Steven D. Martinson, Projects of Enlightenment: The Work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Cultural, Intercultural, and Transcultural Perspectives. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2013. 286 pp.

Summary

In recent years, Lessing scholarship has been greatly enriched by not only the completion of Wilfried Barner's critical edition of Lessing's texts but also the publication, in German, of both Monika Fick's Lessing Handbuch and a translation of H. B. Nisbet's biography of Lessing, among others, an updated version of Nisbet's biography, and a companion, in English, to Lessing's oeuvre. Steven Martinson's contribution to this scholarly dialogue aims to fill gaps that he has identified in the literature. Martinson's overarching goal is to trace the intercultural and transcultural dimensions of Lessing's life and works in order to situate Lessing as a paragon of not only the German Enlightenment but the broader European Enlightenment as well.

The majority of the text is a chronologically arranged handbook that addresses political and personal aspects of Lessing's biography and provides succinct evaluations of some of the critical literature on Lessing's writings. Martinson joins other scholars who have recently drawn attention to the importance of gambling for understanding both Lessing's creative endeavors and his tendency to take great intellectual risks. Martinson is also adept at explicating overlooked parts of Lessing's life such as his stint as a general's secretary in Breslau during the Seven Years’ War and the likelihood that he would have been aware of the Friedrich-Veit-Affair (75). Martinson devotes lengthy expositions to some of Lessing's major works such as Minna von Barnhelm (76–82) and Emilia Galotti (116–25); his discussion of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie within eighteenthcentury theatrical discourse is particularly strong (87–106).

However, the majority of Lessing's writings are dealt with in remarkably concise segments of a few paragraphs each. The terse sections enable Martinson to cover a surfeit of material in the book's two hundred or so pages, but they also prevent him from exploring more fully the numerous lacunae that he identifies in the critical literature. For instance, in his reading of Lessing's Fabeln, Martinson concludes by noting that the fables have been translated into twenty-seven languages and are thus of “transcultural significance” (72). For a work exploring the intercultural dimensions of Lessing's writing and reception, it is thus puzzling that no further effort is made to clarify exactly what this significance entails. In addition, many sections are prematurely rounded off with conclusions that are abruptly pronounced instead of thoroughly demonstrated.