Its modern-day function was originated by the innovations of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an 18th-century German playwright, philosopher, and theorist about theatre.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ( 22 January 172915 February 1781 ) was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era.

Lessing was born in Kamenz, a small town in Saxony.

In 1771 Lessing was initiated into Freemasonry in the lodge " Zu den drei Rosen " in Hamburg.

Lessing was also famous for his friendship with Jewish-German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Lessing was a poet, philosopher and critic.

The same experience was described as early as 1767 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his comedy Minna von Barnhelm ( 3, 7 ): “ Mehr als Wachtmeister zu werden?

From the time in Kassel on, Forster was in active correspondence with important figures of the Enlightenment, including Lessing, Herder, Wieland and Goethe.

Lessing had recently produced the drama Die Juden, whose moral was that a Jew can possess nobility of character.

During his time there, Berlin was a rich artistic environment, where Bach mixed with many accomplished musicians, including several notable former students of his father, and important literary figures, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, with whom the composer would become close friends.

The residence of Gotthold Lessing when he was librarian at the HAB

The term " dramaturgy " was coined by the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

This insight was formulated early by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as " not every critic is a genius, but every genius is born a critic ... genius has the proof of all rules within itself.

Michaelis, he was compensated for this by the esteem of Frederick the Great, of Lessing, Carsten Niebuhr, and many foreign scholars.

In addition to the seven fragments published by Lessing, a second portion of the work was issued in 1787 by C. A. E. Schmidt ( a pseudonym ), under the title Übrige noch ungedruckte Werke des Wolfenbüttelschen Fragmentisten, and a further portion by D. W. Klose in Christian Wilhelm Niedner's Zeitschrift für historische Theologie, 1850-52.

It was read with intense interest by Lessing, who found in the earliest of Winckelmann's works the starting-point for his Laocoon, and by Herder, Goethe and Kant.

Christian Fürchtegott Gellert ( July 4, 1715 – December 13, 1769 ) was a German poet, one of the forerunners of the golden age of German literature that was ushered in by Lessing.

He was, moreover, a mentor to Herder and an admired influence on Goethe, Jacobi, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lessing and Mendelssohn.

Abbt was a fervent admirer of Lessing and seconded his educational, prosaic style of writing.

His mother, Irene, was the sister of political activist Gottfried Lessing, who was married to the British writer Doris Lessing during his exile in Southern Rhodesia.

H. E. Lessing has shown by circumstantial evidence that the climate anomaly of 1816, Year Without a Summer, due to the eruption of Tambora that impaired transportation in Europe by crop failure and starvation of horses, was the cause of Drais ' invention of the velocipede.

* Carl Louis Gotthold Ludwig Lessing ( 1817-1897 ), modelmaker / designer, wine grower and lecturer, son of Carl Friedrich Lessing ( 1778 – 1848 ) and great nephew of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ( 1729 – 1781 )

In late 2007 / early 2008 the company founder Judith Malina performed in Maudie and Jane, a stage adaptation, directed by Reznikov, of the Doris Lessing novel, The Diary of Jane Somers.

* Lauren Lessing and Mary Schafer, “ Unveiling Raphaelle Peale ’ s Venus Rising from the Sea – A Deception ,” Winterthur Portfolio 43 ( July / August 2009 ), 229-59.

* Theodor Lessing, “ Jewish Self-Hatred ”, Nativ ( Hebrew: translated from German ), 17 ( 96 ), 1930 / 2004, pp. 49 – 54 ( Der Jüdische Selbsthass, 1930 ).

In 1773, Lessing published an epigram he had found in a manuscript during his work as a librarian ; it claimed to be a letter sent by Archimedes to Eratosthenes.

Lessing also brought Mendelssohn to public attention for the first time: Mendelssohn had written an essay attacking Germans ' neglect of their native philosophers ( principally Gottfried Leibniz ), and lent the manuscript to Lessing.

However, he also had many notable defenders, chief among them the novelist Doris Lessing.

Wieland's tastes had changed ; the writings of his early Swiss years — Der geprüfte Abraham ( The Trial of Abraham's Faith, 1753 ), Sympathien ( 1756 ), Empfindungen eines Christen ( 1757 ) — were still in the manner of his earlier writings, but with the tragedies, Lady Johanna Gray ( 1758 ), and Clementina von Porretta ( 1760 ) — the latter based on Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison — the epic fragment Cyrus ( 1759 ), and the " moral story in dialogues ," Araspes und Panthea ( 1760 ), Wieland, as Gotthold Lessing said, " forsook the ethereal spheres to wander again among the sons of men.

Shikasta draws on the Old Testament and is influenced by spiritual and mystical themes in Sufism, an Islamic belief system which Lessing had taken an interest in in the mid-1960s.

