000), 143–64. Also: Klaus Bohnen, ed., Lessings Nathan der Weise (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978); Bettina Dessau, Nathans Rückkehr: Studien zur Rezeptionsgeschichte seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986). 12

Inge von Wangenheim, “Die Traumvorstellung,” in 100 Jahre Deutsches Theater Berlin 1883–1983, ed. Michael Kuschina (Berlin: Henschel, 1983), 140–41. 13

George Steiner, “Une saison en enfer,” in George Tabori: Nathans Tod nach Lessing, Programm des Münchner Residenz-Theaters (Munich: 1991), 51. Compare also: Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer and Jörg Schönert, eds., Theater gegen das Vergessen: Bühnenarbeit und Drama bei George Tabori (Tübingen: Max-Niemeyer Verlag, 1997); Peter Höyng, ed., Verkörperte Geschichtsentwürfe: George Taboris Theaterarbeit / Embodied Projections in History: George Tabori’s Theaterwork (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 1998); Ferdinand Piedmont, “Unterdrückt und rehabilitiert: Zur


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Theatergeschichte von Lessings Nathan der Weise von den zwanziger Jahren bis zur Gegenwart,” in Lessing-Yearbook 19 (1987): 85–94; Anke Roeder, “Die Konturen des Verschwindens. Zu Nathans Tod von George Tabori,” in Andrea Welker, ed., George Tabori — Dem Gedächtnis, der Trauer und dem Lachen gewidmet (Vienna, Linz, Weitra and Munich: Bibliothek der Provinz, 1994), 290–92. 14

(Program and text) George Tabori: Nathans Tod nach Lessing, Programm des Münchner Residenztheaters (Munich 1991). (Thanks to the producers of the Residenztheater for their quick and comprehensive help). 15

Ivan Nagel, “Minna von Barnhelm—unspielbar?” Theater heute 12 (1970): 23.

16

Gunter Schäble, “Der schwierige Tellheim: Reflexionen anläßlich einer Aufführung der Minna von Barnhelm,” Theater heute 11 (1967): 40–41.

17 “Was kann man machen? Ein Gespräch über Theater und Theatermachen in diesem Jahr 1968 mit den Regisseuren Peter Stein und Peter Zadek,” Theater heute (Jahrbuch 1968): 26–29. 18 Reinhart Meyer, “Hamburgische Dramaturgie” und “Emilia Galotti”: Studie zu einer Methodik des Zitierens, entwickelt am Problem des Verhältnisses von Dramentheorie und Trauerspielpraxis bei Lessing (Wiesbaden/Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum/ Humanitas, 1973). 19

Johann Heinrich Rademin, Die Römische Lucretia Auf dem von Ihro Röm. Kayserl. und Königl. Cathol. Majestät priviligierten Theatro in Wienn. Im Jahr 1731. In einer so genannten Musica Bernesca vorgestellet (Vienna: Andreas Heyinger, Universitäts-Buchdrucker, 1731). For the reception compare R. Meyer, Bibliographia Dramatica (Annot. 10) 2nd unit, volume 7, 405 ff. The many adaptations can also be found in the registers. Odoardo was a popular comical character of the Viennese theaters.

20 Ivan Nagel, “Aufklärung über das ‘aufgeklärte Bürgertum’. Kortner inszenierte Lessings Emilia Galotti in der Wiener Josefstadt,” Theater heute 5 (1970): 23–37.


Deutsches Theater Berlin Kammerspiele production of Minna von Barnhelm, East Berlin, 1960, directed by Wolfgang Langhoff. L. to r.: Hans-Peter Minetti as Tellheim, Käthe Reichel as Minna, and Gudrun Ritter as Franziska. Courtesy of Deutsches Theater Berlin.

Lessing on the East German Stage and Screen Hans-Joachim Kertscher and Thomas C. Fox

I

EAST Germans proclaimed the German humanist heritage their own, in part because Lessing and much of his oeuvre stem from the Protestant area that came to comprise communist Germany, Lessing played an important and visible role in East German culture. The government honored outstanding school children with the Lessing Medal and awarded leading intellectuals the Lessing Prize. Inasmuch as theater productions greatly influenced East German attitudes towards Lessing, we concentrate in the following on Soviet Zone and East German stagings of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772), Minna von Barnhelm (1767), and Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779). We also discuss two East German films based on Emilia Galotti and Minna von Barnhelm, for these interpretations reached large audiences; indeed, the Minna film continues to be aired on German television today. Finally, we examine the radical rereading of Lessing and the Enlightenment advanced by Heiner Müller, after Brecht the most important playwright of East Germany. East German cultural arbiters utilized Lessing to illustrate that their country had inherited and realized the German Classical tradition, to demonstrate that East Germany represented enlightenment and the end of History, to protest war, the division of Germany, and West German militarism, among other things. As is the case with cultural products in a dictatorship, it is difficult to ascertain to what extent directors actually ascribed to the reductionist terms in which they at times discussed their work. But it is certainly worth noting at the outset that Lessing’s plays did contain a contemporary relevance for East Germans, and that directors and the public were intelligent enough to perform their own deconstructionist readings. The use and abuse of absolute, dictatorial power depicted in Lessing’s three major plays would not, for an East German audience, have been a matter of historical interest only. The reaction, in Emilia Galotti, of Appiani and Odoardo to those abuses — their withdrawal from the court and their attempts to establish a private idyll — were also common strategies in East Germany, especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall. After the collapse, in 1976, of the brief thaw initiated by Party Secretary Erich Honecker, and after the heavy-handed persecutions of artists in 1979, this movement of N PART BECAUSE THE

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inner emigration accelerated, creating the so-called Nischengesellschaft and also the alternative society located in East Berlin’s bohemian Prenzlauer Berg district. And in fact, East German scholars have noted that in the 1970s, East German stagings of Emilia Galotti began to emphasize precisely that aspect of withdrawal from society.1 Furthermore, in the later 1970s East German writers published a number of historical novels, plays, and novellas in which Prussia functions as a thinly disguised East Germany.2 Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, which takes place within the context of a police state, lends itself to such parallelization. In 1978 an East German scholar noted that especially the figure of the innkeeper (who is an eavesdropper and police informant) in Minna was a familiar figure for East Germans, particularly when he speaks of the wise ordinances of the police, who want to know everything, and especially secrets (“weisen Verordnungen unserer Polizei,” who “alles, alles wissen [will]; und besonders Geheimnisse.”)3 The scholar also noted that Tellheim’s monopolizing claim on morality (“Ausschließlichkeitssanspruch im Hinblick auf moralische Gesinnung”) was alive and well in East Germany.4 Within the strictures of censorship it would have been difficult to speak more openly, but such comments give us some indication of the horizon of expectation of an East German audience of Lessing.5

Nathan der Weise In 1968 Hans Mayer asserted that the German experience with the principle of tolerance made it difficult to perform Lessing. The many German theaters that re-opened after the Second World War with Nathan der Weise did so, according to Mayer, out of a sense of embarrassment.6 Hans Mayer’s retrospective criticism, published in 1968, evinces a very different sensibility than the one evident in the first postwar productions of Nathan der Weise. On 7 September 1945 the Deutsche Theater in the Soviet sector of Berlin, under the management of Gustav von Wangenheim, opened the season with Nathan, which has since become part of this theater’s permanent repertoire. The importance of the production can only be understood if one takes into consideration the intellectual and material conditions of Berlin and the Berlin population after the end of the war. Seventy percent of all theaters had been destroyed, as had most suburban and underground railways, and the supply of energy was more or less left to chance. This material chaos reflected the inner condition of the German people. Supported by the Soviet military administration, theaters in eastern Germany started operating again as soon as the end of May, 1945, a few weeks after the surrender. Theater people of various political views joined together in ensembles, among them such Communists as Fritz Erpenbeck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Heinrich Greif, and Friedrich Wolf, who had returned from emigration in the Soviet Union. They were joined by

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resistance fighters who had remained in Germany during the Nazi period, for example Günther Weisenborn, Ernst Busch, and Fritz Wisten. And, last not least, there were also such non-communist artists as Paul Wegener and Eduard von Winterstein, who had participated in the so-called inner emigration during the Nazi dictatorship. Rather than tendentiously overemphasizing certain passages in the text for his Nathan production, Fritz Wisten placed his confidence in Lessing’s words. Fritz Erpenbeck noted in his review that the production did not need to emphasize parallels with the recent past. The audience recognized the compelling topicality of the play, and many spectators were moved to tears.7 Wisten designed his concept around the talents of Paul Wegener, whose fifty-year stage anniversary was near. Wegener had long been interested in this role, but had not been able to attempt it because Nathan was banned from German stages during the Third Reich. In his memoirs, he notes that in playing Nathan he endeavored to avoid anything that might give the figure an (empty) majesty, pathos, or pedagogical element. In general, it was precisely this interpretation that critics praised especially in their very favorable reviews. The partnership of Wisten and Wegener created a tremendous impact. In the postwar period this staging was interpreted as a return to the bourgeois-progressive positions of Lessing’s humanism. Wisten presented these positions to the audience as an implicit offer of a new beginning. Following Hans Mayer’s rather negative comments regarding this production, later critics would sometimes dismiss it as a “Wiedergutmachungsnathan,” but contemporary reviews clearly saw the production as an attempt to return the values of bourgeois humanism to an audience that had been locked away from them for twelve years, an audience that had grown alienated from them. Adolf Peter Hoffmann’s staging in East Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in 1955, with Eduard von Winterstein as Nathan (he had received good reviews for his portrayal of the friar in the 1946 Nathan staging) also proved quite successful. In his outline of this project, Hoffmann clearly referred to Wisten’s production and continued to view the confrontation with fascism as an absolute necessity.8 Discussing the relative lack of action in the text (the pogrom, for example, occurs before the play begins) Hoffmann declared that such actions must be offstage because they would otherwise obscure the “inner action” occurring onstage. And it was precisely that inner action that mattered to Hoffmann, the development of Lessing’s commanding message, “die Botschaft, die der Meister verkündet.”9 For Hoffmann the play demonstrates the possibility of the Templar’s re-education (in this production the Templar displays a fanaticism reminiscent of an SS officer) through his encounter with Nathan’s goodness and wisdom. Hoffmann made this the center of his production, and rigorously erased everything that was an obstacle to it in the text. Nathan appeared on stage as a very old man (von Winterstein was himself already in his

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eighties). His wisdom, linked to the modesty of an experienced man, made him pleasant to the audience and prepared the viewers to receive his message. It was more through his character than through his razor sharp reasoning that this Nathan achieved his wisdom, noted one critic.10 Hoffmann emphasized Nathan’s personal interaction with the people around him, and portrayed him not as a hero, but as a person of great humanity. He did not want to interpret Nathan from a religious or a social point of view, and he erased passages that emphasize Nathan explicitly as a merchant or as a Jew. What remained was a de-Judaicized, “universal” Nathan, which is obviously not unproblematic. Although Hoffmann announced that he shared Wisten’s antifascist commitment (which was in any case de rigeur in East German cultural politics), he nonetheless wanted to present a Nathan that distinguished itself clearly from Wisten’s model. In the Cold War era, what Hoffmann termed “combative humanism” was supposed to take the place of Wisten’s dream of universal tolerance. In the actual staging, however, this was not readily apparent; Winterstein’s Nathan established his views with little effort. With the exception of the patriarch, each of his interlocutors was convinced of his wisdom and declared Nathan’s message his or her own. In his attempts to erase Nathan’s social and religious difference, Hoffmann also removed any self-doubt in Nathan, who is always confident that his wisdom will prevail. Friedo Solter included the idea of “combative humanism” in his staging at the Deutsche Theater in 1966. He did not want to show the idea of tolerance that leads to a universal human alliance, instead emphasizing the play’s politically explosive force. Therefore the parable of the rings was not the staging’s center, but rather a paradigm for one of the many dangerous situations which the rich, but powerless Jew had to face. The question of the substance of the three religions was only marginal to Solter’s considerations. What mattered to him was rather the conflict between the representatives of different (political) attitudes to life. He rearranged scenes and text in order to emphasize this central confrontation. Therefore, and not coincidentally in a world divided by the Cold War, two groups of humans were facing each other on stage, aligned with either the patriarch or with Nathan. Whereas all stagings in the wake of Wisten saw a universal human alliance as the drama’s conclusion, Solter tried to underscore the dangers which threaten such an alliance; any kind of wisdom has to fail because of the figure of the patriarch and his unreasonable attitude. Through his rearrangement of scenes Solter wanted to show that Lessing consciously presented the microcosmic solution which takes place in the family circle, and that he leaves the macrocosmic solution, as Solter noted, for the audience as its task.11 But Solter wanted to indicate that the microcosmic solution entails considerable effort as well. He made Nathan operate on the alarmingly small border between armistice and war. The staging also tried to show this


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tight-rope walk optically. Guards could be seen in the palace and the monastery. Even the scenery’s palm leaves resembled swords, and were cast in a dirty red color. Despite all this, reviewers almost unanimously attested that the staging communicated a spirit of good humor unknown for a Nathan-production. Nathan’s contributions towards “Menschenverbrüderung,” or solidarity among peoples, were, according to the director’s notes, in harmony with the audience’s desires; spectators were exhorted to realize these concerns in everyday life. The director’s notes further assert that the ostensible agreement between the audience and Nathan’s project allows for a sovereign point of view that enables spectators to view the play cheerfully, without however minimizing the seriousness of Nathan’s battles.12 The Nathan stagings in East Germany after 1966 referred more or less clearly to Solter’s conception. The officials supervising the GDR’s cultural life supported and perhaps created that development by encouraging directors to study Solter’s carefully elaborated documentation materials and to use them for their own stagings. “Nathan 1966” became an East German model. Therefore, Jürgen Schmidt presented in the Landestheater Anklam’s season of 1968–69 a Nathan that emphasized Solter’s cheerful attitude to the point where it turned into a comedy. Schmidt justified this by arguing that the conflicts could be resolved, and hence demanded a treatment similar to a Lustspiel.13 But it was exactly this impression that Solter had wanted to avoid. While demonstrating that the conflicts Nathan has with Recha, the Templer, Saladin and others, can be resolved through the insight that everybody is part of one family, he had attempted to temper the optimism by making the viewer aware of the unresolved — and probably unresolvable — conflict with the patriarch. The Lessing year of 1979 bestowed four Nathan productions upon East German stages, one in Dresden (directed by Klaus Dieter Kirst), one in Cottbus (Peter Röll), one in Schwedt (Harald Engelmann), and one in Meiningen (Berndt Renne). The Dresden production, done by Klaus Dieter Kirst, was also shown on television. Alexander Weigel, dramaturge at the Deutsche Theater, harshly criticized these stagings of Lessing’s text. In contrast to Solter’s “comic” interpretation, which Weigel thought legitimate and appropriate in 1966, Weigel called for a new approach to the text, one that did not sacrifice seriousness, and which, while maintaining a belief in progress, nonetheless emphasized the difficulty in achieving enlightenment.14 Weigel repeated his concerns in a discussion group at Halle’s Lessing conference and specifically criticized a decline in the art of acting in East Germany. He alluded to a lack of social consciousness in the actors, and argued that the play should not remind him of ancient Palestine, but of the here and now.15 The Leipzig production two years later could not or did not want to accommodate this demand. This staging emphasized the tempestuousness,

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obstinacy, and self-righteousness of the Templar and the dangers this caused Nathan. The director Peter Röll depicted all this in sometimes masterly fashion on stage. But Röll, whose earlier small-stage Nathan production in Cottbus had attempted to strike a balance between earnestness and optimism, now over-emphasized the latter. In the end, wrote one critic, there was too much comedy, some of it buffoonery; such an “Art von Komik, die doch mehr im Heustadel ihren Platz findet als im Manneswerk Lessings” did little to enhance understanding of the play.16 Solter attempted another contemporary Nathan staging at the Deutsche Theater in the context of the Lessing project of 1987, a project devoted to Emilia Galotti, Philotas and Nathan der Weise. Working in the period of glasnost and near the end of the Cold War, Solter undertook to link the sense of hope created by the emphasis on reason in the Enlightenment with the deadly dangers reason had created in the nuclear age. He hoped to make palpable on stage the fragile and endangered character of the world as well as the imperative of attempting through dialogue to chip away at mistrust.17 Otto Mellie’s Nathan showed less cheerfulness and optimism than Heinz’s Nathan of 1966; he struggled and appeared to lack confidence. In the end, he was alone on stage. As one critic put it, we are still waiting for initiatives based on reason: “Die Tat, an der Vernunft sich erweisen muß, ist noch fällig.”18

Minna von Barnhelm After Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, Minna von Barnhelm was the classic German drama staged most often in East Germany. Between 1949 and 1990 there were at least 133 productions by over fifty stages. The reasons for such a considerable number are obvious. On the one hand, Minna is one of the few German comedies that lend themselves to being performed. Moreover, thanks to the relatively modest size of the cast and the small number of scene changes, one can stage this play relatively quickly and with little technical effort. East German productions, especially the early ones, emphasized the play’s socially critical aspects. In so doing they could refer to Franz Mehring, who argued in his Lessing-Legende of 1892 that Minna should celebrate neither the Seven Years’ War nor Frederick II. Mehring wanted to reduce the plot, in a famous formulation, to a “schneidende Satire auf das friderizianische Regiment,” a biting satire of Frederick’s reign.19 Without doubt, Mehring deserves credit for drawing attention to the play’s social criticism, which does not, however, constitute the drama’s plot. Following the lead of Friedrich Schlegel, Mehring accorded Minna’s aesthetic qualities little attention. Paul Rilla did not go substantially beyond Mehring’s positions in his monograph Lessing und sein Zeitalter which he wrote in connection with


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his edition of Lessing’s collected works. In his book, Rilla referred to Lessing’s treatment of current problems in Minna, emphasizing the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath. Rilla saw the resolution of the conflict between Tellheim and the Prussian king through the receipt of the royal handwritten letter as purposefully artificial; Lessing wanted the viewers to realize that he only resolved the real conflicts of this play through the artifice of comedy.20 Minna stagings from the late forties to the end of the sixties in general reflected some aspect of the Mehring/Rilla interpretation, with the production at the Städtische Theater Chemnitz in the theater season of 1949/50 providing an early example.21 Director Oskar Kassler tried, according to one reviewer, to show the victory of pure humanity over authoritarian arbitrariness, a false sense of honor, and military intrigue. Minna and Franziska represent two young women who know nothing about the mechanism of Prussian militarism, who obey nothing but the logic of the heart. In the end, it is this attitude of pure humanity that brings Tellheim, still mired in Prussian codes of honor, to completely renounce the Prussian state. With this production the Chemnitz theater ensemble achieved, according to the reviewer, the breakthrough to a new interpretation of Lessing’s play, characterized by a consistent antimilitarism and a radical renunciation of all those stagings that saw in Frederick II the true hero of the play.22 The majority of the Minna productions in the fifties and early sixties evinced a similar approach. They varied only in minor ways, for example by emphasizing further the historical background and/or Mehring’s interpretations of the characters. While in the immediate postwar period the confrontation with the ghost of Nazi militarism stood in the foreground, in the fifties some productions criticized directly or indirectly the supposed restoration of this militarism in a West Germany that had reinstated military service and joined NATO. In the meantime, the Lessing “legend” attacked by Mehring had been quietly replaced in East Germany by a new one initiated by Mehring himself. Wolfgang Langhoff’s 1960 production at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin presented the apotheosis of Mehring’s thinking. Langhoff’s production inspired impassioned support and opposition, and served as the benchmark for subsequent stagings of the play in East Germany and also in the West. Hence it is worth examining in more detail. Two contradicting opinions to Langhoff’s work demonstrate its different reception by the audience. In an interview fifteen years after the première, the important East German dramatist Peter Hacks called Langhoff’s Minna the most significant theater event in the history of East Germany.23 Theater critic Herbert Ihering, among others, felt otherwise, writing that Käthe Reichel played Minna as if she had just escaped from a 1960s madhouse in order to visit Tellheim (Hans-Peter Minetti), who might as well have been wearing the uniform of a German POW returning home after the Second World War.

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The innkeeper (Herwart Grosse), Ihering continued, was as scheming as the despicable figure of Wurm in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe.24 Langhoff developed his ideas in counterpoint to another Minna that had been staged at the same theater in 1953, under the direction of Hans Jungbauer. Jungbauer proved to be one of the few directors to bring Minna to an East German stage without socially critical implications. His production emphasized the play’s cheerful atmosphere and left the characters, who were all shown with strengths and weaknesses, in a climate relatively free of ideology. Guided by Mehring, however, Langhoff carefully studied the Seven Years’ War and the genesis of the Prussian state. As a result, he decided to emphasize the “progressive, bourgeois, national” tendencies of the comedy and to underscore the criticism of Prussianism.25 Starting out with these assumptions, Langhoff took the text and simply emphasized certain elements, at times strongly, thus making the piece “harder, sharper, more critical,” as one critic put it, than audiences had previously encountered.26 The stage set, designed by Heinrich Kilger, reflected these considerations. One could see the interior of a pub that was obviously considerably affected by the turmoil of the war and the many billetings that went with it. A painting of Frederick II served as the sign of the king’s omnipresence. The painting hung crookedly and returned to its old position even when Franziska tried to straighten it. (Audiences often interpreted this as a satiric reference to the omnipresent portraits of East German Party Chief Walter Ulbricht.) Langhoff’s production takes place, to a certain extent, on two levels. On the one hand, he “naively” put on the play and let the actors bring out the criticism. But he also emphasized the criticism to the point of satire or even grotesque exaggeration.27 This appears most distinctively in the conception of the role of Tellheim. Hans-Peter Minetti performed it as a personality split between the purely human and the Prussian officer. His insistence on the feudal code of honor was no longer treated understandingly or with respect, but rather exposed immediately to the laughter of the audience. This Tellheim spoke about the restoration of his honor with hollow pathos and showed simultaneously that nothing actually connected him to the Prussian state any longer.28 In his review of the production, Henryk Keisch pointed out the problems of such an interpretation. One is not a comical figure, he argued, merely because one has become overly sensitive due to insults, slander, and impoverishment. Keisch believed that Tellheim possesses a real dignity — bourgeois dignity — that can be seen as protest against decadent aristocracy and the parasitism represented by Riccaut.29 It is crucial when staging Minna to grasp Tellheim’s personality in its complexity, that is, on the one hand to present his demand for the reestablishment of his honor plausibly and on the other to criticize the points at which Tellheim neglects important human relations because of that demand, for example when he refuses Minna’s love or turns down Werner’s offers of help.


