Nathan the wise

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Data
Title: Nathan the wise
Genus: Dramatic poem
Original language: German
Author: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Publishing year: 1779
Premiere: April 14, 1783
Place of premiere: Döbbelinsches Theater
Place and time of the action: Jerusalem around 1192
people
  • Nathan , a wealthy Jew in Jerusalem
  • Recha , his adopted daughter
  • Sultan Saladin
  • Sittah , his sister
  • Daja , a Christian, but in the house of the Jew, as companion of the Recha
  • A young templar
  • A dervish
  • The Patriarch of Jerusalem
  • A friar
  • An emir
  • along with various mameluks from Saladin
Recha greets her father , in 1877 by Maurycy Gottlieb

Nathan the Wise is the title and main character of a five-act ideological drama by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , which was published in 1779 and premiered in Berlin on April 14, 1783. The work focuses on humanism and the tolerance concept of the Enlightenment . The ring parable became particularly famous in the third act of the drama.

Nathan the Wise is Lessing's last work. The background is the fragments dispute, a dispute with the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze , which went so far that a partial publication ban was imposed on Lessing. As a result Lessing integrated his deist ideas into this drama. Immediately before its completion, the Enlightenment had worked on his main philosophical work The Education of the Human Race. However, there is evidence that his occupation with the material dates back to around 1750.

In the figure of Nathan the Wise Lessing erected a literary monument to his friend Moses Mendelssohn , the founder of the Jewish Enlightenment .

Outer shape

The structure of the work corresponds to a classic drama . This includes the following elements:

Lessing chose blank verse as the meter for his drama , which originated in England and was only able to establish itself in Germany through him. The plot is divided into 5 lifts, which in turn are divided into appearances.

Nathan the Wise contains both tragic and comic elements, but despite the conciliatory outcome, is neither a comedy nor a tragedy . The focus of the action is the ring parable, thus at the core the question of the “true” religion .

content

Wolfgang Heinz as Nathan ( Deutsches Theater Berlin , 1971)

The action takes place at the time of the Third Crusade (1189–1192) during an armistice in Jerusalem .

When the Jew Nathan returns from a business trip, he learns that his foster daughter Recha has been rescued from the fire of his burning house by a young Christian temple master . The knight of the order, in turn, owes his life to the Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, Sultan Saladin , who was the only one of twenty prisoners to pardon him because he looks like his deceased brother Assad. Despite these fortunate circumstances, the rational thinking Nathan is not prepared to suspect a miracle behind it and also convinces Recha that it is harmful to believe in the work of guardian angels.

Saladin, a little lax when it comes to financial matters, indeed almost melancholy indifference, is currently in financial difficulties. That is why, on the advice of his more calculating sister Sittah, he has the wealthy Nathan brought to him to test his generosity, which has been praised throughout Jerusalem: Instead of asking him directly for a loan, Saladin pretends to begin with Nathan's wisdom, which is also widely praised to want to test, and asks him about the "true religion". Nathan, who has already been informed of Saladin's financial difficulties by his friend Al-Hafi and warned against his financial frivolity, recognizes the trap. He decides to answer Saladin's question with a “fairy tale”, later called the ring parabola (see below). Saladin was deeply impressed and immediately understood this parable as a message of the equality of the three great monotheistic religions. Moved by Nathan's humanity, he asks him to be his friend from now on. Nathan gladly agrees and grants Saladin a generous loan on top of that, without being asked.

The Lord Templar, who saved Recha from the flames but has so far hardly paid any attention as a mere Jewish girl, is brought together with her by Nathan, falls head over heels in love with her and wants to marry her on the spot. However, his name makes Nathan hesitate to give his consent. The Knight Templar is upset. When he then learns from Recha's companion Daja, a Christian, that Recha was not adopted by Nathan's daughter but only by him as such, but that her birth parents were Christians, he turns to the Patriarch of Jerusalem for advice . Although the Templar submits his request as if it were a hypothetical case, the fanatical head of the church guesses what this is about and wants to look for “this Jew” immediately and have him put on the stake for temptation to apostasy . He does not consider his noble motives; and the fact that he did not raise the Christian child as Jews, but on the contrary in no faith, is not attenuated by the patriarch, but aggravating: "Do nothing! The Jew is burned; yes, it would be worth it three times for this alone to become."

