Born Jan. 22, 1729, in Kamenz, Saxony; died Feb. 15, 1781, in Braunschweig. German playwright, art theorist, and literary critic of the Enlightenment. Founder of German classical literature.

Lessing was the son of a pastor. He received his education at the universities of Leipzig (1746–48) and Wittenberg (1748). Rejecting an ecclesiastical or university career and the patronage of aristocrats, Lessing moved to Berlin, where he led a hand-to-mouth existence as a self-supporting man of letters.

From 1760 to 1765, Lessing served as a secretary to the governor of Silesia, the Prussian general Tauentzien. During the years 1767–68, Lessing made an unsuccessful attempt to found a theater in Hamburg. He ended his days in the modest post of librarian to the duke of Braunschweig.

The principal driving force in Lessing’s career was his opposition to absolutist ideology in favor of a democratic national culture that would unify the country politically and abolish feudalism and class distinctions. In his early anacreontic songs, Lessing asserted the human right to the joys of life; in his fables and epigrams, he cruelly ridiculed the mores of the German aristocracy and philistines.

Rejecting classicism, Lessing wrote the first “bourgeois” family drama in Germany, Miss Sara Sampson (1755), and a comedy with national characters, Minna von Barnhelm (1767), in which enlightened morality triumphs over class and regional prejudices. In his tragedy Emilia Galotti (1772), Lessing vigorously condemns the despotism and arbitrary rule of feudal princes.

In his publicistic writings, Lessing was mainly concerned with the problems of the Enlightenment. From 1751 to 1755 he contributed to the newspaper Vossische Zeitung and published periodicals, including Theatralische Bibliothek.

Lessing’s dramatic poem Nathan der Weise (1779) condemned ecclesiastical reactionism and religious intolerance and defended the principles of humaneness and universal equality.

Lessing’s most important contribution was his doctrine of dynamism, of temporal succession, and the fullness of the representation of life as the primary principles of poetry (Laokoon, 1766); he ardently defended the theoretical principles of realistic theater and drama. Lessing opposed the aristocratic theater of the court and called for truthful and ingenuous theatrical and dramaturgical forms (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, published 1767–69).

In philosophy, Lessing was a predecessor of the materialistic tradition in Germany. N. G. Chernyshevskii devoted a separate monograph to Lessing in 1857. Marx, Engels, and Mering evaluated Lessing’s work highly. The Lessing-Theater existed in Berlin from 1888 to 1943.