Lessing invented the job of dramaturg and found a lost Archimedes puzzle
Hired to critique plays and acting at Germany's first national theatre, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing became, by most accounts, the first dramaturg, and gave us the word. Later, as a ducal librarian, he unearthed Archimedes' cattle problem in a Greek manuscript. Nobody solved it until 1880.
Lessing was born on 22 January 1729 in Kamenz, a small Saxon town, son of a Lutheran pastor who hoped he would follow him into the church. After the Latin School in Kamenz and the elite St Afra school in Meissen, he studied theology, medicine, philosophy and philology at Leipzig from 1746. There the famous actress Karoline Neuber drew him into theatre; he translated French plays for her, and she staged his first comedy, The Young Scholar, in 1748.
For the next dozen years he lived in Leipzig and Berlin, reviewing and editing for periodicals. With his cousin Christlob Mylius he launched a theatre journal in 1750 that lasted only four issues but marked him as a serious critic. From 1760 to 1765 he served as secretary to General Tauentzien in Breslau during the Seven Years' War, and wrote his celebrated essay Laocoön there.
In 1767 the new Hamburg National Theatre, backed by Abel Seyler, took him on, and his reflections became the Hamburg Dramaturgy, where the term dramaturgy first appears. Pirated editions of that work caused losses, and the theatre closed three years later. In 1770 he became librarian at Wolfenbüttel for the Duke of Brunswick, and in 1773 he found the 44-line poem containing the cattle problem. He married Eva König, whom he had met in Hamburg, in 1776; she died in 1778 after giving birth to a son who did not survive.
His friendship with the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn has been called one of the Enlightenment's clearest symbols of religious tolerance. It pulled him into fierce religious debates; when his pamphlets were banned, he returned to the stage to make his case, writing Nathan the Wise. A follower of Spinoza and a Freemason from 1771, he died in Brunswick on 15 February 1781, aged 52, while visiting a wine merchant.
Source: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