From the notes of the friar who brought Recha to Nathan as a toddler, it finally turns out that Recha, who was brought up by a Jew, and the Christian templar are not only siblings - hence Nathan's reservations about marriage - but also the children of Saladin's brother Assad, whereby the close “kinship” of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious families is once again made clear: the curtain falls under the silent repetition of all-round hugs.

Influences

In his search for a German-speaking bourgeois theater, Lessing was strongly influenced by the intellectual influence of the French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot . In his Le Fils naturel ou les Épreuves de la vertu, comédie suivie des Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757), in short: Fils naturel , which he translated into German, a model for his Nathan the Wise (1779) . Lessing valued Diderot's theater reform, especially because of the abolition of the class clause , the abolition of the heroism of the dramatic characters and the use of prosaic language in the drama.

Ring parabola

Paul Wegener (right) as Nathan,
Kai Möller as Sultan.
German Theater Berlin 1945

This parable of the three rings is regarded as a key text of the Enlightenment and as a pointed formulation of the tolerance idea . It can already be found in the 73rd novella of Il Novellino (13th century) and in the third story of the First Day by Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone . The templates for Lessing also include Jans des Enikels tale from Saladin's table (13th century) and the story Vom Dreiffachlauf der Welt in the Gesta Romanorum . The material of the three indistinguishable rings can be traced back to the 11th century. It was probably invented by Sephardic Jews on the Iberian Peninsula .

Boccaccio, Lessing's main source, is about a father who passes a precious ring , his most valuable jewel, on to the one of his sons whom he loves most and whom he thus inherits. So do his descendants. When, generations later, however, a father loves his three sons all equally, he has two more rings made without their knowledge, so that the father “hardly” and the sons can no longer decide which ring is the original one.

This action can also be found, in a slightly different form, in Lessing's key scene : Saladin summons Nathan and puts the question to him as to which of the three monotheistic religions he thinks is the true one. Nathan immediately recognizes the trap set for him: If he declares his religion to be "the only true one", Saladin has to take it as an insult to majesty , but if he flatters the (Muslim) sultan, he has to be asked why he is still a Jew. In order to evade a clear answer (“Don't just feed the children with fairy tales”), he replies with a parable : A man owns a valuable family heirloom, a ring that has the property of making its wearer “ pleasant to God and man "To do if the owner carries it" with this confidence ". This ring was passed down from father to son he loved most for generations. But one day it happens that a father has three sons and does not want to favor any of them. That is why he has an artist make exact duplicates of the ring, bequeaths one of the rings to each of his sons and assures everyone that his ring is the real one.

After the father's death, the sons go to court to clarify which of the three rings is the real one. But the judge is unable to determine this. He reminds the three men that the real ring has the property of making the wearer popular with all other people; but if none of the three had this effect, then that could only mean that the real ring had been lost. (The judge does not explicitly answer the question when this could have happened; the father's ring may also have been fake.) The judge advises the sons that each of them should believe that his ring is the real one be. Her father was equally fond of all three and therefore could not bear to favor one of them and offend the other two, as tradition actually required. If one of the rings is the real one, then this will show in the future in the effect it is said to have been. Every ring bearer should try to bring about this effect for himself.

Lessing's continuation of the Boccaccio story

In contrast to Boccaccio's story, the ring that Nathan reports is not only “beautiful and precious”, but contains an opal that has also been assigned healing power in literature and that “served as a symbol for the grace of God”, “if a person who is free from guilt carries it ”. However, it only works if the wearer believes in it - so the owner's cooperation is crucial. Not only can the father hardly distinguish the three rings, but really no longer at all, which does not prevent him from being "happy and joyful"; he is positively relieved in the illusory hope of being able to satisfy all sons in this way.