By the late-1970s Lessing was considered " one of the most honest, intelligent and engaged writers of the day ", and Western readers unfamiliar with Surfism were dismayed that Lessing had abandoned her " rational worldview ".

Lessing said in an interview that its followers had written to her and asked, " When are we going to be visited by the gods?

Lessing probably had the story in the first instance from Boccaccio's Decameron.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing, who lived in Southern Rhodesia between 1924 and 1949 and had two children there, has published works about the colonial experience and exposing racial hostilities.

The historical Lessing had written Hanswurst into the Hamburg Dramaturgy, and called the banishment ' the biggest buffoonery of all ’ (‘ die größte Harlekinade ’).

In 1840, one of his paintings attracted attention and procured him several orders, which enabled him to go to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied with Lessing.

Lessing advocated that dramaturgs should carry their work out working directly with theatre companies rather than in isolation.

* Lessing ’ s Emilia Galotti, with footnotes and vocabulary ; New York, Hinds & Noble, 1899.

* Lessing ’ s Nathan der Weise, with footnotes and vocabulary.

The early 18th century sees the conclusion of the Baroque period and the incipient Age of Enlightenment with authors such as Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

1877 ); Charles Voysey, Fragments from Reimarus ( London, 1879 ) ( a translation of the life of Reimarus by Strauss, with the second part of the seventh fragment, on the " Object of Jesus and his Disciples "); the Lives of Lessing by Danzel and G. E. Guhrauer, Sime, and Zimmern ; Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie ( vol.

* James C. O ' Flaherty, The Quarrel of Reason with Itself: Essays on Hamann, Michaelis, Lessing, Nietzsche ; ( Camden House ) 1988, ISBN 0-938100-56-4

But, in 1949 — after objections by U. S. Congressmen over the appropriateness of a government body awarding prizes in fine arts and literature to individuals who might harbor dissident views towards the U. S. ( re: Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize ) — the Library of Congress discontinued awarding medals of any kind, including ( i ) the Bollingen Prize, the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for " eminent services to chamber music, and ( iii ) three prizes endowed by Lessing Rosenwald in connection with an annual national exhibition of prints.

This section needs to be expanded with JM Coetzee, Maryse Condé, Cyril Dabydeen, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Raywat Deonandan, Buchi Emecheta, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Alamgir Hashmi, Bonny Hicks, Hanif Kureishi, Doris Lessing, Earl Lovelace, Gabriel García Márquez, Bharati Mukherjee, Barbara Kingsolver, VS Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, RK Narayan, Mahashweta Devi, EM Forster, Anita Desai, Bapsi Sidhwa, Wilbur Smith, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong ' o, Yvonne Vera, Derek Walcott, Kath Walker, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Haim Sabato, Eleanor Dark, Bole Butake, Anne Tanyi-Tang, Bate Besong, Maxine Hong Kingston.

In 1964, disillusioned with Communism, Lessing turned her attention to Sufism, an Islamic belief system, after reading The Sufis by Idries Shah.

He said that the book's cohesiveness is its variety, and noted how Lessing interspaces her " grand designs " and " configurations of enormous powers " with " passages of aching poignancy ".

Pettit lost a power struggle with his deputies ( Steve Lessing, Tom Tucker, and Joseph M. Gregory ) back on March 15 that year that caused him to relinquish its COO title, likely brought about after the three men found about Pettit's extramarital affairs, which violated Fuld's unwritten rules on marriage and social etiquette.

Born was also the regional head of the Viennese Illuminati lodge, and was a sympathizer with the enlightenment ideas of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

John Crowe Ransom ( right ) with Robie Macauley as he prepares to become editor of The Kenyon Review in 1959. In 1959 Robie Macauley succeeded Ransom as editor of The Kenyon Review, where he published fiction and poetry by John Barth, T. S. Eliot, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Richmond Lattimore, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowell, V. S. Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O ' Connor, V. S. Pritchett, Thomas Pynchon, J. F. Powers, Karl Shapiro, Jean Stafford, Christina Stead, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, as well as articles, essays and book reviews by Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Ellmann, Leslie Fiedler, Martin Green, and Raymond Williams.

Together with Lessing and Mendelssohn, Nicolai edited the famous Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend between 1759 and 1765 ; and from 1765 to 1792 he edited the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek.

He was specially famed for his portrait figures of eminent men, treated with much idealism and dramatic vigour ; among the latter class his chief works were colossal statues of Goethe and Schiller for the a monument in Weimar, of Weber for Dresden and of Lessing for Braunschweig cast by Georg Howaldt.

With his dramas as well as with his critical writings he did much to prepare the way for Lessing, by whom his genius was warmly appreciated.