The German Genius

the Apologia brought about a storm of protest from orthodox Protestants. Lessing’s opponents, realizing they could not defeat him intellectually, importuned the Duke of Brunswick, where Lessing was living, to censor him. Financially dependent on the duke, Lessing was forced to comply.
    It was a blow, but during the fight Lessing exchanged letters with Reimarus’s daughter and, in so doing, conceived a notion for reviving an earlier exercise. So came about Nathan der Weise ( Nathan the Wise ), his masterpiece, published in 1779.
    Lessing’s “masterpiece among his masterpieces” was written in blank verse almost a decade before Goethe and Schiller. 39 The plot was taken from a Boccaccio fable in which a father possessed a ring “which had the power of making the wearer, who believed in it, agreeable to God and men.” 40 This father loved his three sons equally and so, unwilling to favor one above the others, commissioned two replica rings and bestowed one on each son. After his death, the sons were unable to agree on who had the genuine ring and took their dispute to a judge. This wise man’s verdict was that none of the rings was genuine.
    Nathan the Wise is set in Palestine during the Crusades and, to begin with, it is a play about a man, a Christian Templar, and a woman, the adopted daughter of a Jew, who fall in love not knowing that they are brother and sister. 41 The blood link is revealed soon enough to prevent them from marrying, but, at the same time, they discover that their father was Saladin’s brother. Saladin the Muslim is in effect one of the three sons in the Boccaccio fable. With him, the other main protagonists are Nathan, the Jew, and the Christian Templar. Saladin asks Nathan which of the three great religions is the true one, and Nathan replies with the tale of the three rings. Throughout the twists of the plot, Nathan is portrayed as a wise soul—tolerant and understanding. Saladin, proud and noble himself, recognizes Nathan’s qualities. It is the Christians who, to begin with, are contemptuous and intolerant, in particular toward the Jews. The changing fortunes of the characters eventually soften the Templar’s intolerance, though the Christian Patriarch doesn’t change. And this is the point of the play: Lessing shows us that there are three kinds of individual, morally speaking: those incapable of moral judgments; those who can see the right course of action, yet do nothing; and those who see what is right and act accordingly. The middle group suffers Lessing’s unmitigated scorn. 42
    Lessing is now recognized as the dominant figure in German literary life before Goethe. His plays helped bring to an end the chronic provincialism of German literature and his criticism ended the hold that French literary models had over Germany, in particular what he called in one of his letters Gottsched’s “slavish adherence” to Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, and Voltaire. Lessing realized that Shakespeare was a much better model; he argued that Othello , King Lear , and Hamlet were the first modern dramas to achieve the same emotional impact of Sophocles. He argued that Dr. Faust, known to German audiences since the Middle Ages through a puppet play, would lend itself to the Shakespearean approach. This “provided a foundation on which the Weimar classicism of Goethe and Schiller was to build in the closing decade of the century” (Goethe’s original version of the drama—the Urfaust , written in 1772–75, wasn’t discovered until late in the nineteenth century, and was never performed. But Faust, Der Tragödie erster Teil is widely viewed now as the decisive moment of innovative change on the German stage). 43
    Not least, Lessing’s meticulous investigation of the Gospels was the first dispassionate scientific examination of their origins, boosting scholarship. In the words of one critic, he was “the most admirable figure in the history of German thought and literature between Luther and Nietzsche.” 44
    T HE O RIGINS OF M ODERN S CHOLARSHIP
     
    We now need to examine two others who were to convert Winckelmann’s theories into definite institutional innovation.
    The development of classical studies as we understand them today owes much to the work and “uncompromising vision” of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824). Nineteenth-century classical scholarship—the “conquest of the ancient world by scholarship,” as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the eminent