Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German dramatist, critic and philosopher of the Enlightenment, born in Kamenz in Saxony in 1729 and dead in 1781. He began as a reviewer and periodical editor in Leipzig and Berlin, served as secretary to a general in Breslau, and then worked at the Hamburg National Theatre, where his reviews became the first work of a dramaturg and produced the Hamburg Dramaturgy. His plays Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti are counted among the first bourgeois tragedies, Minna von Barnhelm became a model for German comedy, and Nathan the Wise is regarded as the first German drama of ideas. His essay Laocoön set standards for discussing aesthetics, and he argued for the serious reception of Shakespeare against the rules of French neoclassicism. He later served as librarian at Wolfenbüttel, where he found a Greek manuscript containing Archimedes' cattle problem. His friendship with Moses Mendelssohn became an emblem of Enlightenment religious tolerance.