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Apparently inspired by Langhoff’s example, the Dresdener StaatsSchauspiel, during its 1961–62 season, worked out a concept that could be regarded as a quite productive application of this model. In contrast to Langhoff, the Dresden company wanted to be “faithful” to the poet Lessing by trying to interest the audience in the eternal message underneath the historical façade.30 In this context, they made an effort to bring “typical” characters, whose actions were influenced by their situation, to the stage, in order to examine critically the attitudes of, above all, Tellheim, Werner, and Riccaut. As a corrective to these attitudes, Minna functioned as a figure that had maintained a natural unity of heart and reason, allowing her to contrast true human happiness with Tellheim’s Soldatenglück. The Dresdeners offered an interesting conception of the role of the inn keeper, who was no longer presented as a hypocrite, an idea that had ossified into a cliché, but rather as a victim. In order to save his bourgeois existence through the times of war, he had turned into an informer. The director’s notes specify that the actor should demonstrate the anxiety, caused by police pressure, that cause him to behave as he does, and warn against nullifying the dangerousness of this character for superficial comic effect. The production at the Leipziger Kammerspiele in 1969–70 (directed by Horst Smiszek), maintained Langhoff’s rejection of a cheerful, superficial comedy, but abandoned his distinct emphasis on antimilitaristic elements. As with the Dresden production, Smiszek both adopted and modified Langhoff’s conception decisively: Tellheim’s problems with the Prussian courts were now taken seriously. The program notes assert that together with Werner and Just, Tellheim fights with justification against a royal Prussian bureaucracy for his rights.31 According to one spectator, the figure of Tellheim underwent a change from deep resignation to a determination to seize the future.32 It becomes clear that this process signifies a retrieval as well as a new formation of Tellheim’s human potential, which had been damaged by feudal absolutist power. The production hence emphasized Tellheim’s justified claim and protest. Even his insistence on his honor now received a positive emphasis. Furthermore, Minna’s struggle for Tellheim became more plausible to the viewer, something that Langhoff’s staging could only incompletely achieve. “Tellheims Kampf um seine Ehre, Minnas Kampf um Tellheim entsprechen sich,” wrote one critic.33 Both figures were now depicted as strong personalities who, in their battle for bourgeois integrity — and that implied their claim for love — sometimes use unsuitable means, but who also, despite their questionable attitudes, find the audience’s understanding. The considerable importance of this production for the Minna von Barnhelm reception on East German stages lies in the interpretations of Tellheim and Minna. For the first time, a theater ensemble managed to

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show a dialectical conception of these two characters. This was important in the slow, halting, and ever incomplete process of emancipation from the father figure of Franz Mehring, and resulted in part due to new investigations by Georg Lukács, Peter Weber, and Wolfgang Heise into Tellheim’s function in creating the play’s comic effect. Weber for example argued that Tellheim did not turn into a comic figure until the scene in which Minna pretends to be in need of assistance.34 Weber thus implies strongly that one should not envision Tellheim’s role a priori as a comic one. Based in part on such works of literary scholarship, Albert Hetterle developed in the season of 1971/72 at the Berlin Maxim-Gorki-Theater a Minna von Barnhelm which clearly distanced itself from Langhoff’s intentions, but in the end did not go beyond Langhoff. Noteworthy for this introduction was Hetterle’s attempt to include audiences, including high school students, in the rehearsals and the conception of the project. Noteworthy, too, was the emphasis on an emancipated and economically independent Minna.35 His Tellheim, however, was once again a personality split between progressive leanings and a reactionary code of honor, a rather obsolete interpretation by that time. Dieter Wien played a “Prussian” major whose stubborn insistence on his honor is incomprehensible for Minna (Jutta Hoffmann), which is why she tries to make her beloved look ridiculous by pulling out all the stops of her comedian temperament. What remained, was once again the question: why fight for such a man and his love? Lessing’s text would appear to allow a positive answer to this question, but Hetterle could not translate that to the stage. The director in any event expressed self-criticism about his work in a later interview, in which he declared that his production had not depicted Tellheim in a differentiated enough fashion.36 He referred to letters from members of the audience who often thought Tellheim exemplary at precisely those moments when Hetterle meant to criticize him. The stagings in Greifswald (première 15 January, 1971; director Wolfgang Baumann) and Prenzlau (première 9 August, 1972; director Helmut Frensel) were also not able to solve this problem. In both productions, Tellheim was not a convincing counterpart to Minna. During the Lessing year of 1979, sixteen productions were mounted. The one at Halle’s Theater des Friedens, presented already in 1978, marked the beginning. Under directors Irene Böhme and Karl Heinz Liefers the ensemble tried to show the historical atmosphere not only in the play itself, but also during the intermissions, by projecting militaristic eighteenth-century engravings on a screen and by reading aloud original letters, read by anonymous speakers and in a pace that corresponded, more or less, to the pace of writing. According to one reviewer the letters were somber expressions of oppressive and degrading circumstances.37 The production presented a convincing scenic interpretation of Mehring’s theory, not more, but also not less.


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Writing in Theater der Zeit, the normative East German theater organ regarding matters both aesthetic and political, Thomas Wieck had little good to report on other Minna stagings of 1979. With harsh, even devastating criticism, Wieck, who taught theater in East Berlin, articulated his dismay at the many humiliations Lessing’s Minna had to suffer in order to be “modern” and “relevant.”38 An exception was the production at the Theater Greifswald, directed by Eugen Dovides; here, Wieck noted, Minna was ruined without attempting a deeper meaning. In the stagings he reviewed, Wieck saw nothing but destructive forces at work: in Greifswald in regard to the stage set, in Senftenberg (director Lutz Günzel) with regard to alterations in the text, and in Frankfurt an der Oder (director Wilfried Mattukat) he condemned the complete production for trying to realize a meaningful chaos. Wieck believed that the interpretations by Mehring and Langhoff had justifiably been abandoned, but in their place young directors had placed “noncommittal” and “highly subjective” attempts of self-realization. As a result, their theaters had changed from moral institutions to moralizing ones: “Aus der moralischen Anstalt ist eine moralisierende, zuweilen peinlich besserwisserische Räsonieranstalt geworden.”39 Theater der Zeit appears to have used these broadsides as an opportunity to seek new impulses from literary scholarship. The journal invited Hans-Georg Werner, a professor of German in Halle, to present theses for a contemporary staging of Minna. Werner’s seven theses center on the character of Tellheim, whose altruistic attitude is confronted with an unsolvable problem due to the lack of cash: “Die geistige Neuerung von Lessings Schauspiel . . . besteht darin, daß der ethisch geforderte Altruismus, der praktisch nur auf der Selbstsicherheit dessen, der es [das Geld] nicht nötig hat, basieren kann, in bezug zu der Haltung eines Mannes gesetzt wird, der es bitter nötig hat.”40 Under the given circumstances, altruism can only succeed if the receiver of help has the real possibility of reimbursing it in the foreseeable future. Tellheim’s argumentation to his friend in III,7 (“Man muß nicht borgen, wenn man nicht wieder zu geben weiß”41) serves Werner as a key to Tellheim’s way of acting. He is indeed impoverished and therefore has, if he wishes to remain true to what Werner terms a bourgeois value system, no other choice than to insist on being generous to those in need, while refusing to accept assistance from others. Therefore, for Werner, Tellheim’s conflict stems not so much from his ideological connection with the court, as other Marxist critics had argued, but rather from his internalization of the values, and the contradictions, of the emerging bourgeois value system. These arguments were, of course, not useful in the productions of the Lessing year, though the editor of Theater der Zeit, Hans-Rainer John, did allow that the stagings in Erfurt (director Barbara Abend) and Magdeburg (director Karl Schneider) had found productive approaches to the play.

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But John also asked, and here he did not only mean the productions he had specifically reviewed: “Aber hätte nicht doch mancherorts stärker an alten, dokumentiert vorliegenden Ergebnissen angeschlossen werden können, um unproduktive Irrtümer zu vermeiden? Ist das (kritische) Studium der alten Muster insbesondere unseren jüngeren Regisseuren im ausreichenden Maße notwendiges Bedürfnis und schöpferische Anregung? Sind sie bereit, sich bewußt in eine sozialistisch-realistische Traditionslinie einzureihen?”42 In other words, in the politically charged cultural situation of the late 1970s, after the expulsion of the outspoken writer and musician Wolf Biermann and during a period when critical writers and intellectuals were openly persecuted, some directors began to distance themselves, presumably for political reasons, from the socialist-realist tradition of Mehring, Rilla, and Langhoff, much to the displeasure of cultural arbiters. In 1979 Hans-Georg Werner organized an international Lessingconference in Halle. It featured a special discussion session on the topic “Lessing und das Theater der DDR,” in which literary and theater scholars took part as well as theater critics and dramaturges. The widespread perception that East German theaters had failed in their recent stagings of Lessing plays controlled the dialogue. Alexander Weigel, at that time dramaturge at the Deutsche Theater in East Berlin, criticized the ineffective cooperation of literary scholarship, theater critique, and dramaturgy. He complained that theater critics had grown accustomed to granting theater productions good intentions, for example that they were politically correct, and then preoccupying themselves with insignificant details. It is time, he demanded, to demonstrate critically whether or not the good intentions are in fact realized by the production.43 Hans-Georg Werner further elaborated his ideas regarding an interpretation of Minna, stressing again that Tellheim is the problematic character and the key both to Lessing’s intentions and to an interpretation of the text.44 And he warned of an overly simplifying, socially oriented interpretation of the conflict. Although the conference brought constructive impulses for the interpretation and production of Minna, they remained without consequence for the East German stagings of the 1980s.

Emilia Galotti With about 52 productions from 1945 to 1990, Emilia Galotti was staged relatively seldom in East Germany, compared with Minna von Barnhelm and Nathan der Weise. This is surprising, inasmuch as this particular drama tries for one of the first times in German literary history to depict the abuse of feudal power, and therefore might have been expected to constitute a mandatory program for socialist theater. There are two reasons for the East German reticence. A comprehensive Marxist analysis of the drama did


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not exist, and related to this, the play’s conclusion appeared fatalistic and could be interpreted as “revolutionary” only with great difficulties. Franz Mehring had not dealt with the play in depth in his Lessing-Legende, let alone offered a practicable interpretation. Two years after the first publication of his Lessing book, he celebrated in an article in the Volksbühne (September 1894), the construction of the play, but could only write of the conclusion that it stemmed from the economic structure of the society in which Lessing’s figures lived, and that Lessing could not overcome this barrier. The East German scholar Erich Kühne attempted to present an interpretation in 1949, with the central conflict structured between the bourgeoisie and the feudal court. Kühne viewed Odoardo’s willingness to act, even if it remains “senseless,” as a step forward in bourgeois ideology, because it puts into question a “natural” order as well as the bourgeois principle of passivity and restraint. Kühne also emphasized the role of Orsina, whom he interpreted as the embodiment and foreshadowing of a coming bourgeois personality which fights for just and humane interpersonal relationships in society.45 When Joachim Müller directed Emilia in 1955, he agreed with Mehring regarding the conclusion, arguing that the German citizen, represented by Odoardo, can not yet dare to commit regicide, but through the “tragically heroic” execution of his own daughter he can expose the true criminal.46 Similarly, Paul Rilla was able to see in the plot of Emilia only the heroism of a higher form of suicide, with which Odoardo saves the honor of his daughter.47 Clearly, East German stages were ill-prepared to cope with the problems this play occasions. It is therefore understandable that no East German theater attempted a so-called model production of Emilia. In our discussion here we will refer to only a few productions, which are however representative. In the season of 1953/54 Hubert Hoelzke presented at the Deutsche Nationaltheater in Weimar a production that was, according to the program, oriented on Mehring. The Weimar production tried to incorporate the current East German foreign policy goal of a united, neutral Germany. If the directors could not do that with the play’s text itself, they could at least articulate it in the program: “Das Wort Lessings kennt ebensowenig Grenzen in Deutschland, wie das deutsche Volk eine Grenze duldet, die es an Elbe, Fulda, Werra willkürlich spaltet. Emilia Galotti wird uns doppelt wichtig, als geschichtliches Zeugnis sozialer Unterdrückung — und als Mahnung.”48 There was no talk of this anymore in the 1960s. East Germany insisted on its distinct identity as a sovereign country vis-à-vis West Germany; this meant that in the realm of cultural politics the East Germans would emphasize (and claim) the progressive tendencies in the German cultural heritage, to which Emilia definitely belonged. The Potsdam literary scholar Werner Rieck had prepared the ground for such new approaches, seeing the conflict in Emilia not so much in the

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confrontation of court and bourgeoisie, but rather in the depiction of a radical violation of a woman’s honor. Emilia, the representative of those without rights, symbolizes according to Rieck the ideal of bourgeois virtue. Here he saw the possibility of a catharsis in Lessing’s sense. The death of the heroine does not represent the death of her ideal, which furthermore receives an activating function. “Die Reinigung erweckte Mitgefühl, Empörung und war Anklage und Aufruf.”49 But such insights from literary scholarship, aiming at finer nuances, proved of little use for the practical work of the theater. Rieck also demanded an interpretation of Emilia Galotti that would interest the public for reasons other than a rather antiquarian cultivation of the progressive cultural heritage. The Landestheater Parchim (director Karl Sternfels) responded to this challenge in the season of 1969/70. Sternfels claimed that Lessing wanted to change people and social conditions through catharsis, but not through violence and revolution.50 Sternfels attempted to show the ideals of the classical, humanist, German bourgeoisie, with its unshakeable belief in human potential and its drive towards self-realization. He wanted to demonstrate that people make their own history, even at those moments when they appear to be history’s victims. He emphasized the Prince’s unfettered sexuality as a sign of the feudal system’s decadence. Furthermore, Sternfels wanted to show a Prince who feels justified making any kind of decision because of his absolute power, but who prefers to avoid clear decisions. Emilia appeared as a well-behaved bourgeois girl, whose love for Appiani arose more from rational grounds than real passion. But her relation to the Prince was supposed to betray traces of passionate arousal. She attempts to suppress this arousal when her middle-class virtue becomes endangered. Marinelli was played as a courtier who employs his only ability, that of intrigue, to the full; he does this not so much for his career at court, but rather for the very pleasure of intrigue. He believes himself indispensable to the Prince, yet his refusal to accept any goodness in people proves a miscalculation that leads to his fall. Orsina was interpreted as mature, intelligent, passionate and jilted woman, who now must make room for a younger one. Despite her intelligence she cannot grasp the fact that the love of a Prince, whose love affairs are known throughout the land, cannot be lasting. Sternfels attempted to find an interpretation that would at least partly escape simplistic characterizations of the figures, revealing their individual motives in more detail. This was achieved, above all, in the complex relationship between Emilia and the Prince. The director attempted to show not only the brutal seducer and the humiliated victim, but also to let the audience glimpse the grey area in which a possible love relationship between the heroine and the Prince might emerge, a “guilt” that finds its tragic solution in such a horrible way. Albert R. Pasch extended and deepened Sternfels’s approach for the season of 1974/75 at the Meiningen Theater. Countering the common


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Marxist approach to the drama, which discerned in it social, even revolutionary protest, Pasch stressed that Lessing’s attitude was mainly determined by religious influences, for which aggressive moral claims, but not revolutionary social positions were typical. Based on Lessing’s considerations in the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of Humanity, 1777–80), Pasch posited an undialectical concept of history in Lessing. Lessing, he asserted, hoped for the peaceful reconciliation of class conflict; the denouement in Emilia is not a historical problem but a moral one. Inasmuch as Odoardo refrains — must refrain — from a revolutionary act and sacrifices his daughter instead of the Prince, he sends a signal for moral change, not social upheaval. And that, Pasch believed, is what Lessing intended.51 When discussing Lessing’s ethics, it is certainly not unproblematic to refer to nothing but the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. After all, the first 53 paragraphs were published in 1777, five years after Lessing finished Emilia. Other works would have to be taken into consideration that show Lessing’s ethics in a different light. Nonetheless, Pasch’s remarks did open new vistas on the play. The key figure in the Meiningen production was not Emilia but Odoardo. He was shown as a man who is trying find avenues of escape from numerous social dependencies, but fails. Pasch polemicizes against Rilla’s point of view, who saw heroism in Emilia’s murder (“Heroismus eines höheren Selbstmordes”). Pasch interpreted Odoardo’s act as one of desperation. Odoardo’s life revolves around concepts of virtue, honor, and dignity, but he proves unable to defend these when confronted with evil. Emilia dies, according to Pasch, without guilt but also without heroism. Pasch did not however take into consideration the problem of Emilia’s tragic “guilt,” for example when she confesses to Odoardo in V,7 that she would not be able to resist a possible seduction by the prince: “Auch meine Sinne sind Sinne. Ich stehe für nichts. Ich bin für nichts gut.”52 It is remarkable that no director chose to participate in the Lessing year of 1979 with a staging of Emilia Galotti. Only a version for television by Klaus-Dieter Kirst was produced. A major reason for the lack of interest was the paucity of scholarly and dramaturgical work on the play. The aforementioned Lessing conference in Halle did not help matters. To be sure, Peter Weber suggested that East Germans study Fritz Kortner’s staging of Emilia in the Wiener Josefstadt in 1970. Kortner had accentuated the conflict between Emilia and Odoardo, whose narrow-minded bourgeois selfrighteousness contributed to the tragedy. Weber did not think Kortner’s reading of Lessing particularly appropriate, but asserted that such methods could place the classics in a productive new light.53 East German theaters reacted somewhat helplessly to this advice, as they did to the suggestions of Hans-Georg Werner, who three years later directed attention to Herder’s little-noticed evaluation of Emilia at the end of the thirty-seventh letter of

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the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, 1793–97). Herder reported there that the play put the audience in a state of extreme uneasiness, robbing it of its sense of orientation: “einen Stand der Unbehaglichkeit . . .; so daß Ungewißheit, Bekümmernis, Verwirrung in allen Gemütern herrschen, und eure Zuschauer den Unglücklichen gleichen, die in einem Erdbeben die Mauern ihrer Häuser wanken sehen, und die Erde ihnen einen festen Tritt verweigern fühlen.”54 Werner suggested that East German theaters abandon the search for an unambiguously comprehensible “message” in Emilia Galotti, but such productions remained anathema to the cultural functionaries. In 1987 the Deutsche Theater in East Berlin attempted its “Lessing Project,” that is, the staging of three of Lessing’s dramas in one season. Michael Jurgons, the director of Emilia, tried, for lack of any interpretation he found acceptable, to place more stress on some of the comic elements suggested by the text. The critics reacted with disdain. As one noted, the production produced nothing of value: neither Lessing’s critique nor a critique of Lessing.55

Lessing in Babelsberg The East German DEFA film studios produced two films based on Lessing and directed by Martin Hellberg: Emilia Galotti in 1958 and Minna von Barnhelm in 1962. There has been almost no scholarly work on these films, which is somewhat curious, for the films provide two of the most powerful examples of East German Lessing reception. They were shown widely in cinemas and on television; indeed, Minna continues to be shown today on television and thus shapes, for the general public at least, the reception of Lessing in the new Germany.56 Hellberg (1905–1999) was an actor and director perhaps best known for his portrayal of Goethe in the film of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1975). His Emilia begins not in the Prince’s palace, but at a soiree at the house of Chancellor Grimaldi. This scene, to which the play only alludes, allows us to view the first encounter of Emilia and the Prince. Surrounded by erotic art, egged on by her mother, Emilia demonstrates already here her vulnerability to the Prince’s not inconsiderable charms. This added scene already establishes the Grimaldi residence, to which the Prince hopes to bring Emilia after Appiani’s death, as a locus of the nobility’s excess, decadence, and Lasterhaftigkeit. A toast offered by one of the guests praises the residence as a “house of pleasure” (“Haus der Freude”), an obvious double-entendre that Emilia repeats shortly before her death. Hellberg expands Lessing’s text in a second important way. Directly following the Grimaldis’ soiree, the film shows a prisoner being led in chains to Guastalla, followed by his grieving mother. The action then cuts


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to the chambers of Camillo Rota, where the mother pleads for her son’s life. Only then does Hellberg insert the scene, taken from Lessing, of Camillo Rota approaching the Prince with the death warrant, which the distracted ruler wishes to sign in haste with his famous “sehr gern!” In the scene that follows, again not in the play, the mother attempts to plead directly with the Prince, but is rebuffed by the Prince’s guards, while the preoccupied ruler notices nothing. Finally, we see the mother mourning her executed son and decrying the arbitrary use of absolute power. Such scenes allow Hellberg to expand the number of locations from three in Lessing’s play to twenty-five in the movie. Hellberg is also now able to employ the possibilities of cinematic form, and to emphasize the arbitrariness and capriciousness of an absolute ruler, without necessarily doing violence to the spirit of Lessing’s text. Despite this emphasis, which one might have expected to have been in keeping with East German cultural politics, the film was generally not well received. One journal published a positive review, but then in a subsequent issue printed a negative review by the same author, which points of course to an official campaign.57 In the Party paper Neues Deutschland, the reviewer thought the film did not adequately inspire viewers to take up the struggle against the class enemy of today,58 and an East German film magazine claimed the film contradicted what was taught about Lessing in the schools, and hence had done great damage: “Abscheu zu erwecken vor den Herrschenden einer vergehenden Welt und die Unvermeidbarkeit ihres Unterganges augenfällig zu machen — das wäre wenigstens eine politisch-pädagogische Aufgabe dieses Streifens gewesen.”59 With Emilia Galotti Hellberg had chosen a play that, as we have seen, was in any case treated with some reserve in East Germany, being performed far less often than Minna or Nathan. The drama’s conclusion clearly proved an obstacle to theater productions, but also for Marxist literary critics; some East German scholars saw it as an expression of bourgeois resignation; others read it as an incitement to begin active opposition against royal rulers and hence as an as optimistic and even revolutionary gesture. This confusion among Germanists in turn never led to a so-called “Modellinszenierung” by an East Berlin theater, and it left film and theater critics without moorings. What particularly unsettled the critics about the Emilia film was the fact that Hellberg made the Prince so charming. East German reviewers, accustomed to thinking in reductionist categories, could not fit the intelligent, seductive, art-loving Prince — and this is, after all, the only side Emilia sees — into their world view. And indeed East German theater productions of Emilia Galotti, influenced by Mehring and Rilla, would continue to divide their characters into superficial categories of bad and good, black and white until the somewhat more nuanced productions by Sternfels (1969/70) and Pasch (1974/75). Hellberg’s production was years ahead of its time.

