Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a pastor’s son who lived by his pen in Berlin and Hamburg, the first German to do so, and became the critic and dramatist of the German Enlightenment. Minna von Barnhelm is the first great German comedy; Nathan the Wise the plea for religious tolerance; the Laocoön the essay that separated poetry from painting. The Education of the Human Race, his last work, reads revelation as the schooling of humanity toward a reason that will no longer need it. He said that if God offered him truth in one hand and the search for truth in the other, he would choose the search.