For Lessing, the actual main part of the story becomes the time after the sons have inherited the inheritance. The argument between the sons is illustrated more vividly to illustrate the problem. A judge is introduced that Boccaccio does not yet have. He refers to the miracle effect of the real ring and derives a task for the owner from it. It will either bring the solution or show that the owners were caught up in bigotry . As a further result of the trial period, it is also conceivable that all three stones are fake and the real first one has been lost.

It is emphasized that the rings and their stones as such, that is, without the effort of their owners, do nothing and that the father loved all three sons equally and considered all three rings to be equally valuable. The judge's judgment that the real stone is currently not recognizable, and the resulting task, that every son should live according to his stone, forbids bigotry, intolerance and proselytizing.

interpretation

The parable can be understood to mean that the father for the loving God, the three rings for the three monotheistic religions ( Judaism , Christianity and Islam ), the three sons for their followers and the judge to whom the dispute is presented is for Nathan himself stand. One statement of the parable would be that God loves people equally, regardless of their religious affiliation, since all three religions are his work and all people are his children. According to this interpretation, however, it cannot be conclusively explained how one has to imagine that God should have inherited his ring from his father (the ring has been inherited for generations). At the end of the parable, Nathan speaks of another judge, before whom the first will invite the children and grandchildren of the three brothers: “So I invite them to this chair for over a thousand thousand years. There will / a wiser man sit on this chair / than I; and speaking. […] “ These thousand times a thousand, that is, a million years, refer to an end-time judge in which God can be seen again, who makes the final decision. So God stands as Father and as Judge at the beginning and at the end of the parable - one can also say: at the beginning and at the end of the world, according to the Judeo-Christian view. The question of where he himself got the "real" ring from is then superfluous.

It is crucial that people do not insist on “owning” the “only true religion”, since it makes them fanatical and unlovable. Admittedly, it is only natural that everyone should prefer their own religion, because who would accuse their parents of having brought them up to a "false belief"? This preference should not, however, tempt one to want to assert one's own faith as the sole salvific against all others, since every authentic religion ultimately has its origin in God. Because the degree of authenticity of the first ring is to be seen in the extent to which it makes “popular before God and people”, every ring that fulfills this is genuine and every one that does not fulfill this is false. Since the brothers distrust each other, none of their rings can be the real one. The validity of every religion can therefore be seen in the extent to which it will be able to create love in the future.

The question of which ring is the real one has to be postponed because none of the three religions ennoble people as it would have to be if the real ring (the real religion) had not been lost, which according to the judge must be considered as a possibility. With his answer, Nathan ultimately rejects Saladin's question about the “only true religion”.

The Catholic theologian Rudolf Laufen writes about Lessing's intention, which he linked with the writing of his variant of the ring parable: “The ring parable, of course, which was originally offensive and provocative, but has long since 'come down to a relatively harmless educational value' and is more common today serves the non-binding “moral self-affirmation” of educated middle class circles, is not the sum of Lessing's theology of religion! Rather, it gives advice for a peaceful-tolerant coexistence, for a modus vivendi of positive religions as long as they still exist. "

Natural religion and positive religion

Lessing explains the term “positive religion” in his work “On the Origin of Revealed Religion”, which was probably created in 1762/63. “To recognize a God, to try to make the most worthy concepts of him, to take these most worthy concepts into account in all our actions, is the most complete epitome of all natural religion.” This “natural religion” is to be assigned to the natural state in which people are before the social contract had found. According to the social contract, natural religion has been converted into “positive religions” by conventions (analogy: transition from natural law to positive law ). What is true about positive religions is their common core, natural religion, while that which is added by conventions, is inevitable, but does not make positive religion “true”. All positive religions gain authority through the person of the founder of the religion, who is believed that God himself speaks out of his mouth (through revelation ). Lessing's conclusion: "All positive and revealed religions are consequently equally true and equally false."

The view (also expressed in Laufen's judgment), Lessing thinks that traditional religion (the “positive religions”) only has the instrumental function of making itself superfluous by helping a morality to become independent that will no longer be in the future religious reasons, "falls short" in Axel Schmitt's view. Lessing, whose life's work is a kind of “work in progress”, has always avoided a “fixation of the valid” (also in his own views).