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Hellberg directed his film Minna von Barnhelm (1962) under the immediate influence of Langhoff’s staging (Herwart Grosse plays the inn keeper in both play and film) and follows the general tenor. The hotel is shabby, with water stains on the ceiling and plaster falling from walls on which paintings glorifying war are hanging. Tellheim’s second room is ratinfested. Tellheim is less a caricature than in the play, but the film emphasizes his anti-Prussian utterances while underplaying or eliminating ones that might be interpreted differently. As the representative and victim of Prussianism, Tellheim remains, however, fairly one-dimensional, and thus underscores the weaknesses of East German readings from that time. The figure of Werner, which Langhoff sees as basically evil, is changed by the casting of Manfred Krug, whose bumbling everyman performance endeared him to viewers and, of course, to Franziska, the feisty and intelligent miller’s daughter who becomes in many ways the star of the film. The film emphasizes the inn keeper as a police spy and depicts at least seven examples of him eavesdropping, including some that are not in Lessing’s text. When, on behalf of the police, the innkeeper “interrogates” (Minna’s word) his guests, Franziska, who opposes him, speaks most of her lines directly into the camera and thus directly to the audience. Although the film does not feature the crooked picture of the King, it does utilize a statuette of him. We first see it as Tellheim is forced to change quarters — it falls out of his luggage, and Just leaves it behind, though Werner saves it. Just then gives it to Franziska, who holds it as she expresses her criticism — meant for Just but now including the King as well — “Das ist ein Schlingel!” After a shot of the leaking ceiling, the film cuts to Franziska utilizing the statuette as a nutcracker, thus demonstrating the irreverence of the common people and also bringing the King into association with the disrepair occasioned by his war. After Riccaut’s visit, Franziska holds the statuette and complains to Minna: “einem Spitzbuben wieder auf die Beine geholfen!” When Franziska adds that one should not let such swindlers roam the countryside without hanging them, the camera focuses on the statue in a close-up, leading one to believe that she is in fact speaking of Frederick as well as Riccaut. At the conclusion, when Minna notes that Frederick is a great man and perhaps a good one, the camera again focuses on the statuette, which by now emanates enough negative associations to undercut her speech. Unlike his film of Emilia Galotti, Hellberg follows the storyline of the play much more closely, though he does add three flashbacks and does expand the number of places from three to nine. He also adds a scene of the Prussian army as it practices marching. The military noise and commotion clearly irritate the anti-Prussian Tellheim, who is trying to compose a letter to Minna. The musical score expresses his point of view, for it clearly mocks the soldiers, as do most of the common people who are watching them march. (And Franziska had earlier compared marching soldiers to


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marionettes). The scene also shows us Riccaut, the down-and-out former officer with a striking physiognomy, whom we see stealing food and who ogles Minna. At the head of the army is a black soldier. This scene serves as an adumbration of Tellheim’s bitter speech: “wie kam der Mohr in Venetianische Dienste? Hatte der Mohr kein Vaterland?”60 but it also proves strikingly reminiscent of similar scenes in the infamous Nazi anti-Semitic film Jud Süß (1940). There the decadent and wanton Duke, under the influence of the licentious Jew Süss, purchases a number of mercenaries to serve as his honor guard. One of those soldiers is black, and thus symbolizes the intersection of blackness, foreignness, Jewishness, and lust, all of which conspire to separate the ruler from his healthy Volk. This East German film, featuring a black mercenary and the Frenchman Riccaut with his striking physiognomy in the background, appears to signal similar associations and thus unintentionally signifies a certain continuity in the German political unconscious. Hellberg was clearly chastened by the criticism of his Emilia Galotti, for his Minna project is less experimental and less willing to utilize the advantages of the medium. Rather than standing as an independent work of art (Hellberg’s professed goal in filming German classics), it remains to a large extent filmed theater.61 Ironically enough, this film, produced soon after the building of the Berlin Wall, a film which reflects the influence of Mehring, Rilla, and Langhoff, and which the East Germans utilized to attack so-called West German militarism, continues to be shown on German television, for example in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Thus, for better or worse, it plays a not unimportant role in shaping the contemporary German image of Lessing.

Heiner Müller’s Lessing Playwright Heiner Müller (1929–95) presented perhaps the most radical East German Lessing interpretation, which he could, at first, only publish outside that country. In 1976 a West Berlin publisher printed Müller’s play Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preussen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (Life of Gundling Frederick of Prussia Lessing’s Sleep Dream Scream). The play contains three short scenes dealing with Lessing. In the first, an actor preparing to play Lessing stands on stage and has his makeup applied as he recites a monologue. Other actors set up a stage set behind him. The actor introduces himself as the forty-seven-year-old Lessing who has dreamed a dream of theater in Germany. His language expresses a strong sense of alienation and despair; he has lost confidence in any kind of historical progress, indeed, he has lost confidence in language itself. Sabine Wilke argues that Müller’s Lessing maintains an awareness of himself as a failed intellectual, but is unaware of his participation in the Enlightenment

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project that produces culture through the subjugation of instinct.62 Müller believed that the resulting, pent-up inner aggression is turned outwards toward the Third World. Western intellectuals can choose to join revolutionary movements, but that choice results from their privileged position; as long as their freedom is based on violence and oppression, such intellectuals remain complicit in the very oppression they condemn. This mechanism, we can add, applied not only in the complicated relationship between the First and Third worlds, but within East Germany itself, where artists could attain a certain kind of artistic freedom in complicity with an oppressive state apparatus. Thus it is no coincidence that Müller’s Lessing betrays autobiographical traits. Müller was also forty-seven when the piece was published. Like Lessing, he was from Saxony; like Lessing, he wrote drama. And, of course, Müller subscribed to the attempt to realize Enlightenment ideals through the project of Marxism, a commitment that led him, like the Lessing he creates, to ever increasing disillusionment. The second scene takes place in a junkyard in the American West. The United States, born of the Enlightenment, here appears to symbolize the bankruptcy of that movement. The last American President, a robot, is executed in an electric chair. In this desert landscape, one littered with the icons of pop culture, Emilia Galotti recites her famous plea for the knife: “Gewalt! Gewalt! Wer kann der Gewalt nicht trotzen? Was Gewalt heißt ist nichts: Verführung ist die wahre Gewalt! Ich habe Blut, mein Vater, so jugendliches, so warmes Blut als eine. Auch meine Sinne sind Sinne. . . . Geben Sie mir, mein Vater, geben Sie mir diesen Dolch. . . .”63 Müller knew of course that Lessing’s play is based on Livy’s account of the young Roman woman Virginia, who is killed by her father to protect her from the advances of a Roman tyrant. Her death ignites a revolt, which Lessing however omits. Lessing replaces revolution with self-sacrifice under the auspices of internalized paternal authority. For Müller, this scene lays bare with uncommon clarity the Enlightenment project of suppressing instinct and libido in the name of the law. Also wandering the junkyard is Nathan, who recites his parable of the rings without an interlocutor. Similar to Emilia Galotti, Nathan der Weise ends with the resolution of conflict through a recognition and internalization of paternal authority as embodied by Nathan. As Arlene Teraoka asserts: “Emilia and Nathan . . . suggest the logical-absurd tendency of Enlightenment thought: the individual learns, in the name of an ideal, to deny the claims of his own individuality.”64 In Müller’s pastiche, Emilia and Nathan then murder each other as a blinding light, suggesting a nuclear explosion, fills the stage. The “lessons” of Emilia and Nathan lead to the electric chair and nuclear weapons. In the final scene, entitled the APOTHEOSE SPARTAKUS. EIN FRAGMENT (The Apotheosis of Spartakus. A Fragment) Müller attacks the ways in which Lessing and his ideas have been appropriated by the


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present for its own uses and reduced to the status of historical relics. On the stage, buried under a mound of sand, Lessing attempts to free himself as stagehands costumed as theatergoers pile on sand. Waiters bring out busts of famous German thinkers and poets. As Lessing begins to work his way out of the sand pile, a waiter sets a Lessing bust on Lessing’s head. On his knees, Lessing struggles vainly to free himself, then screams. The waiters and stagehands applaud. Wilke sees in Müller’s Lessing-triptych a simultaneous process of destruction and recovery.65 On the one hand, Müller wishes to explode readings of Lessing that render his ideas harmless, as though they were affirming the current situation; on the other hand, he is dedicated to an archeological project of recovering other, suppressed voices, for example in Lessing’s unfinished Spartacus fragment, dealing with the revolt of Roman slaves. In this scene Müller also cites Lautréamont, whose Les chants de Maldoror celebrates the very sensuality Müller believes the Enlightenment attempted to suppress. Müller’s insistence on the negative aspects of the Enlightenment has been criticized as non-dialectical, and hence as non-Marxist. One could also argue that this is the point. In this play, and in his other writing, Müller adopts at least in part the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment. His East Germany resembled near its end a parody of the nightmare Modernity described by JeanFrançois Lyotard in his discussions of the postmodern. Viewing themselves as the natural inheritors of the German Classical tradition, the culmination of progressive German history, and the completion of the Enlightenment project, the true “Zeit der Vollendung,” East Germans could utilize their Marxist grand récit to suppress otherness of all kinds. It is precisely that suppression that Müller traces to the Enlightenment and which he attacks in Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei. And it is precisely that critique that prevented the play from being staged in East Germany until 1988, shortly before the demise of that country. — Translated by Martin Bäumel and Tracy Graves

Notes 1

See for example Hans-Joachim Kertscher, “Die Rezeption Lessings in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Dargestellt an ausgewählten Beispielen” (Diss., Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1978), 111. This essay is based in part on that dissertation.

2

See for example the essays in Deutsche Misere einst und jetzt: Die deutsche Misere als Thema der Gegenwartsliteratur: Das Preußensyndrom in der Literatur der DDR, ed. Paul Gerhard Klussmann and Heinrich Mohr (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981–82).

3

Kertscher, “Die Rezeption Lessings,” 85–86.

4

Kertscher, “Die Rezeption Lessings,” 102.

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5

For reasons of space this essay concentrates on Lessing in East German theater and film. A comprehensive study of the reception of Lessing in East Germany remains a scholarly desideratum. For preliminary investigations see Kertscher; Paul Michael Lützeler, “Die marxistische Lessing-Rezeption. Darstellung und Kritik am Beispiel von Mehring und Lukács,” Lessing Yearbook 3 (1971): 173–93; Lützeler, “Die marxistische Lessing-Rezeption (II). Darstellung und Kritik am Beispiel der Emilia-Galotti-Interpretationen in der DDR,” Lessing Yearbook 8 (1976): 42–60; Ferdinand Piedmont, “Minna von Barnhelm, west-östlich. Zur Theaterrezeption der Lessingschen Komödie in der BRD und der DDR,” Lessing Yearbook 13 (1981): 133–42; Hans-Georg Werner, “Ideale Formen der marxistischen LessingAneignung in der DDR,” Bausteine zu einer Wirkungsgeschichte: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ed. H.-G. Werner (Berlin: Aufbau, 1984): 401–510; Wolfgang Albrecht, “Lessing-Forschung 1984–1988,” Weimarer Beiträge 36:7 (1990): 1164–80.

6

Hans Mayer, “Lessings poetische Ausdrucksform,” in Lessing und die Zeit der Aufklärung, ed. Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 145.

7

Fritz Erpenbeck, “Nathan der Weise im Deutschen Theater,” Deutsche VolksZeitung, 9 September 1945. 8

“Zusammenfassendes Protokoll der wesentlichen Aspekte eines Gesprächs mit dem Regisseur der “Nathan”-Inszenierung von 1955, A. P. Hoffmann vom 27.3.1968,” Gabriele Bigott, “Besonderheiten der Rezeption eines klassischen Werkes zu unterschiedlichen Entwicklungszeiten der sozialistischen Gesellschaft, dargestellt am ‘Nathan,’ Deutsches Theater, 1955 und 1966” (Diplomarbeit, Theaterhochschule Leipzig 1968), Appendix, n.p. 9

Ibid., 4.

10

Hans Ulrich Eylau, “Eduard von Wintersteins Nathan,” Berliner Zeitung, 31 March 1955. 11

“Dokumentation zu Nathan der Weise am Deutschen Theater” (1966), No. 127/1 [typescript], 14. 12

Ibid., 15.

13

“Dokumentationsmaterialien zu Nathan der Weise am Landestheater Anklam,” No. 34, vol. 1 [typescript], 3.

14

Alexander Weigel, “Nathan ’79. Zu Aufführungen in Dresden, Cottbus, Schwedt und Meiningen,” Theater der Zeit 34:5 (1979): 9. 15

“Podiumsgespräch 2: Lessing und das Theater der DDR,” ed. Hans-Georg Werner, Lessing-Konferenz Halle 1979, Part 2 (Halle: Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg, 1980), 662. Here, as elsewhere, it is difficult to know to what extent that decline in “social consciousness” reflected a kind of inner emigration or protest.

16

Erika Stephan, “Umschau,” Theater der Zeit 36:10 (1981): 2.

17

Manfred Zelt, “Lessing-Trilogie. Emilia Galotti, Philotas, Nathan der Weise im Deutschen Theater Berlin,” Theater der Zeit 42:12 (1987): 24.

18 19

Ibid.

Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9, ed. Hans Koch. (Berlin: Dietz, 1963), 283.


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20

Paul Rilla, Lessing und sein Zeitalter in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 10 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1958), 116.

21 The city was first renamed as Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1953. In 1990 it became Chemnitz again. 22

Paul Prien, “Ein Lustspiel — Stimme reiner Menschlichkeit,” Volksstimme, 30 August 1949. Compare this with Ferdinand Piedmont’s somewhat different assertions (133–35), for example: “[Langhoffs] Inszenierung . . . versuchte wohl zum ersten Mal, das Lessing-Bild Franz Mehrings für die Theaterpraxis nutzbar zu machen” (135). 23

Rolf Rohmer, “Interview mit Peter Hacks,” Theater der Zeit 30:2 (1975): 45.

24

Herbert Ihering, “Bemerkungen zu Theater und Film,” Sinn und Form 12:3 (1960): 483–84. 25

Dieter Kranz, “Lessings Komödien in neuer Sicht. Minna von Barnhelm in den Kammerspielen Berlin,” Theater der Zeit 15:6 (1960): 57.

26

Edith Krull, Wolfgang Langhoff (Berlin: Henschel, 1962), 24.

27

Christoph Funke and Dieter Kranz, Wolfgang Langhoff: Schauspieler, Regisseur, Intendant (Berlin: Henschel, 1969), 39. 28

Gerhard Ebert, “Minna von Barnhelm,” Sonntag 20 (1960): 11.

29

Henryk Keisch, “Minna von Barnhelm oder — keiner will Geld. Gestalten der klassischen Dramatik — Reichweite und Grenzen ihrer Deutung,” Neues Deutschland, 10 April 1960.

30

“Regie-Konzeption zu unserer Aufführung. Minna von Barnhelm am Dresdener Staats-Schauspiel. Spielzeit 1961/62,” 1 September 1961, n.p.

31

Program Notes: “Minna von Barnhelm” an den Leipziger Kammerspielen, Spielzeit 1969/70, n.p.

32

Thomas Wieck, “Entwicklung oder Neubeginn? Die Herausforderungen der sozialistisch-realistischen Schauspielkunst durch das humanistische Erbe,” Theater der Zeit 25:12 (1970): 14.

33

Ingrid Seyfarth, “Individuelle Größe bürgerlichen Protests. Lessings Minna von Barnhelm an den Leipziger Kammerspielen,” Theater der Zeit 25:6 (1970): 22.

34

Peter Weber, “Lessings Minna von Barnhelm. Zur Interpretation und literarhistorischen Charakteristik des Werkes,” in Studien zur Literaturgeschichte und Literaturtheorie, ed. Hans-Günther Thalheim and Ursula Wertheim (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1970), 28.

35

Manfred Möckel, “Über Theaterarbeit an den Klassikern. Was interessiert die jungen Zuschauer an Minna von Barnhelm?” Weimarer Beiträge 18:12 (1972): 125.

36

“Zur Rezeption des klassisch-bürgerlichen Erbes auf dem Theater. Gespräche mit Regisseuren,” Weimarer Beiträge 20:1 (1974): 102.

37

Jochen Gleiß, “Ehre über Gebühr. Minna von Barnhelm in Halle,” Theater der Zeit 33:6 (1978): 13.

38 Thomas Wieck, “Gehemmter Eindruck der Natur,” Theater der Zeit 34:2 (1979): 28.

324 39


Ibid., 30.

40

Hans-Georg Werner, “Der Sache nach ernst — der Perspektive nach heiter. Zu den Hauptfiguren in Minna von Barnhelm,” Theater der Zeit 34:4 (1979): 21.

41

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. 12 vols. (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), vol 6, 61. Subsequent quotations are from this edition (Ba) and will be cited in the notes with volume and page numbers.

42

Hans-Rainer John, “Zu Lessings Minna, abschließend. Nach Interpretationen in Erfurt, Magdeburg und im Fernsehen der DDR,” Theater der Zeit 34:5 (1979): 15.

43

Lessing-Konferenz Halle, 656.

44

Ibid., 130.

45

Erich Kühne, “Über die Dialektik der bürgerlichen Tragödie. Versuch einer Neuinterpretation von Lessings dramatischen Schaffen,” Deutschunterricht 4 (1949): 6.

46 Joachim Müller, “Lessings Emilia Galotti,” in Wirklichkeit und Klassik: Beiträge zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte von Lessing bis Heine, ed. J. Müller (Berlin: Nation, 1955), 58. 47

Rilla, Lessing und sein Zeitalter, 274.

48

Program Notes: “Emilia Galotti” am Deutschen Nationaltheater Weimar, Spielzeit 1953/54, n.p.

49 Werner Rieck, “Lessings Emilia Galotti — Versuch einer Analyse,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Pädagogischen Hochschule Potsdam 2 (1967): 122. 50

“Dokumentationsmaterialien zu Emilia Galotti am Landestheater Parchim. Premiere am 25.12.1969,” [typescript], 1.

51

“Konzeptionelles Material zur Inszenierung Emilia Galotti. Meiningen, Spielzeit 1974/75,” [typescript], 3. Material located in the archive of the Meinigen Theater. 52

G. E. Lessing, Emilia Galotti, Ba 7, 369.

53

Lessing-Konferenz Halle, 172.

54

Johann Gottfried Herder, “Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität,” in J. G. Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 7, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 202. 55

Zelt, “Lessing-Trilogie,” 22.

56

The film has been broadcast nationwide by mdr, a television station located in the former East Germany.

57

Kertscher, “Die Rezeption Lessings,” 166.

58

G. Dahlke, “Martin Hellberg kontra Lessing,” Neues Deutschland, 22 March 1958. 59

Ingmar Dreher, “Die sozialistische Schule und eine Lessingverfilmung,” Deutsche Filmkunst 5 (1958): 142.


60

G. E. Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm, Ba 6, 84.

61

Quoted in an interview with Kertscher, “Die Rezeption Lessings,” 161.

62

Sabine Wilke, “Heiner Müller’s Lessing,” Lessing Yearbook 22 (1990): 146.

325

63

Quoted in Heiner Müller, Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei, in H. Müller, Herzstück (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1983), 150. 64

Arlene Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller (New York: Lang, 1985), 75.

65

Wilke, “Heiner Müller’s Lessing,” 153–55.


“Lessing as Laocoon. With their commemorations, the old opponents defeat him now after all.” 1929. Courtesy of Lessing Museum, Kamenz.

Modern Criticism in Historical Context: 200 Years of Lessing Reception Hinrich C. Seeba

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HE RECEPTION OF LESSING, of his works and ideas, has been marked for 200 years by attempts to place him historically somewhere between the classic and the modern, between national literature and world literature, between literary history and art theory, and to judge whether he was an innovator and a mediator of new developments. His contested place in German literary and intellectual history has often served to define German culture at the crossroads between French and English models, between the Roman and the Greek traditions, between delayed and accelerated progress toward modernization. While German culture generally lagged behind English and French developments, mostly due to the devastating aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, German intellectuals such as Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, as individuals, pushed the emerging German culture to join and in some cases even spearhead European advances. It was Lessing who, on the one hand, brought such authors as Aristotle and Diderot to German readers, and who, on the other, was the first German author to find a European audience. It was mainly through Lessing that German literary culture arrived on the European stage. As a result of this Janus-like nature of his various roles, Lessing’s reputation at any given time has always been subject to difficulties in affirming his historical place and defining his theoretical significance. Lessing has always been celebrated as a pioneer in literary criticism, art history, critical theology, and drama, but in some areas, which are the focus of attention in current debates of literary and cultural theory, his contributions have gained new poignancy. But while, at least in the Englishspeaking world, the focus may be shifting back and forth between the author of Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) and the author of Laokoon (Laocoon, 1766), between cultural communication and textual representation, Lessing’s historical place as a “classical modernist” remains uncontested in many areas:

• In terms of intellectual history, it was Lessing, in journalistic collaboration with his friends Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai, who

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raised criticism to the level of public discourse, thus inspiring the heated discussion of literary and philosophical issues, which became the preferred area of bourgeois emancipation and identification. In terms of theater history, it was Lessing, in the Theatralische Bibliothek (Theatrical Library, beginning in 1754), who made available to the German theater the entire European tradition of drama, including Spanish and Dutch plays. In terms of literary history, it was Lessing, in Miß Sara Sampson (1755), who raised moral concerns of the middle class to the level of aesthetic legitimacy, creating the first major German bürgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy), which took its place between heroic tragedy and lower-class comedy. He thus paved the way for a popular new dramatic genre from Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784) to Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene (1844) and even naturalist dramas such as Die Familie Selicke (1890) by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. In terms of a major cultural paradigm shift, it was Lessing, in the seventeenth letter of the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (Letters Concerning Most Recent Literature, 1759), who replaced the rigid French model of drama with Shakespeare, thus embracing new concepts of genius and nature. With respect to socio-political history, it was Lessing, in Minna von Barnhelm (1767), who was the first to put on stage the economic misery that prevailed at the time he was writing and the crisis of military honor following the Seven Years’ War, thus engaging literature in social and political debates of the day. In terms of aesthetics, it was Lessing, in Laokoon (1766), who questioned the Horatian principle of ut pictura poesis and introduced temporality as the distinguishing mode of sequential writing, thus laying the groundwork, within a semiotic theory of aesthetics, for the distinction between verbal and visual representation. In regard to cultural poetics, it was Lessing, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1767–1769), who tailored the Aristotelian essence of tragedy, ␸ó␤␱␵ ␬␣␫ ␧´ ␭␧␱␵ (fear and pity) into “Furcht und Mitleid,” thus making sympathy (in the literal sense of ␴␷␮␲␣␪␧ι˜␯ ⫽ to suffer with) the affective feature of bourgeois identity. In the realm of epistemology, it was Lessing, in his theological writings (1777–1780), who suggested a perspectival, if not constructivist concept of truth, thus challenging religious dogmatism. In terms of postcolonial thought, it was Lessing, in his Nathan der Weise, who investigated the clash of civilizations between the Western world and Islam, staging the intercultural encounter of a global family with the Jewish victim of discrimination and persecution, in a plea for international understanding.

