Authors

German · 1729–1781

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was the central figure of German Enlightenment literature — playwright, critic, and philosopher — whose plays Minna von Barnhelm (1767), Emilia Galotti (1772), and Nathan the Wise (1779) transformed German theatre, and whose critical work Laocoön (1766) and Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69) laid the foundations of modern aesthetic theory and dramatic criticism. Nathan the Wise — a plea for religious tolerance in which a wise Jew outargues a Christian and a Muslim — is the defining text of German Enlightenment humanism.