Lessing and the German Enlightenment Edited by Ritchie Robertson (review)

Few authors have resisted ideological appropriation as successfully as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. This may have something to do with the cosmopolitan vision of Enlightenment articulated in his works that in turn has shaped our view of the Enlightenment as a whole. Nathan der Weise has become a key text of the Enlightenment, perhaps only comparable in status to Voltaire’s Candide, but far more complex, “hu-manly textured,” and “emotionally engaging,” as Adam Sutcliffe argues in his contribution to the volume under review here (207). Something in Lessing’s thinking and writing appeals to our own humanity and maybe therefore also resists easy ideological investments.

Lessing and the German Enlightenment is based on a 2010 conference at St. John’s College, Oxford, held in honor of Lessing biographer H.B. (Barry) Nisbet. The resulting volume is a thematically tightly organized, always interesting and engaging volume that is not always entirely flattering for Lessing: Alexander Košenina and Ritchie Robertson, in their contribution on Lessing’s journalism (a neglected topic), speak of him as a master of “quick-witted dallying” who nevertheless also had the “fastidious, pedantic severity of the self-opinionated scholar” (47). Nisbet himself contributes an introductory essay that addresses Lessing’s “aversion, or even hostility to authority” (2) and also his “qualified skepticism,” articulated for instance through his conviction that “there may well be an element of truth in many religious and philosophical positions—but only a relative truth” (10). These are themes that recur in many different guises in this volume.

While the volume’s title is Lessing and the German Enlightenment, several of the essays reconsider Lessing’s relationship to French literary and intellectual history in interesting ways. This goes for Romira Worvill’s contribution, which documents Lessing’s detailed knowledge of contemporaneous French texts. Nobody will contest Lessing’s dislike for Voltaire (to whom he nevertheless also owed much) or his disagreement with Rousseau’s rather negative view of human nature, dislike of the theater, and notion of the general will with its potentially totalitarian tendencies. Lessing did, on the other hand, admire Rousseau’s straightforward intellectual style, as Robertson and Košenina show. Lessing’s interest in Diderot’s writings is one of straightforward identification. Many of Lessing’s theatrical reforms were inspired by Diderot, and there also exists a similarity between Diderot’s seemingly illogical moving from one idea to another and Lessing’s own intellectual style. Lessing was highly critical of Diderot’s arrest by the French authorities. He also respected Pierre Bayle and his radical religious and biblical criticism, and over a long period engaged with Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique. All this indeed makes Lessing into a “figure of European stature” (xv) in addition to a key figure of the German Enlightenment.

Along the same lines, this volume does much to correct the view of Lessing as a one-sided rationalist, and it postulates a far more relaxed relationship of Lessing to the body than tradition preferred. What to think of Lessing’s review of a libertine novel like Boyer d’Argens’s Thérèse philosophe? Or his interest in Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets? Lessing took part in the rehabilitation of Horace, the poet who celebrated “wine, women and male friendship” (51). Richard Schade’s contribution demonstrates that the young Lessing also had an active interest in anacreontic poetry with its celebration of (carnal) love and drinking. In Lessing’s comedy Minna von Barnhelm, as K.F. Hilliard argues, principle and passion fuse to an extent that “no single character is permanently in a position of superiority over the other” (173). While Lessing may not agree with Bayle in every respect, the two concur in their assumption that humans act because of local circumstance and out of present passions, and not according to cold systems.

Two contributions expand existing scholarship on Lessing and what has been termed the ‘Jewish Question’ in highly innovative ways. Jonathan M. Hess and Adam Sutcliffe agree...