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Considering these advances, which resonate in the critical concerns of today, one may wonder how much more theoretically “à propos” an eighteenth-century writer can be in dealing with pressing issues and concepts and how much more historically significant he can be in heralding momentous paradigm shifts. There can be no doubt that Lessing is a modern author, not only because he rang in the age of modernism, but also because some favorite issues in postmodern thought appear to be prefigured in his writings. Yet throughout the 250 years since his first publication, Lessing has eluded theoretical predation and outright ideological appropriation. As a fundamentally critical observer, who would not easily participate in direct action, he has successfully resisted most attempts to claim him for any of the quite diverse political causes that used his name. Even the Nazis had to admit that he could not be counted among the precursors of their movement. One should not look for early National Socialists in literary history, the Nazi critic Ernst Suter remarked in 1938, in a surprisingly open rejection of naive idolatry. Suter emphasized that those ideologues who wished to make Lessing a Nazi were not acting in the best interests of Nazi scholarship.1 And literary scholars in communist East Germany, too, took pains not to reach too far beyond Lessing’s presumed “Kampf für die nationale Einigung des deutschen Volkes durch Schaffung einer einheitlichen, von demokratischem Geist erfüllten bürgerlich-nationalen Ideologie.”2 In their eyes Lessing was the progressive, class-conscious bourgeois who was misunderstood and shunned by a largely unenlightened bourgeoisie. Lessing’s status as an outsider was seen as a promise that in the struggle for a democratic state the bourgeoisie was to be superceded by another more progressive class. Obviously, Lessing could no more be turned into a Communist than into a Nazi. But aside from such extremes, he inspired enough controversy to elicit strong responses pro and con, both in Germany and abroad. Most famous among the early intertextual traces of Lessing reception is the scene of the title character’s suicide in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) of 1774: “Emilia Galotti lag auf dem Pulte aufgeschlagen.”3 Obviously, readers are to assume that before he died on December 23, 1772, Werther had been reading Lessing’s drama of 1772. That this sentimental artist, who reads mostly Homer, Ossian, and Klopstock, would turn to the most recent work of an emerging German literature, indicates how much significance Goethe attributed to Lessing. But what motivated his fictional character Werther and which part of the drama possibly inspired or alleviated Werther’s despair is anybody’s guess, and has been the subject of much speculation for more than 225 years. Is the implicit reference to Emilia Galotti’s assisted suicide (in which her father kills her upon her own demand) meant as a discreet heuristic justification of suicide if it is understood, as one Goethe editor suggests, “nicht als Ausfluß sentimentaler Schwärmerei,

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sondern als Rettung sittlicher Freiheit”?4 Or is it, in social rather than existential terms, a hint that Werther shares Lessing’s contempt for the amoral conventions of society? Is the allusion to Lessing in the most crucial scene, as Georg Lukács suggested,5 a slap in the face for all “bourgeois” critics who tried to see Werther’s emotional revolt only in opposition to, rather than in continuation of, the progressive agenda of Enlightenment? Does Goethe simply share Lessing’s critique of sentimental selfindulgence? Whatever the answer, it seems ironic that Werther’s suicide, which became the literary model for a large number of imitators who plunged into real life suicide, was itself modeled on the calculated effect of Lessing’s drama.6 Here for the first time, reading (and interpreting) Lessing was staged, and became a literary and critical issue far beyond its early implication. A call for a critical account of the impact of Lessing and his works was issued in 1797 by an apparently rather unlikely advocate — Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). Just after Lessing’s brother, Karl Gotthelf Lessing (1740–1812), had laid the groundwork for a serious reception in his biography, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, nebst seinem übrigen literarischen Nachlasse (1793–95), Schlegel stated: “Es ist nicht uninteressant, der allmählichen Entstehung und Ausbildung der herrschenden Meinung über Lessing nachzuforschen und sie bis in ihre kleinsten Nebenzweige zu verfolgen. Die Darstellung derselben in ihrem ganzen Umfange, mit andern Worten, die Geschichte der Wirkungen, welche Lessings Schriften auf die deutsche Literatur gehabt haben, wäre hinreichender Stoff für eine eigene Abhandlung.”7 It is noteworthy in terms of the history of criticism that the very concept of Wirkungsgeschichte, as it was introduced by Hans Robert Jauss in 1967,8 first emerged from the foundational phase of Romantic theory and that it was formulated in the name of and for the sake of Lessing.9 Indeed it was Friedrich Schlegel, the mastermind of Romantic theory, who reminded his readers that Lessing was the genius of the critical revolution that the Romantics were about to set in motion. While modern theorists who trace themselves back to Romanticism can claim: “The romantics have no predecessors,”10 Schlegel insisted that Lessing was not just a precursor but even the founder of the theoretical agenda he was advocating. After writing his perceptive essay, Über Lessing (1797), Schlegel edited a collection of the most significant passages from Lessing’s works and letters, Lessings Geist aus seinen Schriften, oder dessen Gedanken und Meinungen zusammengestellt und erläutert von Friedrich Schlegel (1804), in order to present Lessing as the forebear of his own concept of criticism and Romantic literature. While Romanticism has most often been seen as a critical rejection of the Enlightenment, as a mainly emotional answer to the crisis of reason, this one-sided view is not at all supported by Schlegel’s repeated attempt to show that early Romantic thought, with its


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highly philosophical leanings and theoretical impact reaching all the way to postmodernist debates, is the direct result of Lessing’s concept and practice of criticism. He asserts with confidence that Lessing is unsurpassed as a critic for whom, as for Schlegel, criticism is “ein Organon der Literatur,” a new form of “Kritik, die nicht sowohl der Kommentar einer schon vorhandnen, vollendeten, verblühten, sondern vielmehr das Organon einer noch zu vollendenden, zu bildenden, ja anzufangenden Literatur wäre.”11 As a vehicle of Romantic literature, Lessing’s critical practice anticipates Schlegel’s concept of what he, following Kant’s critique of reason, called “transcendental” literature, that is, literature that does not just entail the product of writing, but which represents the very process by which it came about. In this respect Lessing, who is better known for his unsystematic philosophical writing than for his creative work, is the ideal representative. Schlegel is convinced that “ein kühn kombinierender Geist”12 — the very combinatory mind he is striving for — permeates Lessing’s writings. One of the first historical accounts of a German national literature, as it was emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century, is contained in the famous seventh book of the second part of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Fiction and Truth, 1811–14). As Goethe required “Nationalgegenstände” as the favored subject of literature, he believed that the beginning of a genuine German national literature would come only when German writers felt obliged to prove wrong the low esteem in which the Prussian king Frederick II held both the German language and German literature, and to respond to the experience of the Seven Years’ War. Goethe’s historiographic survey therefore ends with high praise for Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, “der wahrsten Ausgeburt des Siebenjährigen Krieges, von vollkommenem norddeutschem Nationalgehalt”: “es ist die erste aus dem bedeutenden Leben gegriffene Theaterproduktion, von spezifisch temporärem Gehalt, die deswegen auch eine nie zu berechnende Wirkung tat.”13 Goethe acted on his conviction, and had the Weimar stage, under his direction, perform Minna von Barnhelm twenty-four times. This drama’s incalculable place in the history of Lessing reception begins as a programmatic icon of politically engaged writing. By staging the misery of discharged military officers even in victory (on the Prussian side) and the spirited banter of emancipated women even in defeat (on the Saxon side) Lessing’s play got involved, Goethe suggests, in mediating between former enemies. But critics who could not consider the trials and tribulations of love across the battle lines a sufficiently contemporaneous subject of national import found in this drama the kind of emotional personal relations that constituted the powerful core of an emerging bourgeois literature. That the play stood firmly on the ground of contemporary realities is only confirmed by the way that these emotions inevitably are entangled in the most ordinary monetary and legal affairs, with honor, too, potentially becoming a mere exchange value.

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When the editor of Heinrich Heine’s works, obviously interested in highlighting Heine’s historic role in the revaluation of Lessing, asserts that “Lessing wurde von Heines Zeitgenossen sehr viel höher eingeschätzt als von den Romantikern,”14 he merely follows a common historiographic topos that Heine himself was interested in advancing, as it had allowed him, as author of Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School, 1836) to write himself into the annals of literature as the innovator breaking with the Romantic tradition. But even for Heine the brothers Schlegel were imitators of Lessing,15 at least insofar as they adopted, to lesser effect, his polemical style. But Heine, characteristically, wavers in his judgment, praising what he can use and discarding what he cannot use to establish himself within or against a certain literary tradition. Heine allows Lessing to be the precursor of the Romantics, whom he intends to supplant, only where he can present Lessing in a negative light: “Auch dieser, so stark er im Verneinen ist, so schwach ist er im Bejahen, selten kann er ein Grundprinzip aufstellen, noch seltener ein richtiges. Es fehlt ihm der feste Boden einer Philosophie, eines philosophischen Systems. Dieses ist nun bei den Herren Schlegel in noch viel trostloserem Grade der Fall” (374–75). This indictment of Lessing’s and the Romantics’ philosophical aspirations appeared just a few pages after Heine had declared Lessing not only the “Stifter der neuern deutschen Originalliteratur” but also the advocate of a “Vernunftreligion, deren Johannes er war und deren Messias wir noch erwarten” (371). It is probably due to this messianic expectation, which Lessing inspired, that Heine surprised his readers with the confession that in all of literary history, Lessing was the writer he most loved (372). What Heine really loved most about Lessing, it seems, was the role he, Heine, was carving out for himself as Lessing’s legitimate successor. Not unlike Friedrich Schlegel, who saw his own theory anticipated by Lessing, Heine projected onto Lessing his own triadic concept of redemptive history: “Ja, kommen wird auch der dritte Mann, der da vollbringt was Luther begonnen, was Lessing fortgesetzt, und dessen das deutsche Vaterland so sehr bedarf, — der dritte Befreier!”16 Heine had no qualms about dressing up his political vision of spiritual liberation, which he repeatedly invoked in terms of a revolution, in religious images, noting for example that Lessing was the prophet that pointed the way from the New or Second Testament to a third one (589). The role assigned to Lessing serves as just one station in the rhetorical argument for a violent German revolution, which concludes Heine’s essay Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1835): “Der Gedanke geht der Tat voraus, wie der Blitz dem Donner.[. . .] Es wird ein Stück aufgeführt werden in Deutschland, wogegen die französische Revolution nur wie eine harmlose Idylle erscheinen möchte” (639–40). As much as Heine implied himself as the intellectual vehicle for such dramatic change, he could not do so without paying homage to Lessing, or rather to the image of Lessing he


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invented for his lofty philosophy of history. At the same time Heine assumed the role of a polemicist in order to cloak himself in the literary style of witticism he shared with Lessing. Like Heine, who enjoyed attacking devotees of Goethe in order to save him from their clutches, Friedrich Nietzsche (in the first of his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, David Strauss [Untimely Observations, 1873]) expresses contempt for such “Lessing-Enthusiasten”17 as Strauss and G. G. Gervinus in order to make Goethe’s exasperated exclamation his own: “Wir brauchen einen Lessing, rief schon Goethe” (158). On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that second-rate writers admired Lessing so greatly (157) because their praise for his universality helps to conceal their own narrow-minded provincialism. In Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All-Too-Human, 1880), on the other hand, Nietzsche attributes Lessing’s exemplary showmanship (“er versteht seine Dinge im Schauladen gut zu ordnen und aufzustellen”)18 to his training in the French school, the very paradigm Lessing tried so hard to overcome. When Nietzsche, in the same passage, under the heading “Lessing,” praises Lessing’s art of self-representation while chiding his followers for adopting his stylistic “Mischung von Zankteufelei und Biederkeit,”19 it becomes obvious that Nietzsche, too, utilizes Lessing only to offer himself as the better, that is, more vivacious polemicist. In its mastery of style, Nietzsche contends in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886), Lessing’s prose comes closest to adequately representing the speed and rhythm of language even in translation, again by approximating Diderot and Voltaire: “Lessing liebte auch im Tempo die Freigeisterei, die Flucht aus Deutschland.”20 In Nietzsche’s view, Lessing, who admittedly replaced the French model with Shakespeare, assumes the very role of the Francophile that Nietzsche himself was aspiring to, at least stylistically. Obviously concerned with positioning himself for future histories of literature, Nietzsche poses the question in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: “Gibt es ‘deutsche Klassiker’ ”? He suggests in a literary variant of social Darwinism that, while Goethe remains timeless but without consequence, the other German “classics” — Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing, and Schiller — have not aged well, and in fact have outlived their welcome. If Lessing can be exempted from such natural selection, Nietzsche implies, it is only because he lives on among ever-younger scholars: “Lessing lebt vielleicht heute noch, — aber unter jungen und immer jüngeren Gelehrten!”21 This does not mean much, however, as Nietzsche points out with regard to Schiller, who is read mainly by schoolboys: “Und was hat diese fünf [Klassiker] zurückgedrängt, so daß gut unterrichtete und arbeitsame Männer sie nicht mehr lesen?”22 In self-serving fashion Nietzsche argues that these “classical” writers, who merely initiated German Bildung without completing it, will have to be replaced with true “Klassiker” whose fame will survive the people they serve. Thus again, even Lessing, the liveliest of the lot, is a mere stepping stone for those who are to follow.

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One would assume that as a dramaturge and drama critic Lessing would have had an appreciative following. But even though there is a direct line of pedigree from Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz (1786–1870), who was the theater critic of Vossische Zeitung from 1823 until his death in 1870 at age 84, to his successor Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), who took over from Gubitz in August 1870, and to Alfred Kerr (1867–1948), who in turn was mentored by Fontane, there is surprisingly little reference to “der Ahndl Gotthold Ephraim,” as Alfred Kerr, with typical condescension, called his critical ancestor in 1925.23 Long before naturalism and expressionism would break with the literary traditions of bourgeois aesthetics, Lessing seemed to have already vanished into the past. Fontane, the most influential theater critic of his time, who dutifully observed and reviewed every production on the stage of the Königliches Schauspielhaus, where seat 23 was reserved only for him, was more concerned with the guest performances of out-of-town actors than with the merits of Lessing’s dramas — with one exception. When Minna von Barnhelm, staged as part of a theatrical war effort during the height of the Franco-Prussian War in August 1870, failed to raise any nationalist attention to the cultural stereotyping in Tellheim’s encounter with the French caricature Riccaut, Fontane blamed the play’s outdated topicality, the very feature that had caused Goethe to consider it the epitome of national drama, for the lack of current interest in it among modern audiences.24 Issues of the day, Fontane contends, age too quickly to reach beyond the concern of cultural historians. No wonder, as another critic observed in 1870, that Minna von Barnhelm was certainly no longer greeted with enthusiasm, and in fact was often played in front of frightfully empty houses.25 But while the Seven Years’ War of a century earlier seemed to hold little interest for people involved in the present war, the drama representing its aftermath had been adapted into the classical canon. The fact that it had assumed a central place in the school curriculum and that it was performed in Berlin regularly every year was the reason given when Minna von Barnhelm and Nathan der Weise were excluded from the traveling schedule of the Meiningen court theater, a popular theater ensemble financed and practically managed by the Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen (1826– 1914), who insisted on historically correct stagings with authentic set and costume designs. From 1874 to 1890 forty-one productions (in a total of 2,591 performances) were taken on tour throughout Europe, with the entire ensemble, the scenery, costumes, properties and orchestra in tow. While the stage manager Ludwig Chronegk (1837–1891) was in charge of the logistics, the duke, who intervened in the operations through daily telegrams, himself designed the realistic sets for, among other plays, Miß Sara Sampson, which was the only play by Lessing the company ever performed on tour. But while Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans, the most successful production of the Meiningen group, was performed in Berlin


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fifty-five times and in many other cities from Breslau (35 performances), Leipzig (19), London (16), St. Petersburg (12) to Prague (10), Moscow (7), and Odessa (3), Miß Sara Sampson had only three performances in Berlin and only two each in Breslau and Dresden — in spite of a positive review in Die Gegenwart declaring it a signature production of the Meiningen troupe. Hardly any other drama, the critic claimed, exemplified the Meiningen theater’s staging and outfitting of their performances, their emphasis on characteristic atmosphere and their attention to every material detail to complement the actors’ performance as well as Miß Sara Sampson.26 The historicist “outfitting” of Bildungstheater, which tends to stifle classical ideals in the mere spectacle of material display, anticipates the satirical portrayal of such reification in the character of Frau Jenny Treibel in Fontane’s novel of the same title (1892). But while this rather pompous “Musterstück von einer Bourgeoise,”27 as Fontane called his heroine, in Berlin’s nouveau society of the Gründerzeit frequently invokes the classical canon, it is Schiller, not Lessing, in whose name she claims “überhaupt das Höhere,”28 thus both exerting and covering up in tearful sentimentality her unrelenting grip on material power. With Schiller’s spectacular rise to the national pantheon, Lessing’s role in the public imagination was obviously fading. The competition between the concepts the two espoused in the interest of national identity was easily decided in favor of Schiller: While Lessing, in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, implied that the prerequisite of a national theater is the cultural context of a functioning nation,29 Schiller’s assertion of the opposite in his early essay “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” (1785), that is, national theater as the main vehicle for creating a political nation,30 was central to the eventual development of cultural nationalism, in other words the aesthetic construction of the political, in nineteenth-century Germany. Even the German unification of 1871 was seen as emerging from the idea of Kulturnation as it was identified most of all with Schiller. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that it was not Lessing but Schiller whose monument by the leading sculptor of the time, Reinhold Begas (1831–1911), was erected in 1871 in front of Germany’s leading theater, Schinkel’s temple of the arts on the Gendarmenmarkt, the Königliches Schauspielhaus. In 1859, the so-called Schillerjahr celebrating the 100th anniversary of Schiller’s birth, the priest-like statue of Schiller was projected in a verbal monument called Schiller-Denkmal (Schiller Monument, 1859), a collection of devotional texts by leading authors from Berthold Auerbach to Rudolf Virchow who thereby placed their hopes for national unity on Schiller’s legacy. This “Monument des deutschen Geistes, gleichsam ein deutscher GeistesDom,”31 was a distant echo of another, much less celebrated and in fact ridiculed verbal monument, Lessings Denkmal: Eine vaterländische Geschichte (1791/93). The implied patriotism of the latter title — unlike

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the enthusiastic attempt to embrace Schiller for the national cause two generations later — is nothing but sarcastic. The book documents the resistance the author, actor, and playwright Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann (1746–1796), encountered when he tried to convince German theaters to donate one evening’s box office receipts to commissioning a monument to Lessing.32 Obviously, Lessing could never as easily be appropriated for the nationalist agenda as Schiller. Ernst Rietschel’s Lessing monument of 1859 was placed in Braunschweig, not exactly in the center of public attention. While Schiller was the rage of the nation, Lessing clearly took a back seat. While Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, which opened the theater season in Berlin on August 17, 1870, was welcomed with thunderous applause — as Fontane reports in his very first theater review, happy with the theater’s intent to let “our national poets” speak to the Volk during great national occasions33 — Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, which opened ten days later on the same stage and in the same patriotic spirit, had none of the intended effect. Lessing was no longer considered “our national writer” fit to stir and to please a bellicose audience. The emerging cultural climate of the Wilhelmine Empire did not lend itself to celebrating the rationalist skeptic and foremost writer of the German Enlightenment. One of the most popular nationalist manifestos before the turn of the century, Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890, with forty-three printings by 1893!) by Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), suggests, in a still cautiously phrased anti-intellectual sentiment with strong anti-Semitic implications, that Lessing as the critic of patriotism rightly fell out of favor with the people who wanted to replace “that clear German intellect, which Lessing represents” with “the German heart.”34 For Ferdinand Lassalle (1825– 1864), on the ideological left, who published his politically motivated philosophical essay on Lessing (1861) just before he founded the German workers movement, Lessing was the “victorious revolutionary in the kingdom of the intellect” and thus even “greater than Luther.”35 A generation later, on the ideological right, Langbehn sides with what he termed the “instinct of the people,” which places Luther above Lessing. In a time of rising chauvinism, Lessing, it seems, had not much of a chance to outdo Luther as a revolutionary or Schiller as a patriot. As national progress was no longer associated with the universal ideas of enlightenment (“bei Lessing stehen zu bleiben, ist nicht im Sinne Lessing’s”),36 Langbehn undertook the futile but ominous attempt to invoke Lessing as an advocate of turning anti-Semitism into deadly action. If Lessing were alive today, Langbehn argued, he would be a leading enemy of the Jews. He protected them when they were the oppressed, but now that they were the oppressors he would fight them to the death.37 This twisted logic only underlines the fact that it proved rather difficult to appropriate Lessing for emerging trends that were the very opposite of what he stood for.


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Just as Lessing was left behind, and in fact disappeared from the popular adulation of the German classics, he became the subject of comprehensive studies in positivistic Germanistik — and of a famous controversy that pitted conservative nationalists, represented by Erich Schmidt, and progressive socialists, represented by Franz Mehring, against each other. Even before Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) adopted in 1846 the name Germanistik, which had been used to mean the study of Germanic law, to embrace the expanded study of German law, German history, and German language, the first major editorial project of the emerging discipline — one devoted not to Greek, Latin, or medieval but instead to recent German authors — was the thirteen-volume critical edition by Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) of Lessing’s Sämtliche Schriften (1838–40). It was followed by the second edition in twelve volumes (1853–57) and, with substantial help from Franz Muncker (1855–1926), the third edition in twenty-three volumes (1886–1924). Only after Lachmann’s systematic comparison of early printings and manuscripts had established an authentic text was it possible to deal with Lessing’s oeuvre with some philological accuracy. For the first generation of Germanists it was the thorough and philosophically ambitious biography by the Hegelian Theodor W. Danzel (1818–1850), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Sein Leben und seine Werke (1850),38 and the much more popular monograph by Adolf Stahr (1805–1876), G. E. Lessing: Sein Leben und seine Werke (1859, with nine printings until 1889), that served as the critical standard. Especially the latter, with its emphasis on Lessing’s stance as a republican, generated broader critical interest in Lessing’s works and inspired Ferdinand Lassalle to write his important essay of 1861. For the second generation of Germanists it was Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886) and his successor Erich Schmidt (1853–1913), both of them professors in Berlin and the most influential voices in literary studies of the time, who helped define the image of Lessing as a royalist so it would agree with the priorities and predilections of Wilhelmine culture. Thus Scherer, in his prominent Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur (1883, with the third printing in 1885 and a total of twenty-six printings by 1949), portrayed the Prussian king Frederick II as a generous sponsor of arts and literature and, particularly, as Lessing’s benefactor. Intent on turning Lessing into a conservative, Scherer explicitly praised Lessing, as if he were modeled on Bismarck’s Realpolitik, for the fact that he was not a revolutionary. Scherer’s Lessing is a reformer who builds on what exists and prefers gradual change; neither in literature nor in scholarship does Scherer see Lessing as a radical innovator.39 Placed next to courtiers who in their poetry celebrate their glorious king, Scherer’s Lessing too appears as the Prussian king’s willing accomplice: “Lessing, der geborene Sachse, stand mit seinem Herzen auf Friedrichs Seite” (443). For, he asserts, no German writer was as close to the king’s inner spirit as Lessing (455). As if to prove his mistaken point, Scherer discovers in Minna von Barnhelm “lauter tüchtige und

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liebenswerthe vaterländische Gestalten; eine Huldigung für die deutschen Frauen; eine Verherrlichung der Armee, in deren Mitte Lessing vier Jahre lang gelebt hatte; eine Feier des großen Königs, der im Hintergrunde hereinragt und die Gerechtigkeit übt, welche dem Major sein verlorenes Selbstgefühl zurückgiebt, seine geschädigte Ehre wieder herstellt und Alles zum guten Ende führt” (449). Compared to Scherer, who as the Austrian in Berlin obviously tried too hard to be the better Prussian, Erich Schmidt follows the historicist ideals of objectivity much more closely, but he too tried to rescue Lessing — in his painstakingly researched two-volume biography, Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften (1884–91) — from the threat of oblivion by returning him, next to Goethe and Schiller, to the status of a literary classic in German national literature. Franz Mehring (1846–1919) was the first leftist critic to apply to literature the principles Karl Marx had developed in his Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859). Based on ideas he explored in a methodological appendix, “Über den historischen Materialismus” (1893), Mehring wrote a book better known by its title than by its content, Die Lessing-Legende: Eine Rettung (1893), which was re-titled in the otherwise unchanged second printing as Die Lessing-Legende: Zur Geschichte und Kritik des preußischen Despotismus und der klassischen Literatur (1906).40 Because he was driven by virulent opposition to and even hatred of the Prussian monarchy and its servile promoters in academe, he rebuffed as “legend” any attempt to use Lessing to justify the oppressive Prussian system. While he provides an abundance of economic and social data to support his determinist approach to culture, his one-sided conception of Lessing as the kind of tyrannicide Mehring had learned to admire in Schiller adds little to the understanding of Lessing’s significance in German literature. When Mehring, for instance, calls Minna von Barnhelm “eine schneidende Satire auf das friderizianische Regiment,” such labels, however quotable they may be,41 remain mostly unsubstantiated. Whatever the literary details, Lessing was to Mehring first and foremost “der verwegenste Revolutionär, den die bürgerliche Welt in Deutschland hervorgebracht hat bis auf die Börne und Heine, die Marx und Engels, die auch erst im Auslande das werden konnten, was sie geworden sind.”42 However slanted Mehring’s angle may have been, his critical history of the “Lessing-Legend” (210) in all its polemical fervor constitutes a formidable attempt at Wissenschaftsgeschichte, a critical account of the Lessing reception and its socio-cultural context. When Adolf Stahr’s widow, the feminist writer Fanny Lewald (1811–1889), posthumously dedicated the second edition of his book to “Seiner Durchlaucht dem Fürsten Bismarck,” Mehring’s indignation culminated in a characteristic combination of critical insight and polemic brilliance: “Das Buch, das einst den Schatten Lessings beschwor, um die bürgerlichen Klassen zum politischen Kampf zu spornen, ist heute gut genug als geistige Stallfütterung für eine träge verkommende und jeden


