To the extent that the eighteenth century in Germany was indeed an age of the unfettered critical spirit, as Immanuel Kant assured his contemporaries it was, it found its most articulate voice in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. As a scholar of classical antiquity he rivals Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In his extended controversy with leading Protestant theologians on the nature of Christianity and the truth of its teachings, a topic of singular importance to the European Enlightenment, he presented the more convincing arguments until he was silenced by ducal decree. But his most significant contribution was the rejuvenation of German literature, especially the drama.

Lessing's devastating attack on Johann Christoph Gottsched's theater reform put an end to the attempt to establish a classicist literature in Germany. Reinterpreting Aristotle's Poetics, Lessing subordinated aesthetic "laws" and "rules" to the effect which a specific genre is to have on its recipients, thus replacing...