Projects of Enlightenment: The Work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Cultural, Intercultural, and Transcultural Perspectives by Steven D. Martinson (review)

In recent years, Lessing scholarship has been greatly enriched by not only the completion of Wilfried Barner’s critical edition of Lessing’s texts but also the publication, in German, of both Monika Fick’s Lessing Handbuch and a translation of H. B. Nisbet’s biography of Lessing, among others, an updated version of Nisbet’s biography, and a companion, in English, to Lessing’s oeuvre. Steven Martinson’s contribution to this scholarly dialogue aims to fill gaps that he has identified in the literature. Martinson’s overarching goal is to trace the intercultural and transcultural dimensions of Lessing’s life and works in order to situate Lessing as a paragon of not only the German Enlightenment but the broader European Enlightenment as well.

The majority of the text is a chronologically arranged handbook that addresses political and personal aspects of Lessing’s biography and provides succinct evaluations of some of the critical literature on Lessing’s writings. Martinson joins other scholars who have recently drawn attention to the importance of gambling for understanding both Lessing’s creative endeavors and his tendency to take great intellectual risks. Martinson is also adept at explicating overlooked parts of Lessing’s life such as his stint as a general’s secretary in Breslau during the Seven Years’ War and the likelihood that he would have been aware of the Friedrich-Veit-Affair (75). Martinson devotes lengthy expositions to some of Lessing’s major works such as Minna von Barnhelm (76–82) and Emilia Galotti (116–25); his discussion of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie within eighteenth-century theatrical discourse is particularly strong (87–106).

However, the majority of Lessing’s writings are dealt with in remarkably concise segments of a few paragraphs each. The terse sections enable Martinson to cover a surfeit of material in the book’s two hundred or so pages, but they also prevent him from exploring more fully the numerous lacunae that he identifies in the critical literature. For instance, in his reading of Lessing’s Fabeln, Martinson concludes by noting that the fables have been translated into twenty-seven languages and are thus of “transcultural significance” (72). For a work exploring the intercultural dimensions of Lessing’s writing and reception, it is thus puzzling that no further effort is made to clarify exactly what this significance entails. In addition, many sections are prematurely rounded off with conclusions that are abruptly pronounced instead of thoroughly demonstrated. Martinson has generously appended a copious bibliography to the book, which helps to mitigate the fact that evaluations of Lessing scholarship are too often isolated in footnotes or separated out into lengthy digressions.

In the “Statement of Purpose” that precedes the book’s introduction, Martinson proposes that Lessing’s friendship with Mendelssohn should be seen as a “point of entry into a transcultural sphere of creative, mutual activity” (14). Hence, it is somewhat baffling that Martinson does not begin to focus on this relationship until three-quarters of the way through the book. A book review is unfortunately not the place to parse completely one of Martinson’s more audacious claims: namely, that the relationship between the Jewish Mendelssohn and the Christian Lessing should be seen “as constituting the heart of the German Enlightenment, if not also the European Enlightenment in general, the spirit of which animates processes of enlightenment that are ultimately transcultural in nature” (172). For present purposes, it suffices to say that Martinson’s desire to focus more closely on this friendship is certainly understandable. Nevertheless, the decision to tackle the Lessing-Mendelssohn relationship in a separate chapter ignores the fact that their relationship developed and deepened over the course of Lessing’s entire lifetime and cannot be so easily extracted and addressed in isolation. Another consequence of the decision to append an excursus on Lessing and Mendelssohn to the chronological discussion of Lessing’s works is that some texts, such...