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lessingischen Luftzug des Gedankens scheuende Bourgeoisie” (69). But Mehring’s most vitriolic anger was reserved for “Herr Erich Schmidt,” whom he respects for his “Alexandrian” erudition but whom he bitterly detests for his “Byzantine” views even though the latter are not as pronounced as in Scherer’s distorted account. Since Scherer had died seven years before, Schmidt was the only living target for Mehring’s harangue against gestures of servility as an indication of the lamentable intellectual decline of the bourgeoisie, a class which in Mehring’s view had become too weak to bring about the social change that was necessary. Not incidentally, the last chapter of Mehring’s book is dedicated to “Lessing und das Proletariat.” On the one side of the controversy, August Sauer (1855–1926), professor in Prague and another positivist, came to Schmidt’s defense in a sarcastic review of Die Lessing-Legende by saying that Mehring merely added another chapter to a legend that he had set out to debunk: “er hat nur das Grabtuch der Lessinglegende um den Leichnam seines Helden noch enger geschnürt.”43 On the other, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), who took little interest in Lessing proper, called Mehring’s book by far the best depiction of the genesis of the Prussian state.44 In a methodological dichotomy that anticipated later alternatives in critical theories, one side tended to be concerned more with philological detail and literary evaluation and the other more with historical context and political analysis. Franz Mehring had few followers in Lessing scholarship. His views were marginalized and suppressed for too long, by conservatives in the 1920’s, certainly in the Third Reich, and then by postwar anticommunists. Mehring would have been forgotten altogether if he had not found an official niche as an honored forebear of East Germany’s Marxist criticism. Paul Rilla’s book-length essay, Lessing und sein Zeitalter, which was published in 1958 as part of Rilla’s ten-volume edition of Lessing’s works, kept alive the memory of Mehring’s Lessing-Legende, which had been republished in East Germany in 1953, by drawing from and expanding on Mehring’s historical account and by placing his ideological fervor in the service of cold war politics: “Lessing ist aktuell. Er versöhnt in der Minna von Barnhelm die nationalen Gegensätze, die der deutschen Einheit im Wege sind. Er wendet sich gegen einen Krieg, der nicht den Frieden der Nation hergestellt, sondern die nationale Zerklüftung vertieft hat. Aber er weiß auch, daß der Friede unter Umständen gewappnet auftreten muß.”45 Against the background of such obvious appropriation, which was as much ideologically guided as the nationalism Mehring targeted in his polemic, it comes as no surprise that leftist interpretation of Lessing’s works was more effective on the stage than in the hands of academic propagandists. For instance, in 1960, at a time when the state of Prussia had been dissolved by Allied decree and Minna von Barnhelm was considered too Prussian for the postwar stage, the director of

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East Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, Wolfgang Langhoff (1901–1966), dared to stage it as a satire, in a widely emulated production (with the Brecht actress Käte Reichel in the title role) that was clearly based on Mehring’s sociological approach to the anti-Prussian tenets of the play.46 In postwar German theater it was mainly through the eyes — and often with the dramatic means — of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) that Lessing was reintroduced to a younger audience. Brecht, drawn to the didacticism of the Enlightenment, found a perfect model for his own parable Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1949)47 in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, whose English adaptation by Brecht’s exiled colleague Friedrich Bruckner (1891–1958), was performed in Erwin Piscator’s theater in New York in 1942. Central to both plays is the rhetorical question, as it is put by Recha: “Aber macht denn nur das Blut den Vater, nur das Blut?” — whether the biological mother/father is as much entitled to the child as the adoptive parent who takes loving care of the child and raises it to be a valuable member of a better society. The obvious answer, favoring Nathan and Grusche, respectively, against cruelly applied positive law, could easily be directed as much against biological racism in the first case (as it was in the anti-Nazi version of 1942) as against the natural right to inherited property in the second (as it was supposed to be in the anti-capitalist agenda). But while Lessing’s didactic drama of tolerance, with its message of multivalent truth, had to be reduced to a one-dimensional manifesto against German barbarism, Brecht’s one-dimensional plea for Soviet-style socialism in the seldom performed prologue “Der Streit um das Tal” (The Fight Over the Valley) had to be cut, when performed on stages in the West, to make the parable acceptable as an appeal to moral responsibility. Through such ideological adaptations, Lessing, the prototype of bourgeois emancipation, and Brecht, the anti-bourgeois revolutionary, appeared to be comrades in dramatic practice, though not in dramatic theory. In the latter, Lessing remained in the affective tradition of Aristotelian theater and Brecht strove for anti-Aristotelian episches Theater. The theoretical gap did not keep Brecht’s most important student, the playwright Heiner Müller (1929–1995), from inventing in his play Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (The Life of Gundling, Frederick of Prussia, Lessing’s Sleep, Dream, Scream, 1976) a Brechtian character named Lessing, who fails utterly as a revolutionary intellectual: Mein Name ist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Ich bin 47 Jahre alt. Ich habe eins/zwei Dutzend Puppen mit Sägemehl gestopft das mein Blut war, einen Traum vom Theater in Deutschland geträumt und öffentlich über Dinge nachgedacht, die mich nicht interessierten. Das ist nun vorbei. [. . .] 30 Jahre lang habe ich versucht, mit Worten mich aus dem Abgrund zu halten, brustkrank vom Staub der Archive und von der


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Asche, die aus den Büchern weht, gewürgt von meinem wachsenden Ekel an der Literatur, verbrannt von meiner immer heftigeren Sehnsucht nach Schweigen. Ich habe die Taubstummen um ihre Stille beneidet im Geschwätz der Akademien. [. . .] Ich fange an, meinen Text zu vergessen. Ich bin ein Sieb. Immer mehr Worte fallen hindurch. Bald werde ich keine andere Stimme mehr hören als meine Stimme, die nach vergessenen Worten fragt.48

In this pessimistic (self-)portrait, which clearly differs from dominant Marxist interpretations of Lessing and the Enlightenment both in and outside the GDR, Müller’s Lessing no longer represents, as he had in Adorno/Horkheimer’s critical program of 1944, the emancipatory tenet of the Dialektik der Aufklärung. Instead he has lost all interest, and with it all verbal power of memory, because he is fully implicated in the repressive instrumentalization of reason; for there is no culture, Heiner Müller implies against all dogma, that does not suppress the experience of blood, excrement, and sweat (“Blut Kot Schweiß).”49 On the ideological right, where Franz Mehring was shunned and Julius Langbehn reigned supreme, Langbehn’s suggestion of 1890 that if Lessing were still alive he would be the strongest opponent of the Jews had many anti-Semitic followers, among them most prominently Adolf Bartels (1862–1945), who in his book Lessing und die Juden (1918) had no doubt that the new Lessing, were he alive today, would undoubtedly be an anti-Semite.50 Such far-fetched speculation, as expressed by Langbehn in 1890 and by Bartels in 1918, became a strategy in the Third Reich, for example on the eve of the Holocaust in 1940, when it had become opportune to emphasize that if Lessing had lived 150 years later, during the time of “Jewish rule,” he would have become one of the most decided anti-Semites.51 In order to save Lessing as a typically German, even Nordic writer in the völkisch tradition, the radical nationalists had to reinterpret Lessing’s universalistic ideas of tolerance, especially toward Jews, as a simple error, as a misguided naiveté. Only because Lessing had been led astray by the cunning and deception of the Jews, Mathilde Ludendorff (1877–1966) argued in her Lessing book of 1937, could he become their advocate (“Anwalt dieses vermeintlich zu unrecht unterdrückten, vermeintlich duldsamen, vermeintlich harmlosen Volkes.”)52 Ever watchful of supranational forces and thus advocating total warfare in her book Der totale Krieg (1935), Ludendorff counted Luther, Mozart, Schiller, and Lessing among those murdered by the Freemasons, who were as much the target of her ideological fury as the Jews and the Jesuits.53 Although the Nazis tried to distance themselves somewhat from Ludendorff’s most extreme views, they shared many of her presuppositions, as when they used the racist concept of Germanic superiority to turn Lessing into an early fighter for Germanness, a “Vorkämpfer deutschen Wesens.”54

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While Minna von Barnhelm, with its presumed Prussian cult of honor, was the most popular play in the Third Reich, Nathan der Weise, with its humanist ideal of a world family led by the good Jew, was removed from the curriculum in German schools and from the German stage. Favored by those who had escaped from Germany, this play had been central in the cultural assimilation of German Jews from the early nineteenth century to Jewish confessionals on the occasion of Lessing’s 200th birthday in 1929. For a long time, total acculturation had seemed to be the only way to Jewish emancipation. Originally, as George Mosse has pointed out,55 the German Enlightenment and the ideal of Bildung, which was supposed to transcend all national, social, and religious differences, had complemented each other in the Jewish hope for social integration. A formidable cult of Lessing and Goethe developed among German Jews, with some of them even adopting Lessing as a family name or naming their children after him, for instance the Jewish philanthropist Lessing Rosenwald. But these hopes were dashed with the dramatic rise in anti-Semitic sentiments, thanks to Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), Eugen Dühring (1833–1921), and the self-proclaimed founder of racist anti-Semitism, Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904).56 In response, the resolve to affirm cultural difference and to expect full equality rather than mere toleration grew among many Jews, especially those influenced by Zionism. While recognizing the historical significance of Lessing’s plea for tolerance in the past, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), whose book Der Judenstaat (1896) had been the foundational manifesto of the Zionist movement, suggested a new literature for the future by means of which Jews themselves would proudly plead their own case: “Schon sind die Zeiten, die für den Dichter des Nathan die späteren waren, vorüber. Die Judenfrage sucht eine andere dichterische Gestaltung [. . .] wenn es jetzt Juden selbst sind, die nicht mehr im Ghetto, nicht mehr im vertraulichen Flüsterton der Jargondichtung, sondern vor aller Welt das poetische Wort zur Judenfrage ergreifen.”57 Obviously, enthusiasm for Nathan, who was more humanist than Jewish, was no longer unanimous. The argument that Nathan was not typically Jewish was meant to recommend him to the Nazis, who, however, preferred to replace him with Shakespeare’s much more stereotypical Shylock, but it also made him suspect to Zionists who were looking for Jewish characters to identify with. While on the Nazi side Nathan was credited as the prototype of tolerance, in an odd logical twist, “nicht weil der Jude in Wirklichkeit so tolerant ist, sondern weil gerade in der Religion dieses Volkes Toleranz fast ein Verbrechen scheint,”58 the fact that he was being “entjudet”59 did not play too well on the Jewish side. After the assimilationists, for example Heinrich Meyer-Benfey (1869–1945) in “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing als Verkünder der Toleranz” (1929),60 had tried to uphold tolerance against all odds as the humanist principle uniting Germans and Jews, disillusionment set in: in July 1933 the Jüdische Rundschau argued against the performance of


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Nathan der Weise if it would attempt to wrap German Jews again in a world of illusion.61 This was comparable to how Jews had responded to the antiSemitic subtext of the Dreyfus affair of 1894, which had set off the Zionist movement. Rather than an advocate of acquiescence, Lessing was soon to become the patron saint of all exiles, Jewish or not, who were intent on fighting fascism under the motto “Lessing’s Antwort an Goebbels,” which was the title of one such plea: “Lessings ganzes Werk atmet den Geist des Fortschritts, den Geist des Kampfes gegen Tyrannei und Reaktion. Wir deutschen antifaschistischen Freiheitskämpfer sind die wahren Erben Gotthold Ephraim Lessings. Seine Werke sind [uns] Waffen im Kampfe der Volksfront für die Verteidigung der deutschen Kultur gegen Hitlers und Rosenbergs Dunkelmännertum.”62 It was, indeed, refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria who revived American interest in Lessing and who returned his works to the college curriculum. Even the world’s first Lessing Society was founded in the United States, by Gottfried F. Merkel (born in Dresden in 1905) and Guy Stern (born in Hildesheim in 1922) at the University of Cincinnati in 1969. Traditionally, ever since a forty-five-page review of Lessing’s critical writings, with emphasis on Laokoon, appeared in The New York Review in 1840,63 it had been Lessing the critic rather than the playwright who had garnered attention among American intellectuals. Popular interest in Lessing’s works began in 1866, when an American translation of Adolf Stahr’s republican-inspired monograph of 1859 appeared; it was thoroughly reviewed by James Russell Lowell, Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University.64 Ellen Frothingham’s translations of Nathan der Weise in 1868 and of Laokoon in 1874, the only translations available for many decades, set the stage for the two-pronged reception of Lessing in America: as the classical humanist on the one hand and as the aesthetic theorist on the other.65 While the first prepared the way to the high esteem in which Lessing’s philosophical drama was held especially among Jewish exiles more than two generations later, the second, Lessing’s reflections on the limits of verbal and visual representation, was evidence for the reviewer of 1874 “that to Lessing more than to any other man modern criticism in matters of art owes its foundations.”66 To the so-called successor generation, that is, American-trained scholars whose teachers were Jewish exiles from German-speaking countries, the postmodern concern with issues of representation, perspectivism, and semiotic discourse resonates with Lessing’s ideas.67 As Lessing has long disappeared from the American stage, the conventional wisdom in American criticism that his dramas are not on a par with his critical acumen68 has actually helped him secure a firm place in the theoretical canon of German Studies. “By grasping language as an arbitrary sign system,” writes Robert Leventhal in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994), “and by radically distinguishing the task of the critic from that of the philologist or philosopher, Lessing

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created the discipline of modern literary criticism in Germany and initiated the commonplace modern doctrine of aesthetic autonomy.”69 But it is in the twists and turns of more than two-hundred years of Lessing reception that such claims to aesthetic autonomy have been challenged by shifting cultural contexts in which Lessing has appeared in ever changing light, thus reaffirming that even the aesthetic principles of modern criticism are subject to historical conditioning.

Notes 1

Ernst Suter, “Lessing politisch gesehen,” Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 1938, 415.

2

Aufklärung: Erläuterungen zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Kollektiv für Literaturgeschichte im volkseigenen Verlag (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1977), 479.

3

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), in Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe. Ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 6 (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 5 1963), 7–124, here 124. 4

Erich Trunz in his commentary to Werther, 586.

5

Georg Lukács, “Die Leiden des jungen Werther” (1936), in G. L., Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern: Francke, 1947), 17–30, here 28.

6

Cf. Leonard Forster, “Werther’s Reading of Emilia Galotti,” Publications of the English Goethe Society N.S. 27 (1958): 33–45. 7

Friedrich Schlegel, “Über Lessing” (1797/1801), in Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Carl Hanser, 21964), 346–83, here 349.

8 Hans Robert Jauss, “Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft,” in Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 144–207 (in English: “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982]), 3–45. 9

Cf. Hinrich C. Seeba, “Wirkungsgeschichte der Wirkungsgeschichte. Zu den romantischen Quellen (F. Schlegel) einer neuen Disziplin,” Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 3 (1971): 145–67. 10

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY P, 1988), 29. Characteristically, Schlegel’s essay “Vom Wesen der Kritik,” which appeared as part of his dedication to Lessing, is discussed (102 ff.) without any reference to Lessing. While the other important book on the Romantic legacy, Azade Seyhan’s Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), does not mention Lessing even once, the book by Andrew Bowie (From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory, London: Routledge, 1997), which tries to draw a direct line from Romantic theory to the revival of Enlightenment thought


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in Critical Theory, refers to Lessing only with regard to the infamous Pantheism controversy started by Jacobi against Mendelssohn and Lessing. 11

Lessings Geist aus seinen Schriften, oder dessen Gedanken und Meinungen zusammengestellt und erläutert von Friedrich Schlegel (Leipzig, 1804), Schlegel’s introductions and essays explaining the various groupings of Lessing excerpts are reprinted in Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Carl Hanser, 21964), 393–451. The quotation here, on page 424, is taken from the essay “Vom kombinatorischen Geist” (421–28). 12

Schlegel, “Vom kombinatorischen Geist,” Kritische Schriften, 427.

13

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 9 (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 51964), 7–598 (Book 1–13); vol. 10 (31963), 7–187 (Book 14–20); here vol. 9, 281. 14

Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 886.

15

Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule (1836), in H. H., Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 357–504, here 374. Subsequent citations are in the text.

16 Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (1835, 21852), in H. H., Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 505–641, here 585. Subsequent citations are in the text. 17

Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. Erstes Stück: David Strauss. Der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, in: Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 1 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 51966), 137–207, here 157. Subsequent citations are in the text. 18

Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, op. cit., vol. 1, 435–1008, Zweiter Band, 920 (no. 103). 19

Ibid.

20

Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 2 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 5 1966), 563–759, here 594 (no. 28). 21

Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 928 (no. 125).

22

Ibid.

23

Alfred Kerr, Berliner Tageblatt, 6 April 1925, quoted from Günther Rühle, Theater für die Republik 1917–1933 im Spiegel der Kritik, 2 vols. (Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1988), vol. 1, 629. 24

Theodor Fontane, “Lessing — Minna von Barnhelm,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter Keitel, series III, vol. 2: Theaterkritiken, ed. Siegmar Gerndt (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1969), 10–12, here 11. [First published in Vossische Zeitung 207, August 30, 1870.]

25

Ernst Heinrichs, Ein Meisterstück Lessings oder Fragen und Anmerkungen zu “Minna von Barnhelm” (Hannover, 1870), 26, quoted from Wilfried Barner et al., Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 41981), 267.

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26

Cf. Ann Marie Koller, The Theater Duke: Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen and the German Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1984), 99.

27 Theodor Fontane, Frau Jenny Treibel, in Th. F., Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger. Series I, vol. 4 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 297–478, here 305 (chapter 1). 28

Fontane, Frau Jenny Treibel, 413.

29

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert, vol. 8 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1973), 229–707, here 698 (101.104. Stück): “Über den gutherzigen Einfall, den Deutschen ein Nationaltheater zu verschaffen, da wir Deutsche noch keine Nation sind! Ich rede nicht von der politischen Verfassung, sondern bloß von dem sittlichen Charakter. Fast sollte man sagen, dieser sei: keinen eigenen haben zu wollen.” 30

Friedrich Schiller, “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?,” in dtv Gesamtausgabe, vol. 20 (Munich: dtv, 1966), 13–26, here 24: “Wenn wir es erlebten, eine Nationalbühne zu haben, so würden wir auch eine Nation.”

31

Karl Tropus, “Nach dem 10. November 1859,” in Schiller-Denkmal, ed. Karl Tropus, vol. 1 (Berlin: Riegel’s Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1860), 3–15, here 11.

32 Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann, Lessings Denkmal: Eine vaterländische Geschichte. Dem deutschen Publikum zur Urkunde vorgelegt, Erster Theil (Hannover, 1791), Zweyter Theil (Hannover 1793), reprint (Hildesheim: Olms, 1996). The resulting statue was created by one of Winckelmann’s students, F. W. E. Döll, and dedicated in 1796; today it is in the lobby of Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. 33

Theodor Fontane, “Schiller — Wilhelm Tell,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter Keitel, series III, vol. 2: Theaterkritiken, ed. Siegmar Gerndt (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1969), 5–6, here 5. [First published in Vossische Zeitung 196, August 19, 1870.]

34

Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher: Von einem Deutschen (Leipzig: Verlag von C. L. Hirschfeld, 421893), 177. 35

Ferdinand Lassalle, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing” (1861), in Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende: Mit einer Einleitung von Rainer Gruenter (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna: Ullstein, 1972), 541–61, here 545 and 546. 36

Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 177. This is an odd reversal of an anonymous statement quoted in Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende: Mit einer Einleitung von Rainer Gruenter (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna: Ullstein, 1972), 59: “Auf Lessing zurückgehen heißt fortschreiten.” 37

Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 348.

38

Theodor W. Danzel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Sein Leben und seine Werke. Nebst einigen Nachträgen zur Lachmann’schen Ausgabe, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1850). Vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1854, in two parts) was written, after Danzel’s premature death, mainly by Gottschalk Eduard Guhrauer (1809–1854).

39

Wilhelm Scherer, Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1883), 438. Scherer deals with Lessing in his eleventh chapter (“Das Zeitalter Friedrichs des Großen”), 394–525. Subsequent citations are in the text. According to Wolfgang Höppner, Das “Ererbte, Erlebte und Erlernte” im Werk


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Wilhelm Scherers: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Germanistik (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1993), 65, Scherer’s tribute to the Prussian court in this chapter is a blatant “Geschichtsverfälschung” and an unmistakable violation of scientific investigation. 40

Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende: Eine Rettung (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1893); Die Lessing-Legende: Zur Geschichte und Kritik des preußischen Despotismus und der klassischen Literatur. Zweite, unveränderte Auflage. Mit einem neuen Vorwort (Stuttgart: Verlag von J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., 1906). 41

For example in Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels und die Dichter: Ein Kapitel deutscher Literaturgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Ullstein, 1969), 184 (quoted from the original edition [Stuttgart, 1893], 32). 42

Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende: Mit einer Einleitung von Rainer Gruenter (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna: Ullstein, 1972), 51. Subsequent citations are in the text. 43

August Sauer, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung 42, October 21, 1891, 1323–24, quoted from Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende: Mit einer Einleitung von Rainer Gruenter, 521–22, here 522.

44

Friedrich Engels, letter to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893, in Franz Mehring: Die Lessing-Legende: Mit einer Einleitung von Rainer Gruenter, 516–20, here 516. 45

Paul Rilla, Lessing und sein Zeitalter, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 10 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1958), 114.

46

Cf. Ferdinand Piedmont, “Minna von Barnhelm, west-östlich. Zur Theaterrezeption der Lessingschen Komödie in der BRD und der DDR,” Lessing Yearbook 13 (1981): 133–42, here 135–36.

47 Cf. Richard Critchfield, “The Mixing of Old and New Wisdom: On Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Brecht’s Der kaukasische Kreidekreis,” Lessing Yearbook 14 (1982): 161–75. 48

Heiner Müller, Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (1976), in Herzstück (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1983), 34–35, cited in Sabine Wilke, “ ‘An Kotsäulen [ruht] der Tempel der Vernunft’: Heiner Müllers Lessing,” Lessing Yearbook 22 (1990): 143–57, 145. After the curtain closed on Claus Peymann’s staging of Nathan der Weise in Brecht’s old theater, the Berliner Ensemble, in January 2002, this Heiner Müller passage was spoken by the actress portraying Daja (Carmen-Maja Antoni) — in the mask of Lessing and in deference to his unnamed followers, Brecht and Heiner Müller. 49

Ibid.