Characterization of the main characters

Nathan

Statue of Nathan by Erich Schmidtbochum (1961) in Wolfenbüttel, in the background the Lessing House

Nathan is considered to be Lessing's mouthpiece. He is the main character who ties all the storylines together into a whole. He is initially introduced as a wealthy merchant from Jerusalem (I, 6.), who always brings a lot of money and luxury goods with him from his business trips. Since he is an opponent of lending money, because it only makes the debtor dependent, he does not want to fill Saladin's empty state coffers at first, although he could then increase his wealth through appropriate interest. Through his behavior, Nathan invalidates the general prejudice of the usury Jew who only strives for wealth. It was only after Saladin became his friend that Nathan responded to his unspoken request to lend him money and made him a generous and selfless gift.

Nathan has broken away from Orthodox Judaism and is tolerant of other religions ("Jud 'and Christian and Muselmann and Parsi , everything is one to him"). For him it is important to be “human”, in the sense of a “mere human being” and not a “such person” (cf. also Lessing's work “ Ernst and Falk ”). By speaking of the Jewish and Christian people , Nathan shows that he does not only want to criticize the distinctions between "such people" on the basis of their religious affiliation. With him, faith and reason are in harmony. That is why he consistently rejects the "irrational" belief in miracles . He lives his humane worldview, which he also makes the basis of Recha's upbringing, exemplary. It is because of her, and not because of his business acumen, as the Templar initially suspects, that he is called "wise".

Recha is only Nathan's adopted daughter, but he naturally calls her “my Recha” and “my dear child”. Although not her biological father, he is the perfect paternal guardian for Recha: "The blood alone does not make the father." His enlightened and tolerant thinking is also shown in the fact that Nathan rejects any "belief in miracles" and, despite it through the Christians caused the loss of his wife and seven sons, the “Christian baby” Recha takes in at the age of eight weeks and sees the child as a gift from God: “I had three days' and nights' in ash '/ And dust before God , and cried - [...] But now reason gradually came back. [...] I took the child [...] threw myself on my knees and sobbed: God! on seven / But now one more! "

Saladin

Sultan Saladin's palace is the center of political power in Jerusalem and the scene of the final scene. During an attack on Tebnin, Saladin's men take twenty Knights Templar prisoner. Saladin only leaves one of these Knights Templar alive because he looks like his missing brother Assad.

Saladin is very generous when it comes to money matters, which ultimately threatens to drive him to economic ruin. His religious views are also quite liberal. The key experience in this regard, however, is the meeting with Nathan and his "Ring Parable".

The young templar

The Templar Curd von Stauffen is a Christian and a brave knight of the Templar Order . He is an impulsive young man who was initially shaped by the negative prejudices against the Jews that were common at the time. With his courageous intervention he saves Recha from the flames of her burning house. For this deed, however, he does not want any thanks or recognition, because he did not help so much for the sake of the victim, but because he was already tired of the failed crusade of his life. Therefore he avoids Recha and Daja. Only when Nathan arranged a meeting and opened his eyes to the girl did Curd fall in love with her and now, again very impulsively, did everything in his power to marry the beautiful girl even against Nathan's misgivings: he is indeed by Nathan's and Saladin's role models soon also convinced of the equality of all religions, but temporarily falls back into old ways of thinking and into religious intolerance when he learns that Recha is actually a Christian. Eventually, however, Nathan, who recognizes the brother Rechas (alias Blanda von Filnek) in Curd (alias Leu von Filnek), and Saladin, who greets him as the son of his missing brother Assad (alias Wolf von Filnek), heal the heated "defiant head".

The patriarch

As a Christian fanatic, the patriarch is a politically ambitious and insidious opponent of Saladin and Nathan, who pompously flaunts his power as the ecclesiastical head of Jerusalem. Lessing characterizes his narrow-minded belief in his own infallibility , his radical orthodoxy and intolerance, not least by repeating his decision about Nathan three times: “Do nothing! The Jew is burned ” . Archbishop and Patriarch Heraclius , who was in office in the 12th century, is said to have modeled this figure.

