Contemporary Conversations: Jonathan B. Fine on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the German Enlightenment

On September 7, 1945, only a few months after the Allies accepted the Nazis’ unconditional surrender, the Deutches Theater in Berlin reopened its doors with a very deliberate choice of performance. Like many theaters across the country reopening in the wake of the Second World War, Deutches Theater began its new run with a production of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s comic drama about religious tolerance and reconciliation, Nathan der Weise, or Nathan the Wise, which had been banned under the Nazis. A tale of friendship across religious divisions and near-fatal misunderstandings, Nathan the Wise is the story of a wealthy Jewish merchant –the titular Nathan–and the series of complications that arise when he returns home to Jerusalem to discover that his adoptive daughter, Recha, has been rescued from a fire by a former Knight Templar, who himself owes his life to the unlikely mercy of the Muslim Sultan Saladin. Here as elsewhere, Lessing’s play functioned as a cipher for an entire history of anxieties about German national identity, Jewish emancipation, and the promise and peril of secular modernity. In this episode, we talk with Jonathan B. Fine, Assistant Professor at Brown University, about Lessing's complex legacy and his pivotal role in the German Enlightenment and the formation of the early bourgeois public sphere. Lessing is nothing short of an embodiment of cultural modernity and the spirit of the European Enlightenment, and one of the main progenitors of the sphere of public debate and discussion that we take for granted in liberal democratic societies and which serves as such an important counterweight to state power. Upon receiving the Lessing Prize from the Free City of Hamburg in 1959, the political theorist Hannah Arendt returned to Lessing's critical role as a public intellectual in a lecture on humanity in dark times. We return to both Lessing and Arendt in this episode with a similar feeling of foreboding. How can the public realm, the world in which free and equal citizens can exercise their reason in deliberation and govern their lives in common, be salvaged from the rising tide of authoritarianism and the ascendance of technocapitalism? To understand where we are going, we must understand where we came from, and for this there is no better place to begin than Lessing.

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