Lessing, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM, reformer of German literature, was born, the son of the pastor of Kamenz, in Saxony, on 22d January 1729. From the school of St Afra, at Meissen, where he had spent five years, he entered in 1746 as a theological student at Leipzig. But, instead of studying theology, he made haste to acquire a knowledge of men and of the world, to polish his manners, to learn bodily and social accomplishments, and to improve his taste, and developed that strong, manly independence which was always one of the most striking traits in his character. Moreover, he cultivated a love for the stage, and began to write plays, mostly comedies, in the French style. All this sorely grieved his strictly orthodox parents. And yet, both at Meissen and at Leipzig, Lessing manifested an ardent thirst for knowledge and truth; he had great intellectual parts, and read hard. But his mode of life at the university ran him into debt—a state that was more or less chronic to him throughout his life; then in 1748 the theatre was closed; and he suffered from an innate restlessness that never let him abide long in one place. Accordingly, braving his father's serious displeasure, he quitted Leipzig, having resolved to earn a living by his pen, notwithstanding that the calling of author was held in little or no repute. After a few months' stay in Wittenberg, he travelled to Berlin to join Mylius, a clever man, but branded as a freethinker by the orthodox. Along with him Lessing published Beiträge zur Historie des Theaters (1750), and independently wrote plays, translated, did literary hack-work; but his chief stay was the Vossische Zeitung, to which he contributed criticisms. He soon felt, however, that he himself stood in need of greater culture, and in the end of 1751 he withdrew to Wittenberg to study at leisure; at the same time he pleased his father by taking his master's degree. The result of his toil in the Wittenberg library was a series of Vindications (1751) of unjustly maligned or forgotten writers, such as Cardan, Lemnius, &c., in which he gave bold utterance to his strong love of justice and his scorn of narrow intolerance. Later, in Ein Vademecum für Herrn S. G. Lange (1754) he displayed as unrelenting an hostility to pretentious and self-satisfied ignorance. Returning to Berlin after a year's absence, he resumed his former occupations. At this time too he became intimate with Moses Mendelssohn, Nicolai, and Ramler. He also published four volumes of his collected writings, and, along with Mendelssohn, an essay on Pope, ein Metaphysiker (1755). But he still strove to make the theatre an engine of popular culture: he wrote the tragedy Miss Sara Sampson (1755), in which he revolted against French theatrical traditions in favour of English models. For dramatis persone he took people of middle-class life, and so carried on the movement begun by Lillo, the dramatist, and Richardson, the novelist, in England, and by Diderot in France. The success of this work tempted Lessing back to the theatre, reopened, at Leipzig; but he only stayed there a short time. In May 1756 he set off, as companion to a young gentleman (Winkler) of that city, on an extended tour; but they had only reached Holland when they were hastily summoned home by the outbreak of the Seven Years' War. Lessing then remained some time in Leipzig, to be near his friend the poet Ewald von Kleist.
In 1758 he was once more in Berlin, assisting Mendelssohn and Nicolai to bring out a new critical journal, Litteraturbriefe. In the work he did for this publication Lessing takes a distinctively higher place: he refuses any longer to submit to the degrading dictatorship of French literary taste, combats the inflated pedantry of the Gottsched school, and extols Shakespeare above Corneille as the highest type of dramatic writer. In these letters he displays most of the admirable qualities of his mature style: his insight is penetrating and sure; his manner vivacious, often ironical or satirical; his intellect is strong and logical, yet supple, and works easily; and his language is clear, forcible, and elegant. He always possessed the power of making dry subjects interesting. From November 1760 to the spring of 1765 Lessing enlarged his knowledge of men by acting as secretary to General von Tautenzien, governor of Breslau. During these years he wrote two of his greatest works, Laocoön (1766) and Minna von Barnhelm (1767). The former is a critical treatise defining the limits of poetry and the plastic arts. It affords an admirable illustration of Lessing's critical procedure. He plunges at once into the midst of the argument, takes up various views one after another, examines them, contrasts them, searches and sifts them from all sides, and exhausts upon them the resources of the dialectical method; then out of what survives this intellectual conflict he constructs his final conclusions. Yet the movement of thought is simple, natural, and logical; we are led to discover the truth by the same paths by which the author arrived at it originally. His essays on the Fable (1759) and the Epigram (1771) are both admirable instances of the same method. The comedy Minna von Barnhelm shows no trace of imitation of foreign models: it is the first national comedy of the Germans on the grand scale, and is a great advance on Lessing's early dramatic efforts. After Frederick the Great had refused to nominate him keeper of the Royal Library at Berlin, Lessing was glad to accept the post of critic to the new national theatre at Hamburg in 1767. Out of these new duties grew the celebrated Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1769), in which he overthrew finally the dictatorship of the French drama and worked out the thoughts that had for many years been ripening in his mind. This theatre too soon failed, and Lessing was again left without fixed occupation. Yet he was never long idle, especially so long as there was error to combat, and ignorance and pedantic vanity to expose. For, though a scholar himself, he always regarded learning not as an end in itself, but as a means: he always accounted truth superior to mere knowledge. He was naturally fond of disputation, and so we soon find him in the thick of another controversy, this time with Klotz, a young Halle professor. On this occasion he had a double purpose to serve—to defend his Laocoön and to expose the pretensions of the men who set themselves up as leaders of German scholarship. The chief fruits of this controversy from Lessing's pen were Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts (1769) and Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (1769).
In October 1769 the Duke of Brunswick offered Lessing the librarianship of the Wolfenbüttel library; he accepted it and entered upon his duties in the following May. Here at last he settled for good, and in 1776 married Eva König, the widow of a Hamburg merchant, but lost her after little more than a year of happy married life. He at once began to publish some of the less-known treasures of the library in a series of volumes entitled Zur Geschichte und Litteratur (6 vols. 1773-81). But in 1772 he wrote the tragedy Emilia Galotti, which in spite of grave faults, notably the absence of dramatic necessity for the catastrophe, is one of the greatest tragedies in German literature, certainly the greatest Lessing wrote. Shortly before his marriage he carried out a long-cherished desire, by spending eight months in Italy, though as companion to the hereditary Duke of Brunswick. His last years were occupied with theological controversies. In 1777 he published the famous Wolfenbüttelsche Fragmente, a rationalist attack on Christianity from the pen of Reimarus (q.v.). This book, which was almost universally attributed to Lessing, provoked a storm of replies from orthodox Lutherans. The best of Lessing's counter-attacks were the polemical Anti-Goeze (1778), directed against his chief assailant, and the fine dramatic poem, Nathan der Weise (1779), one of the noblest pleas for tolerant humanity ever penned. This last was supplemented by Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780), which is extremely rich in suggestive thought. Lessing's last work was Ernst und Falk (1778-80), five dialogues on freemasonry. He died 15th February 1781. The best edition of his Sämtliche Schriften is Lachmann's, reissued by Muncker in 1886 seq. His chief works have been often translated into English. See Kont's Lessing et l'Antiquité (1899); Lives by Danzel and Gulraner (2d ed. 1880), Erich Schmidt (2d ed. 1889), Sime (1877), Helen Zimmermann (1878), and Rolleston (1889)—the last three in English.