Lessings Economic Comedy

Abstract

What Minna says of her beloved applies to Lessing himself: `Er spricht sehr oft von Oekonomie.' 1 Although money and money metaphors are fairly prominent throughout Lessing's dramatic work, economics makes a spectacular appearance in Minna von Barnhelm and Nathan der Weise, the canonized plays with which we will be most concerned. just what we are supposed to make of money's leading role has not yet been decided. The question of whether the omnipresence of money in the former play represents a critique of bourgeois society or a glorification of it, of whether in Nathan money and religion are allies or enemies, has evoked the most contradictory answers. As we shall show in the first part of our essay, Lessing ties a tight knot around love and money in his comedies, and whether money emerges as the hero or villain remains to be seen. Helmut Gobel sees in Lessing's treatment of money the message that human beings are not commodities,' and Hinrich C. Seeba, in his traversal of the plays in which money appears, similarly discerns criticism of a society based on economic exchange. 3 This does not prevent Heinz Schlaffer from viewing Minna and Nathan as affirmations of this same society. 4 Though it will be seen that we incline towards the latter point of view, one of our tasks will be to clarify the pronounced ambiguity of the role that money plays in Lessing's comedy. Money, we will discover, is a rather mysterious substance for