The friar

Bonafides was once a servant of Saladin's brother Assad, when he was named Wolf von Filnek . Now he is in the service of the patriarch as a friar and has to spy and intrigue for him, although he detests his machinations. To avoid the worst, he deliberately acts simple-minded so that the potential victims can see through the intentions of his client.

Here yes

Daja is the former maid of a crusader who drowned during a crusade together with Emperor Barbarossa and the educator Rechas in Nathan's house. Recha describes her as a downright fanatical Christian and one of the contemporary "enthusiasts" (5th act, 6th appearance), who did her good, but also tormented her. Daja refuses to accept Nathan's tolerant teaching and is therefore missing from the last scene of the drama. All her steps serve to bring Recha, who grew up as a Jew but a native Christian, together with the Christian Templar and to lead both of them back from Jerusalem to the Christian West.

Recha

Her maiden name is Blanda von Filnek. She is the adoptive daughter of her foster father, Nathan, whom she loved so much, but as a result of Daja's influence she appears a bit naive and overly enthusiastic, especially since she has not yet come into contact with books or men.

Sittah

Saladin's sister gives her brother loans without his brother knowing anything about it. As a shrewd strategist and good chess player, she has a more sober relation to reality than her brother. Her combination of cleverness, tact and loyalty to her own family makes this emancipated woman a counterweight to Lessing's two more emotional and less intellectual women, Recha and Daja.

Al-Hafi

The mendicant monk ( dervish ) and chess friend Nathan becomes treasurer of the sultan. He flatters the assumption of this office, with the help of which he hopes in the service and on behalf of Saladin to be able to successfully fight poverty and need. But when Al-Hafi see how the court of the Sultan heading towards bankruptcy, he says goodbye as "classic drop-outs" to the Ganges, where he wrote his alternative life as a mendicant in his Parsi wants faith community, the Ghebern live. He asks Nathan to accompany him there because he fears that the lavish Saladin could otherwise corrupt him into interest-rate transactions.

As a follower of the teaching of Zarathustra, Al-Hafi represents another religion in this drama. Lessing originally planned to put this figure at the center of a postscript under the title Dervish .

reception

Nathan the Wise, sculpture by Adolf Jahn , around 1900, alabaster

Was listed Nathan the Wise , first of all, but not publicly, on October 15 in 1779 in Mannheim. The official premiere of the play in 1783 in the Döbbelin Theater , Berlin, was disappointing because it did not meet the expectations of the audience. According to Thorsten Meier, it was the "lack of action, the sometimes very long and sometimes very reflective dialogues that have something like sentences about them, and the solemn sophistication of the piece" that prevented the emergence of an illusion . With the production of August Wilhelm Iffland in 1802 and the Goethe's in Weimar, the play was a success on stage for the first time.

Although the work was part of the educational canon, it was banned from playing during the Nazi era and disappeared from school reading. The call for tolerance and the portrayal of a human exemplary Jew in the figure of Nathan was contrary to National Socialist ideology. After 1945 it found its way back into many curricula for German lessons and is still considered a classic for school reading today.

Film adaptations

The drama was filmed in 1922 by the Jewish film director Manfred Noa under the title Nathan the Wise . The silent film was considered lost after the Second World War. Employees of the Munich Film Museum discovered it in Moscow, arranged for an extensive restoration and released it on DVD in 2006. In 2009, the film was provided with new film music for HD broadcast on arte .

Other film adaptations come from Karl-Heinz Stroux (1956), from Hermann Lanske and Leopold Lindtberg (1964), from Franz Peter Wirth (1967), from Friedo Solter and Vera Loebner (1969, GDR), from Oswald Döpke (1979), from Friedo Solter and Margot Thyrêt (1989, GDR) and by Uwe Eric Laufenberg (2006).

