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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
German Enlightenment writer (1729–1781)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | |
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Portrait of Lessing by Anna Rosina Lisiewska during his time as dramaturg of Abel Seyler's Hamburg National Theatre (1767/1768) | |
| Born | (1729-01-22)22 January 1729 Kamenz, Upper Lusatia, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire |
| Died | 15 February 1781(1781-02-15) (aged 52) Braunschweig, Brunswick-Lüneburg, Holy Roman Empire |
| Occupation | Writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, art critic, and dramaturg |
| Alma mater | Leipzig University University of Wittenberg |
| Notable works | Miss Sara Sampson, Emilia Galotti, Minna von Barnhelm, Nathan the Wise, Laocoön, Hamburgische Dramaturgie |
| Spouse | Eva König |
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (German:[ˈɡɔthɔltˈʔeːfʁa.ɪmˈlɛsɪŋ]ⓘ; 22 January 1729 – 15 February 1781) was a German philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substa
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Biography
The German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born on January 22, 1729 to a pastor's family in Kamenz. After attending school in Kamenz and Meißen, he went to Leipzig in 1746 to study theology and medicine. Lessing quit his studies in 1748 and went to Berlin. He earned his living there as a reviewer and editor but soon started writing pieces for the theater. On the insistence of his father, Lessing resumed his studies in Wittenberg and earned the title Magister in 1752. After his return to Berlin, he met Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he developed a deep friendship. Lessing returned to Leipzig in 1755, but the next year returned to Berlin. He published letters on contemporary literature with his friends Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nikolai. Turning more and more toward literature, Lessing worked as a professional writer in Berlin and as the dramatic advisor for the National Theater in Hamburg beginning in 1767. His drama "Minna von Barnhelm" premiered a
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8. Lessing’s Science: Exploring Life in the Universe1
1Nature bored him, as an anecdote relates. When his attention was drawn to the approach of spring, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is said to have replied that he wished the leaves would turn red for once instead of always turning green.2 Goethe found this so memorable that he recounted it in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit.3 Like the Swiss poet and scientist Albrecht von Haller,4 Lessing’s lifelong partner in a lonely dialogue, Goethe saw the wonder of nature in its continual sameness, in the eternal recurrence of the same. The anecdote, however, places Lessing firmly in the other of the two camps into which C. P. Snow, in his influential Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959, divided the inhabited world: those who know the second law of thermodynamics and those who do not. In the language of the Enlightenment, however, we must reckon not with two but with three cultures – the humanistic, the scientific and the theologic