50

Adolf Bartels, Lessing und die Juden (Dresden: C. A. Kochs Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1918), 343.

51

Werner Zimmermann, “Die Gestalt des Juden in der deutschen Aufklärungszeit. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Emanzipation des Judentums,” in Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 54 (1940): 245–53, here 250, quoted from Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt, “Das Lessingbild im Dritten Reich,” Lessing Yearbook 23 (1991): 69–78, here 71.

52

Mathilde Ludendorff, Lessings Geisteskampf und Lebensschicksal (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag GmbH, 1937), 18.

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53 Mathilde Ludendorff, Der ungesühnte Frevel an Luther, Lessing und Schiller im Dienste des allmächtigen Baumeisters aller Welten (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag GmbH, 1928). 54

Wilhelm Poethen, arguing in 1936 for a Nazi-style reading list for the schools, quoted from Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt, “Das Lessingbild im Dritten Reich,” Lessing Yearbook 23 (1991): 69–78, here 74.

55 George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985). 56

Cf. Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, ed. Walter Boehlich (Frankfurt am Main: insel taschenbuch, 1988), Eugen Dühring, Die Überschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden (Karlsruhe: H. Reuther, 1881), Wilhelm Marr, Lessing contra Sem (Berlin, 1885).

57 Theodor Herzl, Zionismus, in Gesammelte zionistische Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1934), 334–35 (quoted from Barbara Fischer, “Lösungsansatz ‘Raum’ versus ‘Zeit’: Jüdische Reaktionen auf Lessings Nathan der Weise im Vor-Shoah-Deutschland,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 324–39, here 326–27). 58

Elisabeth Frenzel, Judengestalten auf der deutschen Bühne: Ein notwendiger Querschnitt durch 700 Jahre Rollengeschichte (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1940), 59, quoted from Wilfried Barner et al., Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 41981), 400.

59

Wilfried Barner et al., Lessing: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), 400.

4

60

Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing als Verkünder der Toleranz,” in Die C[entral] V[ereins]-Zeitung. Blätter für Deutschtum und Judentum. Organ des Central-Vereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens e.V. (Berlin, 18 January 1929), 1. 61

“Warum Nathan der Weise?,” Jüdische Rundschau (25 July 1933), quoted from Barbara Fischer, “Lösungsansatz ‘Raum’ versus ‘Zeit’: Jüdische Reaktionen auf Lessings Nathan der Weise im Vor-Shoah-Deutschland,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 324–39, 332.

62

“Lessings Antwort an Göbbels,” in Rote Fahne (1936), no. 5, 5, quoted from Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt, “Das Lessingbild im Dritten Reich,” Lessing Yearbook 23 (1991): 69–78, here 75.

63

The New York Review 6 (1840), 323–68. Cf. Herbert Rowland, “Lessing in American Magazines of the Nineteenth Century,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 269–81.

64 Adolf Stahr, The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, trans. E. P. Evans (Boston: V. Spencer 1866), reviewed in The North American Review 104 (1867): 541–85. 65

Nathan the Wise: A Dramatic Poem, trans. Ellen M. Frothingham (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1868); Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. Ellen M. Frothingham (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1874).

66

The North American Review, vol. 119, no. 244 (July 1874): 230–33, here 230.


349

67

Cf. Hinrich C. Seeba, “ ‘Der wahre Standort einer jeden Person’: Lessings Beitrag zum historischen Perspektivismus,” in Nation und Gelehrtenrepublik: Lessing im europäischen Zusammenhang. Special volume of Lessing Yearbook, ed. Wilfried Barner and Albert M. Reh (Detroit: Wayne State UP; Munich: edition text ⫹ kritik, 1984), 193–214; David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1984).

68

Cf. Herbert Rowland, “Lessing in American Magazines of the Nineteenth Century,” Lessing Yearbook 32 (2000): 269–81, here 272: “Closely related to the reviewers’ denial or qualification of Lessing’s poetic genius is their virtually unanimous assertion of his preeminence as a critic.”

69

Robert Leventhal, “G. E. Lessing,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 461–63, here 462.

Contact Organizations

The Lessing Museum and Research Center for Lessing Reception in Kamenz Dieter Fratzke Director, Lessing Museum and Research Center for Lessing Reception, Kamenz

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have, for the most part, only vague ideas about Lessing’s place of birth. Kamenz, where the poet was born and where he spent the first twelve years of his life, is a small town of 19,000 inhabitants in the Oberlausitz (Upper Lusatia) region of Saxony. It was founded in 1225, approximately forty kilometers northeast of what is today the city of Dresden. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Kamenz had about 2,000 inhabitants. On 22 January 1729, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born to Justina Salome Lessing, the wife of Johann Gottfried Lessing, Kamenz’s Lutheran minister. He was the third child of twelve, and the oldest surviving son. Training and education started fairly early for the adolescent, both in his parents’ house and through private tutoring. Later, he attended the Städtische Lateinschule from 1738 to 1741. City life in Kamenz in the first half of the eighteenth century was marked by modest wealth and characterized by the emerging bourgeois cultural tradition that was typical for the Oberlausitz towns at that time. A devastating fire in 1842 destroyed the city almost completely. Nevertheless, Kamenz is still laid out according to its original plan, and some buildings have been preserved as historical landmarks. Unfortunately, the fire also destroyed the house in which the poet was born. At the site next to the St. Marien church where Lessing’s father served as minister, a monument commemorates the city’s most important son. Kamenz is also home to a modern literary museum, financed by the city and sponsored by the state government of Saxony, as well as the federal government of Germany. It serves all those who are interested in Lessing and the Enlightenment. Until the early twentieth century, Kamenz honored Lessing’s life, works, and literary heritage mainly through commemorative events, lectures, and theater productions. The desire of many of the city’s people for a museum honoring Lessing became a reality in 1929, on the poet’s 200th birthday. It was then that the foundation stone for a Lessinghaus was laid. In 1931, on the 150th anniversary of the poet’s death, the building was dedicated. VEN FRIENDS OF LITERATURE

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The museum’s permanent exhibition endeavors to portray Lessing as a writer and thinker of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, was an extraordinary theorist and practitioner of the art of drama in the eighteenth century. The museum’s exhibits on Lessing’s life and the reception of his works help visitors to understand the poet’s impact on later generations. In the museum’s bookstore, works about Lessing and the museum's own publications are available. These publications have appeared since 1981 and serve to give a deeper understanding of the museum’s exhibits as well as information about Lessing reception in Kamenz. The so-called Lessing Tage, featuring approximately twenty cultural, artistic, and scholarly offerings, have taken place every January and February since their founding in 1962. Every two years a Lessing Prize, donated by the State of Saxony, is awarded at the commencement of the festivities. It honors outstanding achievement in the areas of literature, literary criticism, and/or theater. The museum collects scholarly and popular publications as well as translations and documents of theatre productions. Furthermore, there are materials relating to the works of the Wolfenbütteler Lessing-Akademie and the Lessing Society in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Lessing Prizes of the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg (since 1929), the German Democratic Republic (1955 to 1989), the State of Saxony (since 1993), and the Lessing Prize of the Lessing-Akademie, Wölfenbüttel (since 2000). Facilities in the basement include a classroom, the museum’s archives, and a computer work station. Scholars can access databases with the museum’s inventory, and work in the archives with the assistance of a specialist. The library of the Lessing Museum in Kamenz houses approximately 5,500 books, including first and early editions of Lessing’s works. The collection’s main strength is the theater collection, with documents of Lessing productions in East Germany and, since 1990, in all Germanspeaking and foreign countries. Furthermore, the museum possesses substantial materials on Lessing, his family and his significance; they include handwritten documents, paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, coins, medallions, Free Masons’ insignias, and newspaper articles. The collection also houses literary estates, among them that of the renowned Lessing scholar Erich Schmidt (1853–1913). Secondary literature is oriented towards the museum’s research areas “Lessing auf dem Theater,” “Lessing im Bildungswesen,” and “Lessing und Kamenz.” These extensive inventories are all listed and annotated in an index. To fulfill its dual functions in facilitating teaching and research, the museum strives to mediate creative activities as well as active collecting. Focusing on Lessing’s national and international influence in the past and present, the Research Center for Lessing Reception organizes exhibitions on such topics as Lessing the Freemason, Lessing’s international impact, the influence of Lessing’s ideas on the visual arts, the reception of

THE LESSING MUSEUM IN KAMENZ

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Nathan der Weise, and Lessing on Stage. The Lessing Museum cooperates closely with other institutions dealing with Lessing: the International Lessing Society in Cincinnati, the Wolfenbütteler Lessing-Akademie, and the Lessing-Gesellschaft Hamburg. The institution in Kamenz not only actively exchanges information with all of them, but also cultivates multilateral and diverse cooperative relations. —Translated by Tracy Graves and Martin Bäumel Lessing-Museum Kamenz Lessingplatz 1-3 01917 Kamenz Germany Tel.: 49/3578/3805-0 Fax: 49/3578/3805-25 email: [email protected] Web site: www.lessingmuseum.de

The Lessing Academy in Wolfenbüttel Helmut Berthold Executive Director, Lessing Academy, Wolfenbüttel

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HERE ARE TWO GERMAN cities that take particular pride in their affiliation with Lessing: Kamenz, where the poet was born, and Wolfenbüttel, where he spent his final years. At that time, Wolfenbüttel was a small and uninteresting town, particularly after the ducal court had been moved to Braunschweig. However, in Wolfenbüttel Lessing not only wrote Emilia Galotti, Nathan der Weise and Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, but he also worked there as the ducal librarian for over ten years. This aspect of his career is rarely dealt with, let alone appreciated. It was probably due to the genius loci of the Wolfenbüttel library that in 1971 an institution was founded which devotes itself to Lessing and the Enlightenment: the Lessing-Akademie. Among the founding members were Dr. Max Plaut (the Academy’s first president), Professor Paul Raabe (then director of the Herzog August Bibliothek), the theologian Professor Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, Dr. Günter Schulz (for a long time secretarygeneral of the Academy) and Ernst August Schütze, the mayor of Wolfenbüttel at that time. One may ask if this institution should be called an “academy”; Lessing himself did not get on too well with academies, and some people might feel intimidated by the high standard the term implies. In fact, every person who is interested in the work of the Lessing Academy and in the Enlightenment may join. The Academy is a non-profit organization, with statutes, a president, a treasurer, and an executive committee. The Academy devotes itself to the work and the influence of Lessing. But it also deals with questions vital to ideals of the Enlightenment: liberty and impartial justice, humanity and tolerance, and communication among peoples. The social and cultural history of the German Jews is an important concern of the Academy. The Academy is supported by the state of Lower Saxony, the city of Wolfenbüttel, and regional government. A small, but nonetheless important part of its budget comes from its members. (Dues are 30 Euros per year, 15 Euros for the unemployed and students). The budget of the Lessing Academy is small; it is just about sufficient to maintain the office (two part-time employees and — as often as possible — a temporary assistant).

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The budget covers the costs of lectures, poetry readings and readings from eighteenth-century texts in general (in order to avoid too heavy a concentration on Lessing alone). The Academy founded the Lessing-Preis für Kritik in 2000. In addition, it publishes two series, the Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung and the Kleine Schriften zur Aufklärung. It also publishes books and brochures. The Academy supports research on Lessing by organizing conferences, by maintaining a bibliographic database of Lessing’s works (including his correspondence), and a concordance of the most important Lessing editions. Some of this material is available online at the Academy’s website. The Lessing Academy cooperates most closely with the Herzog August Bibliothek, but also with the Lessing Museum in Kamenz, the Gleimhaus in Halberstadt, the Lessing Society in Cincinnati, and with the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts in Wolfenbüttel. Although it may seem old-fashioned, membership in the Lessing Academy is a matter of idealism; a member’s interest is more important than his or her annual dues. Nevertheless, members receive an annual gift (normally a volume of the Kleine Schriften), and they can purchase Academy publications at a reduced price. Members can use the Academy’s reference library, and they have free admission to the Lessinghaus in Wolfenbüttel. Needless to say, members and non-members alike are entitled to receive assistance from the office in all questions concerning the Enlightenment and Lessing. Lessing-Akademie e. V. c/o Herzog August Bibliothek Schloßplatz 2 38304 Wolfenbüttel Tel. 49 / 5331 / 808–227 or -221 Fax: -248 Email: [email protected] Web site: www.lessing-akademie.de

A Brief History of the Lessing Society Herbert Rowland President of the Lessing Society, 2002–2004

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HE LESSING SOCIETY originated at the University of Cincinnati in 1966 as the American Lessing Society. Its founders wished first and foremost to acknowledge Lessing’s major contributions to German culture and Western thought in fields as varied as literature and literary criticism, aesthetics, anthropology and theology, music and sculpture. They were also aware, however, that Lessing’s achievement did not receive the attention it deserved in his native Germany and that his critical cosmopolitanism, with its ideals of religious and personal tolerance and humanitarianism, found greater resonance in the United States. They thus created the Society with the express goals of stimulating a reappraisal of the pertinence of Lessing’s thought in modern times, fostering scholarly lectures and symposia about Lessing and his age, developing extensive research facilities for the study of eighteenth-century German literature and culture, and, in general, reemphasizing Lessing’s cosmopolitan humanism and continuing importance throughout the civilized world. In keeping with these purposes, the Lessing Society sponsors annual seminars at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and certain regional organizations. It has also (co-)organized and/or (co-)sponsored some half dozen international symposia which have produced extensive volumes of conference proceedings. In 1969, the Society published the first volume of the Lessing Yearbook. With the thirty-third volume soon to appear as of this writing, the Lessing Yearbook has long since become a respected organ of eighteenth-century studies in disciplines as diverse as Lessing’s own interests and is recognized internationally as a vital compendium of current research both in its articles and its extensive review section. Through its varied endeavors, the Lessing Society has assumed a respected place in the scholarly community of Germanists. Having celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2001, it is currently the largest and most active of all American-based organizations honoring a specific German author. Virtually from its establishment, however, colleagues in both Germanys and other countries lent their support to its work. In 1973, the Society therefore dropped “American” from its title, in recognition of its

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international inspiration, membership, and activity. This internationalism has only increased over the years. While most members still come from North America and Germany, a total of fifteen countries, including Japan and South Korea, are represented in the membership, and colleagues from a variety of countries contribute articles and reviews to the Lessing Yearbook. In the summer of 2001, representatives of the Lessing Society met in Lessing’s hometown, Kamenz, to take up significant issues with colleagues from the Lessing-Museum in Kamenz, the Lessing-Gesellschaft in Hamburg, where Lessing spent a brief but key period of his life, and the Lessing-Akademie in Wolfenbüttel, the site of the Herzog August Bibliothek, where Lessing served as librarian and wrote several important works during the last eleven years of his life. They discussed ways in which institutions of learning and research could enhance teaching and scholarship on Lessing and how to improve inter-institutional cooperation. In 2002, the Society concluded an agreement with the LessingAkademie, whereby the German organization assumes partial editorial and financial responsibility for the Lessing Yearbook — a further sign of the continuing internationalization of the Society. The Society co-sponsored a meeting in Kamenz and Weimar to celebrate Lessing’s 275th birthday in 2004. In this and other ways, it continues its endeavor to maintain and better realize the goals of its founders.


Copy of Lessing’s death mask after the original by Christian Friedrich Krull. Photo Credit: Steinborn. Courtesy of Lessing Museum, Kamenz.

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Wellbery, David E. “The Pathos of Theory in Laokoon Revisited.” In Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein, 47–63. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993. ———. “Das Gesetz der Schönheit: Lessings Ästhetik der Repräsentation.” In Was Heißt “Darstellen”?, ed. C. L. Hart Nibbrig, 175–204. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism. Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. Werner, Hans-Georg. “Der Sache nach ernst — der Perspektive nach heiter. Zu den Hauptfiguren in Minna von Barnhelm.” Theater der Zeit 34:4 (1979): 21–22. ———. “Ideale Formen der marxistischen Lessing-Aneignung in der DDR.” In Bausteine zu einer Wirkungsgeschichte: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ed. Hans-Georg Werner, 401–510. Berlin: Aufbau, 1984. Wessell, Leonard P. G. E. Lessing’s Theology: A Reinterpretation. A Study in the Problematic Nature of the Enlightenment. The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co, 1977. ———. “Das widersprüchliche Wesen der Lessingschen Auffassung der Theologie.” In Lessing in heutiger Sicht, ed. Edward P. Harris and Richard E. Schade, 187–95. 1977. Wieck, Thomas. “Entwicklung oder Neubeginn? Die Herausforderung der sozialistisch-realistischen Schauspielkunst durch das humanistische Erbe.” Theater der Zeit 25:12 (1970): 12–16. ———. “ ‘Gehemmter Eindruck der Natur’: über Minna-von-BarnhelmInszenierungen in Frankfurt/Oder, Greifswald und Senftenberg.” Theater der Zeit 34:2 (1979): 28–30. Wiedemann, Conrad. “Ein schönes Ungeheuer. Zur Deutung von Lessings Einakter Philotas.” Germanisch-Romanische-Monatsschrift 17 (1967): 381–97. Wierlacher, Alois. “Das Haus der Freude oder Warum stirbt Emilia Galotti?” Lessing Yearbook 5 (1973): 147–62. Wilke, Sabine. “An Kotsäulen [ruht] der Tempel der Vernunft: Heiner Müllers Lessing.” Lessing Yearbook 22 (1990): 143–57. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. 2nd enlarged ed. (1756). Reprinted in Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. Complete German text ed. and trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987. Witte, Karsten. “How Nazi Cinema Mobilizes the Classics: Schweikart’s Das Fräulein von Barnhelm (1940).” In German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler. New York and London: Methuen, 1986. 103–16. Wolf, Norbert Christian. “ ‘Fruchtbarer Augenblick’ — ‘prägnanter Moment’: Zur medienspezifischen Funktion einer ästhetischen Kategorie in Aufk-

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Contributors

BEATE ALLERT is chair of German and associate professor of German and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. Among her publications are Die Metapher und ihre Krise: Zur Bilderschrift Jean Pauls (1987) and Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature (editor, 1996). She has published on Novalis, Goethe, Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Runge, Friedrich, Klee, and especially on visual theory, text-image debates, multi-sensory perception, painting, and film. She is currently working on a book titled G. E. Lessing and the Art of Understatement in a Visual Culture. KLAUS L. BERGHAHN is Weinstein-Bascom Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught since 1967. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the German Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism, literary theory and criticism since the eighteenth century, and German-Jewish relations. His latest publications include: Kulturelle Repräsentationen des Holocaust in Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten (2002, co-edited), Schiller’s Über naive and sentimentalische Dichtung (2002, edited), Goethe in German-Jewish Culture. (2001, co-edited), Grenzen der Toleranz: Juden und Christen in der deutschen Aufklärung (2000), and Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (2000, edited). HELMUT BERTHOLD is the executive director of the Lessing-Akademie in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. He is the author of Die Lilien und den Wein: Gottfried Benns Frankreich (1999) and Vom Herrn Leßing (1999). He has published articles on Lessing, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, and Knut Hamsun. BARBARA FISCHER is associate professor of German at the University of Alabama, where she joined the faculty in 1998. Her research interests include eighteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, GermanJewish studies, Holocaust studies, and literature in German by authors of non-German origin. She has published articles on the German Enlightenment, Lessing, Mendelssohn, art in Nazi Germany, the contemporary playwright George Tabori, and on migrant literature. She is the author of Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von “Nathan der Weise” (2000).

394

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

THOMAS C. FOX is professor of German at the University of Alabama. He has written or edited books on medieval, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century German literature and culture. His most recent book is Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust (1999). He is currently a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. DIETER FRATZKE has been director of the Lessing-Museum in Kamenz, Lessing’s birthplace, since 1975. Since 1995 he has been responsible for the federally funded project “Lessing in Kamenz,” which includes work in the area of Lessing reception as well as the annual Lessing-based cultural program. He has written and edited numerous articles and books on Lessing, including volumes published by the Lessing-Museum. WILLI GOETSCHEL is professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994) and Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, Heine (2004). He is the editor of the collected works of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt (1993–), Perspektiven der Dialogik (1994), and of The Germanic Review. He is currently working on a book on Heinrich Heine and Critical Theory. PETER HÖYNG is an associate professor of German at Emory University. In his research he focuses on three areas: twentieth-century German literature, German-Jewish cultural history, and eighteenth-century literature with a focus on drama and theater. He has published Embodied Projections on History: George Tabori’s Theater Work (1999, edited) and Die Sterne, die Zensur und das Vaterland: Geschichte und Theater im späten 18. Jahrhundert (2003). HANS-JOACHIM KERTSCHER works as Hochschuldozent at the MartinLuther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung at that university. He is the author of Der Verleger Johann Justinus Gebauer (1998). Further publications include Die Verleger Carl Hermann Hemmerde und Carl August Schwetschke (2004, edited), Georg Friedrich Meier: Frühe Schriften zur ästhetischen Erziehung der Deutschen in 3 Teilen (1999–2002, edited with Günter Schenk), Wanderzwang–Wanderlust: Formen der Raum- und Sozialerfahrung zwischen Aufklärung und Frühindustrialisierung (1999, edited with Wolfgang Albrecht), Dichtungstheorien der deutschen Frühaufklärung (1995, edited with Theodor Verweyen), G. A. Bürger und J. W. L. Gleim (1996, edited), and Anakreontik: Zweiter Hallescher Dichterkreis (1993, edited). STEVEN D. MARTINSON is professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and a member of the Associated Faculty in Religious Studies. His


395

study Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller (1996) won a Choice Award as an outstanding academic book. He has published widely in the area of modern German literature and culture, with a primary interest in the eighteenth century. Martinson is Vice President/President-Elect of the Lessing Society and a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. REINHART MEYER is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the University of Bremen and director of the research project “Bibliographia Dramatica.” He also holds a post as director in residence of the student theater at the University of Regensburg, the oldest student theater in Europe. He has published widely on German drama, drama theory, opera and musical theatre, including “Hamburgische Dramaturgie” und “Emilia Galotti.” Studien zu einer Methodik des wissenschaftlichen Zitierens, entwickelt am Problem des Verhältnisses von Dramentheorie und Trauerspielpraxis bei Lessing (1973) and Das deutsche Trauerspiel im 18. Jahrhundert: Eine Bibliographie (1977). He edited seven volumes of Das deutsche Drama des 18. Jahrhunderts in Einzeldrucken (1981) and eleven volumes of Bibliographia Dramatica et Dramaticorum: Kommentierte Bibliographie der im ehemaligen deutschen Reichsgebiet gedruckten und gespielten Dramen des 18. Jahrhunderts nebst deren Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen und ihrer Rezeption bis in die Gegenwart (1986–1998). He has also edited seventeen additional volumes on German drama. BARRY NISBET has been professor of Modern Languages (German) at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College since 1982. His specialty is the literature and thought of eighteenth-century Germany and its relation to the European Enlightenment. He has written books on the philosophy of nature of Herder and Goethe, edited seven other works (including, with Claude Rawson, the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism in nine volumes), translated several volumes of works by Kant and Hegel, and published numerous articles in related areas. His latest publication is Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings (2005, edited). JOHN PIZER is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University. He is the author of numerous articles on Austrian, German, and Swiss literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. His most recent books are Toward a Theory of Radical Origin: Essays on Modern German Thought (1995) and Ego/Alter-Ego: Double and/as Other in the Age of German Poetic Realism (1998). His current book project examines the history of “Weltliteratur” as a discursive paradigm in Germany and “World Literature” as a unique pedagogical domain in the United States. It will be published in Spring 2006 by LSU Press under the title The Eden of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice.