Text sources

First print (on subscription basis , still without publisher information)
  • First edition: Nathan the Wise. A dramatic poem in five acts. [O. Publisher's information], Berlin 1779.
  • Ingrid Haaser (Ed.): Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the Wise. Text and materials, classic school reading, Cornelsen, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-464-12136-4 .
  • Ingrid Haaser (Ed.): Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the Wise. Teacher's booklet. Classical school reading, Cornelsen, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-464-12137-2 .
  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the wise. A dramatic poem in five acts. Anaconda, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-938484-51-9 .
  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the wise. A dramatic poem in five acts. Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-15-000003-3 .
  • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Nathan the wise. E-book at Projekt Gutenberg .

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Nathan the Wise  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiversity: Title page and contemporary cover of the first edition 1779  - course materials

Free web editions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Th. C. Van Stockum: Lessing and Diderot. In: Neophilologus. Volume 39, Issue 1, 1955, pp. 191-202.
  2. ↑ The theater of Herr Diderot translated by Lessing, 1760, including: Le fils naturel (1757) and Le père de famille (1758); Strange example of female vengeance . Drawn from a manuscript of the late Diderot, Thalia, 1, 1785 translated by Schiller ( full text on Wikisource )
  3. ↑ Adam Bžoch: German Literature in the Age of Enlightenment. Catholic University in Ružomberok Press, Ružomberok, Verbum 2011, ISBN 978-80-8084-701-2 .
  4. ↑ Lessing refers in a letter of September 6, 1778 to Elise Reimarus to the figure of Melchizedech (Decameron I.3); Ephraim Lessing: Collected Works , Volume 9: Letters; Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1982, p. 798 f.
  5. ↑ See also Solomon ibn Verga : Schevet Jehuda. Edited by Sina Rauschenbach (= Jüdische Geistesgeschichte, Volume 6) Parerga Verlag, Berlin 2006, pp. 106-108
  6. ^ Nathan the Wise , v. 1889f.
  7. ↑ Walter Andreas Euler in: Difficult tolerance . Edited by Mariano Delgado et al., Friborg and Stuttgart 2012, p. 228, note 39
  8. ^ Nathan the Wise , V. 1985–1990.
  9. ↑ Rudolf Laufen: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's theology of religion - a lasting challenge. ( Memento of February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) p. 13 f. (PDF; 154 kB). In: Religious instruction in higher schools. 45, 2002, pp. 359-369, also in: Pastoralblatt. 55.2003, pp. 49-59.
  10. ^ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Lessing's works in five volumes . Berlin / Weimar 1982. Volume 2, p. 240 ff.
  11. ↑ Axel Schmitt: The fermentation substances of tolerance . Literary criticism , July 2003.
  12. ↑ Nathan the Wise , v. 1070
  13. ↑ Nathan the Wise , V. 1307-1311
  14. ↑ Nathan the Wise , verses 359–364
  15. ^ Stephan Eberle: Lessing and Zarathustra. In: Rückert studies. Volume 17 (2006/2007) [2008], pp. 73-130.
  16. ↑ See: www.literaturwissenschaft-online.uni-kiel.de
  17. ↑ See Thorsten Meier: Tolerance and aesthetic disposition. In: Oxana Zielke (ed.): Nathan and his heirs. Contributions to the history of the concept of tolerance in literature . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2901-1 , pp. 44–45.
  18. ↑ Thorsten Meier: Tolerance and Aesthetic Disposition. In: Oxana Zielke (ed.): Nathan and his heirs. Contributions to the history of the concept of tolerance in literature . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2901-1 , p. 46.
  19. ↑ See Wilfried Barner , Gunter E. Grimm , Helmuth Kieser, Martin Kramer: Lessing. Epoch - work - effect. 6th edition. CH Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-43221-2 , p. 417.
  20. ↑ See Sebastian Thoma: Nathan the Wise. In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Volume 7, Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-025873-8 , p. 335.
  21. ↑ Ulrike Draesner, John von Düffel, Anja Brockert: Classics of school reading, Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing . SWR2 , October 5, 2015, accessed October 31, 2017.