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HERBERT ROWLAND is professor of German at Purdue University. He has written primarily on German literature during the Kunstperiode, focusing on C. M. Wieland, Matthias Claudius, and, more recently, Goethe and Lessing. His latest book is Matthias Claudius: Language as “Infamous Funnel” and Its Imperatives (1997). Most recently, he has completed a book on the reception of Hans Christian Andersen in the US during the nineteenth century and is currently working on a similar study involving Lessing. ARNO SCHILSON was professor for European History of Religions at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz from 1981 until his death in 2005. He published widely on Lessing, his theological reception, and the theology of the eighteenth century, the “Enlightenment.” He was editor or co-editor of volumes 8 through 10 of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden (1989, 1993, 2001). Additional books include Geschichte im Horizont der Vorsehung: G. E. Lessings Beitrag zu einer Theologie der Geschichte (1974); Theologie als Sakramententheologie: Die Mysterientheologie Odo Casels (1982; 2nd ed. 1987); Perspektiven theologischer Erneuerung: Studien zum Werk Romano Guardinis (1986); and Medienreligion: Zur religiösen Signatur der Gegenwart (1997). ANN SCHMIESING is an associate professor of German and Scandinavian literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has published several articles on Lessing and the German Enlightenment, as well as articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Norwegian literature. Her book Harlequins, Hulders, and Hermaphrodites: Norwegian Nationalism and the Christiania Theater, 1827–1867 will be published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2005. HINRICH C. SEEBA is professor of German at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Kritik des ästhetischen Menschen (1970), Die Liebe zur Sache (1973), and numerous articles on German literary and intellectual history from the eighteenth century to the present, with a more recent emphasis on cultural poetics of historiography, concepts and history of German Studies, academic emigration, the role of language and literature in national identity formation, and discourses of the city (particularly Berlin). He served as co-editor of the Festschrift Heinz Politzer (1975), Festschrift Richard Brinkmann (1981), and of a Heinrich von Kleist edition (1987 and 1991). KARIN A. WURST is professor of German at Michigan State University. Her research interests include eighteenth-century literature and culture, visual culture, and literary and cultural theory. She is the author of Unpopular Virtues: J. M. R. Lenz and the Critics. A Reception History (1999, with Alan


397

Leidner), Frau und Drama im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1991), and “Familiale Liebe ist die wahre Gewalt”: Zur Repräsentation der Familie in Lessings dramatischem Werk (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988). She has published widely on Lessing, Lenz, women authors of the eighteenth century, fashion, and changing love paradigms in literary texts. Her book Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Consumption in Germany (1780– 1830) will appear in 2005.

Index Abend, Barbara, 311 absolutism, 17, 48, 52, 79, 80, 244, 245, 246, 267, 294, 295, 309 Ackermann, Ernst Konrad, 22, 217 Adorno, Theodor W., 341 Aesop, xviii, 75, 89–95, 98–100, 103, 108, 109 Alberti, Julius Gustav, 29 Albrecht, Wolfgang, 2, 6, 7, 8, 322, 363, 394 Allert, Beate, 3, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 180, 182, 363, 393 American Revolution, 17, 32 Anacreontic poetry, 18, 22 Aphthonius, 97 Aristophanes, 288 Aristotle, 1, 28, 47, 50, 52, 53, 57, 61, 77, 82, 84, 107, 140, 214, 217, 221, 223, 227, 327, 379 Arnheim, Rudolf, 271 Auerbach, Berthold, 335 Augustine, 146 Auschwitz, 33, 185 Bahr, Ehrhard, 9, 56, 61, 62, 85, 87, 154, 205, 253, 364, 372, 376, 378, 389 Balser, Ewald, 272 Barner, Wilfried, xi, 6, 9, 37, 38, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 102, 122, 124, 153, 179, 183, 204, 205, 206, 253, 262, 277, 278, 280, 298, 324, 345, 348, 349, 364, 383, 384, 387 Bartels, Adolf, 265–67, 269, 279, 341, 347, 364, 365 Batteux, Charles, 92 Bauer, Gerhard, 98, 100, 103, 365 Baumann, Wolfgang, 310 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 67, 74, 106, 107, 114, 123, 126, 365

Baumgarten, Siegmund Jacob, 134, 135 Bayle, Pierre, 51, 61, 137, 144, 151, 194, 206, 375, 381 Beaujour, Michel, 96, 102, 365 Beauvoir, Simone de, 232, 250, 365 Begas, Reinhold, 335 Behn, Friederich Daniel, 170 Bélazs, Béla, 271 Belloy, Dormont de, 58 Bennet, Benjamin, 111, 115, 118, 123, 126, 127, 129, 365 Bennett, Jonathan, 47, 60, 383 Berengar of Tours, 157 Berger, Arnold, 264, 278, 365 Berghahn, Klaus, 3, 85, 393 Berthold, Helmut, 393 Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste (Library of the Liberal Arts), 23–24, 122 Biermann, Wolf, 312 Bismarck, Otto von, 337, 338 Blankenburg, Hauptmann von, 25, 38 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 33 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 67, 68, 74, 86, 90, 113, 365, 372 Böhme, Irene, 310 Bohnen, Klaus, 6, 36, 55, 63, 86, 181, 183, 256, 298, 366, 367 Börne, Ludwig, 87, 338, 375 bourgeois tragedy (bürgerliches Trauerspiel), 1, 22, 23, 54, 80, 215, 238, 249, 254, 328, 368, 373, 379 Boyle, Nicholas, 57 Brandt, Hans-Jürgen, 269, 278, 279, 366 Braun, Julius W., 6, 9, 366 Brawe, Joachim Wilhelm von, 149 Brecht, Bertolt, 1, 5, 215, 283, 287, 301, 322, 340, 347, 367

400

INDEX

Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 71, 74, 90, 96, 99, 113 Brenner, Peter J., 7, 9, 37, 39 Brock-Sulzer, Elisabeth, 289, 293, 298, 366 Brucker, Johann Jacob, 136 Bruckner, Friedrich, 340 Buber, Martin, 196, 206, 366 Büchner, Georg, 262, 277, 285, 288, 371 Buddeus, Johann Franz, 136 Busch, Ernst, 303 Butler, Judith, 231, 232, 250, 251, 366 Cardanus, Hieronymus, xvi, 137, 180, 193–94, 206 Carl I, Duke of BrunswickWolfenbüttel, 30, 295 Caylus, Anne-Claude-Phillippe de, Comte, 113, 126, 366 Christ, Johann Friedrich, 90, 91, 92 Chronegk, Ludwig, 334 Cibber, Colley, 51 classicism, 13, 76, 77, 84, 393 Claudius, Matthias, 16, 29, 265, 396 Commedia dell’arte, 19 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 136 Congreve, William, 51 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 42, 151, 387 Copleston, Frederick, 42, 59, 367 Corneille, Pierre, 3, 52–54, 61, 72, 220 counter-Reformation, 14 Critische Nachrichten aus dem Reiche der Gelehrsamkeit (Critical News from the World of Erudition), 21, 37 Crusius, Christian August, 149 Curtius, Michael Conrad, 140 Daniel, Ute, 216, 227 Danzel, Theodor W., 153, 337, 346, 367 Daunicht, Richard, 6, 9, 85, 152, 153, 154, 367 Daveson, Alexander, 35 Deism, 4, 13, 29, 34, 142, 148, 164, 200

Demetz, Peter, 83, 87, 247, 256, 347, 367 Descartes, René, 3, 15, 43–45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 60, 231, 232, 367, 389 Destouches, Philippe Néricault, 57, 63 Deutsch, Ernst, 282, 290, 291 Deutsche Bibliothek der Schönen Wissenschaften (German Library of the Liberal Arts), 78 Diderot, Denis, xvii, 3, 23, 25, 42, 51, 52–54, 56, 59, 61, 63, 180, 219, 228, 327, 333, 377, 378 Döbbelin, Carl Theophil, 295 Döblin, Alfred, 283, 295 Dovides, Eugen, 311 Dryden, John, xviii, 107, 123 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (Abbé Dubos), 63, 113, 126, 368 Dühring, Eugen, 204, 264, 278, 342, 348, 368 Dvoretzky, Edward, 262, 277, 368 Eberhard, Johann August, 142, 143 Ebert, Johann Arnold, 29 Eckardt, Jo-Jacqueline, 262, 263, 277, 278, 280, 347, 348, 368 Eckart, Dietrich, 265 Eckermann, Peter, 55 Empiricism, 15, 43, 136, 140 Engel, Johann Jakob, 25, 38 Engelmann, Harald, 305 Engels, Friedrich, 338, 339, 347 epic theater, 340 Erasmus, 51 Ernesti, Johann August, 134 Erpenbeck, Fritz, 297, 302, 303, 322, 369 Eschenburg, Johann Joachim, xiii, 31, 39, 102 Euripides, 21, 288 Expressionism, 334 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 285, 298 Faust, 25, 187, 267 Feller (Lessing), Justina Salome, 17 Fellman, Waldemar, 267, 279, 369 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 283

INDEX Feuerbach, Ludwig, 50 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 35, 154, 186, 365 Fick, Monika, 7, 37, 38, 122, 124, 125, 129, 180, 183, 213, 218, 225, 227, 228, 229, 232, 233, 245, 250, 255, 256, 257, 262, 277, 278, 369 Fink, Gonthier-Louis, 56, 57, 63 Fischer, Barbara, 39, 129, 207, 262, 277, 278, 280, 295, 297, 298, 348, 369, 393 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 219, 222, 227, 228, 229, 369 Fontane, Theodor, 5, 334–36, 345, 346, 369 Foucault, Michel, 245, 251, 370 Fox, Thomas C., 5, 394 Fragments Controversy (Fragmentenstreit), 30, 129, 158, 163, 168, 170–72, 182, 365, 377 Francke, Peter, 273 Franco-Prussian War, 334 Fratzke, Dieter, 8, 370, 394 Frederick II /the Great (Friedrich II./der Große), xviii, 15, 21, 28, 30, 135, 190, 205, 263, 264, 267, 272, 273, 289, 295, 306, 307, 308, 318, 319, 325, 331, 337, 340, 347, 381 Freemasonry, 14, 31, 32, 146, 264, 266, 341, 354 French Revolution, 17, 80 Frensel, Helmut, 310 Frisch, Max, 287 Frothingham, Ellen, 343, 348, 377 Fuhrmann, Helmut, 248, 257, 370 Gay, Peter, 41, 58, 59, 370 Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott, xviii, 19, 20, 89, 90, 92, 205, 253, 296, 297 Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, 334, 346, 376 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 333 Gibson, J. C., 262–63, 277, 370 Giehse, Therese, 283 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, xvi, 16, 19, 24, 25, 26, 37, 394 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 288 Goebbels, Joseph, 268, 269, 271, 343

401

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 2, 5, 13, 18, 26, 27, 35, 36, 38, 47, 55, 68, 83, 89, 90, 91, 101, 103, 105, 114, 122, 127, 128, 149, 154, 222, 224, 253, 265, 285, 287, 288, 289, 293, 296, 297, 316, 327, 329–30, 331, 333, 334, 338, 342, 344, 345, 363, 364, 365, 369, 370, 378, 383, 384, 386, 389, 393, 395, 396 Goetschel, Willi, 4, 59, 207, 370, 371, 394 Goeze, Johann Melchior, vii, xv, 29, 32, 78, 81, 118, 144, 158, 159, 165, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 385 Gold, Käthe, 272 Goldschmidt, Abraham Meyer, 264, 278 Goldschmidt, Hermann Levin, 206, 371, 394 Göpfert, Herbert G. xi, 6, 8, 9, 87, 204, 227, 255, 280, 346, 372, 385 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 13, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 92, 136, 211, 217–20, 223, 224, 227, 228, 253, 371, 372 Graetz, Heinrich, 191, 205, 371 Grass, Günter, 24 Greif, Heinrich, 302 Greis, Jutta, 237, 239, 245, 249, 253, 255, 256, 371 Grimm, Gunter E., 6, 9, 102, 124, 204, 255, 262, 277, 364, 371 Grimm, Jacob, 97, 337 Grimm, Wilhelm, 97 Grosse, Herwart, 308, 318 Grossmann, Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm, 336 Grubmüller, Klaus, 100, 103, 371 Gubitz, Friedrich Wilhelm, 334 Günzel, Lutz, 311 Guthke, Karl S., 7, 9, 62, 86, 152, 192, 193, 204, 205, 206, 207, 253, 262, 277, 372 Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 79, 87, 251, 252, 372

402

INDEX

Hacks, Peter, 307, 323, 384 Hagedorn, Friedrich von, 89 Hamann, Johann Georg, 35, 265 Handel, George Frideric (Georg Friedrich Händel), 297 Harlan, Veit, 4 Harris, Edward P., 9, 55, 56, 61, 62, 103, 154, 205, 253, 255, 364, 372, 376, 378, 379, 385, 389, 390 Hart, Gail, 38, 241, 254 Hasselbach, Ernst, 273 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 1 Hausen, Karin, 241, 252, 373 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 1, 23, 296, 328 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 35, 150, 151, 337, 382, 395 Heine, Heinrich, 5, 83, 87, 206, 295, 324, 332–33, 338, 345, 371, 373, 381, 394 Heise, Wolfgang, 310 Hellberg, Werner, 316–19, 324, 367 Hensel, Sophie Friederike, 226 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 27, 35, 68, 76, 110, 114, 122, 140, 149, 150, 262, 265, 277, 315–16, 324, 327, 333, 373, 383, 386, 395 Herzl, Theodor, 342, 348, 373 Hetterle, Albert, 310 Hindenburg, Paul von, 33 Hippler, Fritz, 271–72, 278, 280, 366, 374 Hirschel, Abraham, 191 Hitler, Adolf, 265, 343 Hoelzke, Hubert, 313 Hoffmann, Adolf Peter, 303, 304, 322 Hoffmann, Hilmar, 272, 280, 374 Hoffmann, Jutta, 310 Hohenzollern, 15 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 262, 265, 277, 363 Holocaust, 289, 292, 341, 393, 394 Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation), 15, 220 Holz, Arno, 328 Homer, 279, 329, 386 Horace, 22, 112, 125, 126

Horkheimer, Max, 341 Höyng, Peter, 4, 298, 374, 394 Humboldt, Alexander von, 42 Hume, David, 60, 138, 149, 232, 365 Hutcheson, Francis, xvii, 138, 151, 224, 232, 233, 374 Ibsen, Henrik, 1 Idealism, 13, 35, 150 Iffland, August Wilhelm, 222, 224 Ihering, Herbert, 285, 298, 307, 308, 323, 374 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 9, 34, 35, 62, 148, 149, 153, 193, 204, 298, 345, 372, 386, 387 Jacobs, Carol, 118, 129, 374 Jacobs, Jürgen, 6, 9, 374 Jasper, Willi, 6, 9, 228, 375 Jauss, Hans Robert, 320, 344, 375 Jens, Walter, 78, 86, 87, 375 Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm, xv, 148, 153 Job, 175–76, 194, 202 Jöcher, Christian Gottlieb, 137 John, Hans-Rainer, 311–12, 324 Jonnes, Denis, 241, 254, 375 Jonson, Ben, 220 Jüdischer Kulturbund, 278 Jung, Werner, 7, 9, 375 Jungbauer, Hans, 308 Junghans, Carl, 269–71, 278, 279, 366, 386 Jurgons, Michael, 316 Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von, 81 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 35, 36, 41, 42, 59, 67, 74, 82, 83, 87, 90, 91, 101, 106, 136, 140, 145, 149, 150, 154, 226, 327, 331, 365, 367, 375, 394, 395 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, 30 Kassler, Oskar, 307 Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf, 16, 134, 145 Kauer, Edmund T., 273, 274, 280, 375 Keisch, Henryk, 308, 323, 375 Keller, Gottfried, 24

INDEX Kerr, Alfred, 334, 345 Kertscher, Hans-Joachim, 5, 321, 322, 324, 325, 376, 394 Ketelsen, Uwe-K., 93, 102, 376 Kiesel, Helmuth, 6, 9, 102, 124, 204, 262, 277, 364 Kilger, Heinrich, 308 Kirst, Klaus Dieter, 305, 315 Kleist, Ewald Christian von, 24, 26, 27 Kleist, Heinrich von, 262, 265, 277, 285, 288, 363, 396 Klimm, Johann Albert, 134 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 16, 26, 29, 51, 83, 333 Klotz, Christian Adolf, 27, 72, 78, 79, 83, 261 Koch, Heinrich, 271, 273, 279, 280, 376 Koch, Heinrich Gottfried, 217 König, Amalia, 53 König, Engelbert, 47 König (Lessing), Eva, 48, 49, 53 König, Samuel, 135 Koopmann, Helmut, 109, 124, 376 Kortner, Fritz, 5, 283, 295–97, 299, 315, 381 Koselleck, Reinhart, 3, 79, 87, 251, 255, 376 Köster, Heinrich Martin Gottfried, 42 Kotzebue, August von, 222, 224 Kovach, Thomas A., 56 Kramer, Martin, 6, 9, 102, 124, 204, 262, 277, 364 Kröger, Wolfgang, 168, 182, 183, 377 Kuhles, Doris, 6, 8, 377 Kühne, Erich, 313, 324, 377 La Chaussée, Pierre-Claude Nivelle de, 56 La Fontaine, Jean de, 89, 90, 92–94, 98, 102, 108, 382 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 135, 149 La Mothe le Vayer, Francois de, 137 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de, 96 Lachmann, Karl, xi, 6, 7, 8, 37, 85, 101, 150, 253, 337, 346, 367 Lactantius, 70 Lamport, F. J., 1, 7, 21, 37, 38, 377

403

Lanfranc of Bec, 157 Lang, Fritz, 283 Langbehn, Julius, 336, 341, 346, 377 Lange, Samuel Gotthold, xv, 22 Langhoff, Wolfgang, 292, 300, 307–12, 318, 319, 323, 340, 370, 377 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 283 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 263, 278, 336, 337, 346, 377 Lauer, Reinhard, 57 Lautréamont, 321 Le Bossu, René, 89, 90 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, xiv, xv, 3, 13, 16, 45, 46–49, 50, 53, 57, 58, 60, 114, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 142–43, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 189, 195, 257, 377, 383 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 54, 222, 224, 396, 397 Leopold, Prince of Brunswick, 31 Lessing (König), Eva, 48, 49, 53 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, works by: Des Andreas Wissowatius Einwürfe wider die Dreyeinigkeit (Andreas Wissowatius’s Objections to the Holy Trinity), 143 Anti-Goeze, xiii, 154, 169, 171, 174 Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt (Axioms), xiii, 32, 61, 162, 171, 181 Barbarus Antibarbaro, 170 Berengarius Turonensis: oder Ankündigung eines wichtigen Werkes desselben (Berengarius Turonensis: Or Announcement of an Important Work by Him), 157, 158 “Der Besitzer des Bogens” (The Owner of the Bow), 109–11 Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (Contributions on the History and Reception of Theater), xiv, 21, 37, 50–51, 61, 212 Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts (Letters on Classical Matters), xiv, 27, 78, 261

404

INDEX

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (continued) Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend (Letters Concerning the Newest Literature), xiv, 24, 25, 50, 53, 63, 67, 68, 71, 81, 87, 90, 102, 212, 227, 228, 328 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel mit Nicolai und Mendelssohn (Letters to and by Nicolai and Mendelssohn on Tragedy), xiv, 86, 87, 223, 229, 386 Das Christentum der Vernunft (The Christianity of Reason), xiv, 14, 39, 57, 134–35, 138, 143 Damon, oder die wahre Freundschaft (Damon, or True Friendship), xiv, 37 Durch Spinoza ist Leibnitz nur auf die Spur der vorherbestimmten Harmonie gekommen (Spinoza Only Put Leibniz on the Track of Pre-established Harmony), xiv “Die eherne Bildsäule” (The Statue of Brass), 111–12, 115 Ein Vade Mecum für den Hrn. Sam. Gotth. Lange (A Primer for Mr. Samuel Gotthold Lange), xiv, 22 Eine Duplik (A Rejoinder), xiv, 32, 33, 36, 41, 144, 152, 169, 170, 181 Eine Parabel (A Parable), xv, 32, 35, 118, 129, 171, 198, 378 Emilia Galotti, vii, xv, 5, 30–31, 38, 39, 215, 224, 225, 229, 230, 235, 239, 244–46, 248, 254, 255, 256, 257, 267, 274, 286, 287, 289, 290, 293–97, 299, 301, 302, 306, 312–19, 320, 322, 324, 329, 344, 357, 368, 369, 372, 373, 376, 378, 380, 381, 382, 383, 385, 386, 390, 391, 395 Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freymäurer (Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons), xv, 31, 32, 33, 146, 147, 153, 154, 173

Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), xiv, 14, 32, 33, 34, 43, 91, 134, 138, 141, 143, 163, 146, 147, 148, 161, 163, 167, 173, 177, 179, 181, 183, 197, 198, 199, 207, 266, 315, 357, 364, 380 “Die Esel” (The Donkeys), 100, 103 Fabeln: Drey Bücher. Nebst Abhandlungen mit dieser Dichtungsart verwandten Inhalts (Fables: In Three Books), xv, 24, 71, 86, 90–95, 100–103, 108, 111, 152, 374 “Faust” fragment, xiv, 24–25, 38, 381 Der Freigeist (The Freethinker), xiv, 19, 20, 147, 237, 286 “Der Fuchs und die Larve” (The Fox and the Mask), 98–99, 103 Gedanken über die Herrnhuter (Thoughts on the Moravian Brethren), xv, 137, 162, 180 Gegensätze des Herausgebers (Editorial Commentary by Lessing on the Fragments of Reimarus), xiv, 30, 34, 158, 162, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171 Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy), xv, 5, 28, 29, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 62, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 99, 125, 139, 141, 152, 212, 213, 214, 215, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 262, 268–69, 286, 298, 299, 328, 335, 346, 380, 395 “Herkules,” 101, 103 “Der Hirsch und der Fuchs” (The Deer and the Fox), 92, 93, 102 Die Juden (The Jews, 1754), xiv, 2, 19, 20, 33, 37, 136, 186, 190–93, 195, 202, 204, 205, 206, 236, 253, 261, 266, 267, 286, 287, 364, 372, 384

INDEX Der junge Gelehrte (The Young Scholar), xiv, 18, 19, 187, 204, 228, 235, 253, 285, 286 Kleinigkeiten (Trifles), xv, 22, 24, 380 Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. Mit beyläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte (Laocoon or Concerning the Limits of Poetry and Painting), vii, xv, 1, 3, 26, 27, 38, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 83, 86, 87, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112–18, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 262, 268, 269–71, 278, 279, 326, 327, 328, 343, 348, 349, 366, 370, 374, 376, 377, 380, 383, 386, 389, 390 Leibnitz von den ewigen Strafen (Leibniz on Eternal Punishment), xv, 143 Daß mehr als fünf Sinne für den Menschen sein können (That More than Five Senses Are Possible for Human Beings), xiv, 144 Minna von Barnhelm, vii, xv, 1, 5, 7, 15, 26, 27–28, 39, 54, 204, 215, 242–43, 255, 261, 266, 267, 268, 272, 273, 274, 280, 286, 287, 289, 290, 292–93, 297, 299, 300, 301, 302, 306–12, 316, 317, 318–19, 322, 323, 324, 325, 328, 331, 334, 336, 337, 338, 339, 342, 345, 347, 367, 368, 369, 370, 373, 375, 376, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 387, 389, 390 Der Misogyne (The Misogynist), xiv, 19, 20, 37 Miß Sara Sampson, xv, 1, 22–23, 29, 38, 54, 215, 224, 225, 226, 235, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 253, 254, 267, 274, 279, 286, 238, 334, 335, 368, 373, 379, 382

405

Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), vii, xv, 1, 2, 5, 7, 12, 14, 32–34, 35, 39, 56, 57, 81, 94, 119–21, 128, 129, 144, 145, 146, 163, 174–77, 183, 185, 186, 187, 190, 200–203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 214, 215, 225, 247–49, 256, 257, 261, 262, 263, 264–68, 277, 278, 282, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290–92, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302–6, 312, 317, 320, 322, 327, 328, 334, 340, 342, 343, 347, 348, 355, 357, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 376, 377, 378, 382, 384, 386, 388, 389, 391, 393 Das Neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes (The Latest from the Realm of Wit), xiv Nötige Antwort auf eine sehr unnötige Frage des Hrn. Hauptpastor Goeze in Hamburg (Necessary Response to Quite an Unnecessary Request by the Chief Pastor of Hamburg, Herr Goeze), xv, 32, 159, 172, 173, 182 “Die Pfauen und die Krähe” (The Peacocks and the Crow), 99, 103 Philotas, 5, 25–26, 38, 242, 255, 262, 272, 297, 306, 322, 369, 372, 386, 390, 391 Pope ein Metaphysiker! (Pope a Metaphysician!), xvi, 22, 136, 195 Reimarus Fragments, xiv, xvi, 29–32, 34, 129, 158, 161, 162, 164–74 “Rettung des Hier. Cardanus” (Vindication of Hier. Cardanus), xvi, 180, 194, 206 Rettungen (Vindications), 21, 37, 137, 206, 383 “Das Schaf” (The Sheep), 100, 103 Schrifften (Writings), xiii, 22, 37 “17. Literaturbrief” (17th Literary Epistle), 24, 25, 218, 219–20

406

INDEX

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (continued) Sogenannte Briefe an den Herrn Doktor Walch (So-Called Letters to Herr Doctor Walch), 159 “Der Tanzbär” (The Dancing Bear), 92–93, 102 Das Testament Johannis (The Testament of John), xiv, 32, 169 Das Theater des Herrn Diderot. Aus dem Französischen (The Dramatic Work of Mr. Diderot. Translated from French), xvii, 25, 51, 228 Theatralische Bibliothek (Theatrical Library), xvi, 21, 22, 50, 212, 225, 229, 328 Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power), xvi, 32, 50, 61, 181 Über die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion (On the Origin of Revealed Religion), xvi, 142, 158 Über die Wirklichkeit der Dinge ausser Gott (On the Reality of Things outside God), xvi, 147 Über eine zeitige Aufgabe (On a Timely Task), 144 “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel” (On the Use of Animals in the Fable), 95, 96, 102, 382 “Von dem Vortrage der Fabeln” (On the Presentation of Fables), 95, 98 “Von dem Wesen der Fabel” (On the Essence of the Fable), 95 Von der Art und Weise der Fortpflanzung und Ausbreitung der christlichen Religion (On the Method of the Continuation and the Expansion of the Christian Religion), xvi, 158 “Von der Eintheilung der Fabeln” (On the Classification of Fables), 95, 97

“Von einem besondern Nutzen der Fabeln in den Schulen” (On a Special Use of Fables in Schools), 95, 98, 99, 103 “Vorrede zu des Herrn Jacob Thomson sämtliche Trauerspiele” (Preface to James Thomson’s Complete Tragedies), 152, 212 Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (How the Ancients Represented Death), xvi, 78, 86, 87, 262, 268, 290 Zur Geschichte und Litteratur. Aus den Schätzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel (On History and Literature: From the Treasures of the Ducal Library at Wolfenbüttel), xvi, 30, 31, 102, 152, 158, 163, 164, 187 Lessing, Johann Gottfried, 17, 37, 353 Lessing (Feller), Justina Salome, 17, 73, 353 Lessing, Karl Gotthelf, xiii, xviii, 63, 151, 159, 180, 181, 330 Lessing, Theophilus, 17, 21, 36, 377 Lessing, Traugott, 31 Leventhal, Robert, 343, 349, 378 Lewald, Fanny, 338 Liefers, Karl Heinz, 310 Lillo, George, 54 Locke, John, 3, 15, 43, 44, 45–46, 47, 49, 60, 100, 136, 140, 375, 378 Logau, Friedrich von, 15, 24 Loiperdinger, Martin, 262, 277, 378 Lorre, Peter, 283 Lowell, James Russell, 343 Ludendorff, Mathilde, 266–67, 279, 341, 347, 348, 378 Lüderwald, Johann Balthasar, 170 Luhmann, Niklas, 235, 237, 252, 378 Lukács, Georg, 310, 322, 330, 344, 378 Luther, Martin, 55, 62, 159, 263, 332, 336, 341, 348, 378 Lyon, Laurence G., 9, 56, 61, 62, 154, 205, 253, 364, 372, 376, 378, 389 Lyotard, Jean-François, 321

INDEX Maimonides, Moses, 188–89 Mann, Heinrich, 283 Mann, Klaus, 283 Mann, Thomas, 33, 316 Maria Theresa (Maria Theresia), 15 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 57, 63 Marr, Wilhelm, 342, 348 Martinson, Steven, 3, 240, 253, 378, 394–95 Marx, Karl (Marxism), 100, 201, 311, 312, 315, 317, 320, 321, 322, 338, 339, 341, 347, 378, 390 Mascho, Friedrich Wilhelm, 169 Mattukat, Wilfried, 311 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 135, 151, 373 Mauser, Wolfram, 58, 62, 85, 100, 103, 124, 129, 152, 153, 179, 254, 363, 366, 379, 382, 385, 388 Mayer, Hans, 302, 303, 322, 379 Mazur, Ronald M., 91, 92, 93, 94, 102, 379 McCarthy, John, 7, 62, 94, 98, 102, 103, 206, 371, 379 Mehring, Franz, 264, 306, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 317, 319, 322, 323, 337, 338–41, 346, 347, 377, 378, 379 Mellie, Otto, 306 Mendelssohn, Moses, vii, 9, 14, 16, 22, 23, 24, 33, 34, 41, 42, 49, 51, 59, 61, 62, 68, 70, 71, 81, 83, 86, 87, 105, 106, 107, 122, 123, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 184, 185, 194–97, 199, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207, 212, 223, 224, 264, 266, 327, 345, 364, 369, 371, 378, 379, 380, 386, 389, 393, 394 Merkel, Gottfried F., 343 Meyer, Reinhart, 5, 216, 227, 298, 299, 380, 395 Meyer-Benfey, Heinrich, 342, 348, 380 Michaelis, Johann David, 186, 195, 204, 206, 371, 373, 378 Minetti, Hans-Peter, 300, 307, 308 Minnesänger, 90

407

Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 19, 187, 288 Montaigne, Michel de, 137 Moréri, Louis, 137 Morhof, Daniel Georg, 136 Mosse, George, 342, 348, 381 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 341 Müller, Heiner, 5, 215, 301, 319–21, 325, 340–41, 347, 381, 388, 390 Müller, Joachim, 313, 324, 381 Muncker, Franz, xi, 6, 7, 8, 37, 85, 101, 150, 253, 337, 346, 367 Mylius, Christlob, 18, 21, 22, 37, 135, 147, 151, 367 Nagel, Ivan, 296, 299, 381 Napoleon Bonaparte, 15 Naturalism, 334 Neher, Carola, 283 neoclassicism, 13, 21, 24, 25, 28, 52 neologists, 142, 143, 161, 181, 385 Neuber, Friederike Caroline, 16, 18, 217, 218, 221, 228, 274 Neumann, Peter-Horst, 241, 254, 381 Neuser, Adam, 137, 180 Nicolai, (Christoph) Friedrich, xiii, 16, 22, 23, 24, 68, 71, 81, 84, 86, 87, 137, 138, 139, 151, 195, 212, 327, 369, 404 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 50, 110, 125, 146, 333, 345, 381 Nisbet, H. Barry, 3, 4, 8, 151, 152, 153, 154, 381, 382, 395 Nivelle, Armand, 55, 56, 58 Noa, Manfred, 262, 265 Noel, Thomas, 96, 98, 102, 103, 382 Olshausen, Waldemar von, 6, 8, 11 Ossian, 329 Ott, Karl August, 93, 102, 382 Pabst, G. W., 274 Pantheism, 135, 144, 147, 150, 153, 154, 193, 386 parable of the rings (Ringparabel), 1, 7, 33, 94–95, 119, 120, 139, 145, 174–75, 183, 248, 257, 292, 304, 320

408

INDEX

Pasch, Albert R., 314–15, 317 Peitsch, Helmut, 240, 254, 382 Perrault, Charles, 97 Petersen, Julius, xi, 6, 8 Peymann, Claus, 33, 292, 347 Philippine Charlotte, Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 30 Piedmont, Ferdinand, 262, 277, 278, 298, 322, 323, 347, 382 Pietism, 162 Piscator, Erwin, 283, 340 Pizer, John, 3, 395 Planudes, Maximus, 94, 95 Plato, 140, 146, 232 Plaut, Max, 357 Plautus, xvii, 18, 19, 21, 137 Pliny, 78, 79 Plutarch, 112, 125 Poethen, Wilhelm, 267, 348 Ponto, Erich, 290 Pyrrhonism, 144 Quincey, Thomas de, 133, 150, 367 Quintilian, 110 Raabe, Paul, 357 Racine, Jean, 220 Rademin, Heinrich, 295, 299, 383 Ramler, Karl Wilhelm, xv, 16, 21, 22, 24 Rationalism, 13, 14, 15, 20, 26, 34, 41, 43, 46, 49, 74, 77, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 149, 151, 160, 188, 189, 200, 336, 386 Reformation, 14, 21, 49 Reh, Albert M., 37, 56, 58, 61, 62, 183, 206, 349, 364, 383, 384, 387 Reichel, Johann Gottfried, 68 Reichel, Käthe, 300, 307, 340 Reich’s Chamber of Film (Reichsfilmkammer), 268 Reimarus, Elise, 37, 173, 183 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, xiv, 4, 29, 34, 50, 129, 133, 141, 142, 153, 161, 163–74, 177, 181, 182, 197, 206, 214, 365, 383, 386. See also “Reimarus Fragments” under Lessing, G. E.

Reimarus, Johann Albert Heinrich, 181 Reinhard, Max, 283 Remnant, Peter, 47, 60, 383 Rengstorf, Karl Heinrich, 357 Renne, Berndt, 305 Ress, Johann Heinrich, 165, 167, 169 Restoration drama, 23 Richardson, Samuel, xviii, 93, 95 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, 110, 114, 126–27, 375, 393 Rieck, Werner, 313–14, 324, 383 Riedel, Friedrich Justus, 68, 86, 261, 383 Riefenstahl, Leni, 271 Rietschel, Ernst, 336 Rilla, Paul, xvi, 6, 8, 306, 307, 312, 313, 315, 317, 319, 323, 324, 339, 347, 401 Ritchie, Gisela F., 56, 57 Ritchie, J. M., 263, 278, 383 Röll, Peter, 305, 306 Romanticism, 76, 82, 150, 262, 293, 330–32, 344, 366, 377, 387 Rosenberg, Alfred, 265, 266, 269, 279, 343, 384 Rosenwald, Lessing, 342 Rosenzweig, Franz, 201–3, 208, 384 Rousseau, 56, 81, 138, 141, 224 Rowland, Herbert, 7, 62, 63, 206, 348, 349, 371, 379, 384, 396 Runset, Ute van, 37, 57, 384 Sack, August Friedrich Wilhelm, 142 Sasse, Günter, 58, 62, 85, 124, 129, 152, 153, 179, 235, 237, 239, 243, 253, 255, 256, 363, 366, 379, 382, 384, 385, 388 Sauer, August, 339, 347 Schade, Richard E., 7, 8, 55, 62, 109, 206, 369, 371, 372, 379, 385, 390 Schalk, Fritz, 51, 61, 346, 385 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 35, 150 Scherer, Wilhelm, 337–39, 346, 347, 365, 374, 385 Schiebinger, Londa, 233, 251, 385 Schiller, Friedrich, 1, 2, 5, 13, 23, 55, 62, 68, 79, 83, 87, 126, 222, 224, 227, 246, 252, 262, 265, 268, 277,

INDEX 278, 285, 287, 288, 293, 296, 306, 308, 327, 328, 333, 334, 335, 336, 338, 341, 346, 348, 363, 369, 378, 385, 388, 389, 391, 393, 395 Schilson, Arno, 4, 6, 36, 62, 179, 180, 182, 183, 385, 396 Schinkel, Friedrich, 335 Schlaf, Johannes, 328 Schlegel, Friedrich, 5, 35, 68–70, 78, 86, 87, 150, 253, 306, 330, 331, 332, 344, 345, 375, 386, 387 Schlegel, Johann Elias, 19 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 35, 50, 145 Schmidt, Erich, 8, 103, 124, 153, 337–39, 354, 373, 381, 386 Schmidt, Jürgen, 305 Schmidt, Karl-Dirk, 292 Schmiesing, Ann, 5, 396 Schneider, Helmut, 248, 255, 257, 386 Schneider, Karl, 311 Schnitzler, Arthur, 1, 288 Schröder, Johann Friedrich, 221–22 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 86, 87, 228, 229, 255, 386 Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 273, 277, 280, 387 Schultz, Franz, 264, 278, 387 Schulz, Günter, 357 Schulze, Hagen, 42, 60, 387 Schumann, Johann Daniel, xvi, 168 Schütze, Ernst August, 357 Schweikart, Hans, 5, 261–63, 272–75, 277, 390 Seeba, Hinrich, 5, 254, 344, 349, 387, 396 Seifert, Siegfried, 6, 8, 387 Semler, Johann Salomo, 161 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, xvi, 21 Sensualism, 45, 49, 232 Seven Years’ War, 15, 23, 24, 26, 27, 242, 272, 306, 307, 308, 328, 331, 334 Seyler, Abel, 217 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 42, 138, 140, 141, 151, 232, 233, 387

409

Shakespeare, William, 13, 24, 28, 83, 207, 215, 220, 287, 288, 293, 297, 328, 333, 342 Silberschlag, Georg Christoph, 170 Simmel, Georg, 196, 206, 387 Simonides of Ceos, 71, 112 Slessarev, Helga, 57, 153, 382 Smiszek, Horst, 309 Smith, Adam, 57, 138 Sobol, Joshua, 33 Socrates, 137, 146 Solter, Friedo, 304–6 Sophocles, 137, 270 Sørensen, Bengt Algot, 241, 254, 387 Spalding, Johann Joachim, 142 Spence, Joseph, 113, 126, 387, 388 Spinoza, Baruch de, xiv, 3, 13, 16, 26, 34, 35, 83, 134, 135, 147–49, 150, 153, 154, 180, 193, 213, 206, 207, 365, 366, 371, 388, 389, 394 Staege, Max, 98, 103, 124, 388 Stahr, Adolf, 263, 278, 337, 338, 343, 348, 388 Ständeklausel, 80, 223 Stein, Charlotte von, 13 Steinmetz, Horst, 6, 9, 55, 56, 86, 87, 154, 227, 262, 277, 278, 371, 388 Stenzel, Jürgen, 6, 37 Stern, Guy, 8, 343, 388 Sternfels, Karl, 314, 317 Stoecker, Adolf, 342 Stone, Lawrence, 23, 252, 388 Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang), 13, 38, 85, 246, 256, 366, 373, 374 Stöve, Günther, 267, 279, 376 Strauss, David, 333, 345, 381 Strindberg, August, 1 Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid, 39, 57, 153, 180, 183, 388 Stroux, Karl Heinz, 282, 291 Sturm, Johann Christoph, 136 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 16, 21, 67 Suter, Ernst, 267, 279, 329, 344, 388 Tabori, George, 33, 39, 129, 207, 277, 292, 297, 298, 299, 365, 369, 374, 384, 388, 389, 393, 394

410

INDEX

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 51 Vega, Lope de, 19, 51 Vergil, 105 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 110 Virchow, Rudolf, 335 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), xvii, 21, 37, 42, 56, 57, 58, 70, 72, 81, 135, 151, 191, 205, 333, 371, 384, 386 Voss, Christian Friedrich, 16, 22, 25, 27, 67, 295, 334, 345, 346, 369 Vossius, Isaak, 136

Weber, Peter, 310, 315, 323, 389 Wegener, Paul, 290, 303 Weigel, Alexander, 305, 312, 322 Weigel, Helene, 283 Weisenborn, Günther, 303 Weiss, Peter, 288 Weisse, Christian Felix, 16, 18, 24, 149 Wellbery, David E., 87, 94, 102, 122, 349, 389, 390 Werner, Hans-Georg, 311, 312, 315, 316, 322, 324, 382, 390 Werther, 5, 329–30, 344, 370, 378 Wicherly, William, 51 Wieck, Thomas, 311, 323, 390 Wiedemann, Conrad, 6, 58, 255, 390 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 24, 294, 333, 396 Wien, Dieter, 310 Wierlacher, Alois, 38, 245, 256, 390 Wilder, Billy, 283 Wilke, Sabine, 319, 321, 325, 347, 390 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 27, 71, 83, 105, 114, 115, 122, 127, 327, 346, 383, 390 Winkler, Johann Gottfried, 23 Winterstein, Eduard von, 290, 303, 304, 322, 369 Wisten, Fritz, 290, 291, 303, 304 Witte, Karsten, 273, 277, 280, 390 Wolf, Friedrich, 302 Wölfel, Kurt, xi, 6, 8, 391 Wolff, Christian, 17, 46, 94, 97–98, 103, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141, 145, 149

Walch, Christian Wilhelm Franz, 159, 182 Walser, Martin, 285, 297 Wandertruppen (Wanderbühnen), 217, 219, 283 Wangenheim, Gustav von, 302 Wangenheim, Inge von, 298, 389

Zedler, Johann Heinrich, 42, 136 Ziegler, Wilfried, 58 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von, 162 Zionism, 2, 200, 202, 342, 343, 348, 373 Zweig, Stefan, 283

Tauentzien, Bogislaw Friedrich von, 26 Teraoka, Arlene, 320, 325, 388 Terence, 18, 288 Ter-Nedden, Gisbert, 246, 256 Thalheim, Hans-Günther, 100, 103, 323, 389 Theophrastus, 18 Thirty Years’ War, 14, 43, 327 Thomasius, Christian, 17, 42, 136, 137, 151, 375 Thomson, James (Jacob), xvii, xviii, 51, 152, 212 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 17 Toller, Ernst, 283 Toulmin, Stephen, 43, 44, 60, 389 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 264, 278, 342 Tubières, Anne Claude Philippe de, 113 Ugrinsky, Alexej, 8, 56, 62, 102, 122, 367, 379, 383, 388, 389 Ulbricht, Walter, 308

Contributors: Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox, Steven D. Martinson, Klaus L. Berghahn, John Pizer, Beate Allert, H. B. Nisbet, Arno Schilson, Willi Goetschel, Peter Höyng, Karin A. Wurst, Ann Schmiesing, Reinhart Meyer, Hans-Joachim Kertscher, Hinrich C. Seeba, Dieter Fratzke, Helmut Berthold, Herbert Rowland. Barbara Fischer is associate professor of German and Thomas C. Fox is professor of German, both at the University of Alabama.

A COMPANION TO THE WORKS OF

THE ESSAYS Introduction Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox


Lessing’s Life and Work Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox



Lessing on the German-Speaking Stage in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, 1945–1990 Lessing the Critic: Polemics as Enlightenment Reinhart Meyer Klaus L. Berghahn Lessing on the East German Stage Lessing and the Fable and Screen Hans-Joachim Kertscher and Thomas C. Fox John Pizer Lessing and the European Enlightenment Steven D. Martinson

Lessing’s Poetics as an Approach to Aesthetics Modern Criticism in Historical Context: 200 Years of Lessing Reception Beate Allert Hinrich C. Seeba Lessing and Philosophy The Lessing Museum and Research Center H. B. Nisbet for Lessing Reception in Kamenz Dieter Fratzke Lessing and Theology Arno Schilson The Lessing Academy in Wolfenbüttel Helmut Berthold Lessing and the Jews Willi Goetschel A Brief History of the Lessing Society Herbert Rowland Lessing’s Drama Theory: Discursive Writings on Drama, Performance, and Theater Peter Höyng

OTHER NEW CAMDEN HOUSE COMPANION VOLUMES A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal Edited by William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer ISBN 1–57113–237–6

A Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue Edited by Francis G. Gentry ISBN 1–57113–238–4

A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller Edited by Steven D. Martinson ISBN 1–57113–183–3

A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism Edited by Neil H. Donahue ISBN 1–57113–175–2

One of the most independent thinkers in German intellectual history, the Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to literature, philosophy, theology, criticism, and drama theory. As a playwright, Lessing created the first major German Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or bourgeois tragedy, Miß Sara Sampson, and wrote one of the finest German comedies, Minna von Bamhelm. In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious tolerance and intolerance and the clash of civilizations. Lessing’s dramas are the oldest German theater pieces still performed regularly on German and international stages. Both his plays and his drama theory have influenced such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Hebbel, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Strindberg, Schnitzler, and Brecht. Addressing an audience ranging from graduate students to seasoned scholars, this volume introduces Lessing’s life and times and places him within the broader context of the European Enlightenment. It discusses his pathbreaking dramas, his equally revolutionary theoretical, critical, and aesthetic writings, his original fables, his innovative work in philosophy and theology, and his significant contributions to Jewish emancipation. The volume concludes by examining the reception of Lessing and his oeuvre in Nazi Germany, in the former East and West Germanys, and in contemporary critical theory.

A Companion to the Works of Stefan George Edited by Jens Rieckmann ISBN 1–57113–214–7

IS BN 1 -5 711 3 -24 3 -0

Camden House

668 Mt. Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com

Edited by Fischer and Fox

Jacket Design: Lisa Mauro Jacket image: Portrait of the young Lessing by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Used by permission of Ullsteinbild.

9 781571 132437

Edited by Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox

A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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Lektureschlussel: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - Nathan der Weise

An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000 (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture)

Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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A Study of the Major Novellas of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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