Notes on Friendship: Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Abstract

This article investigates the various ways Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn discuss, dramatize, and publicly promote their friendship, a friendship highly influential in the history of the Jewish–German relationship. Instead of focusing on their biographies, I throw light on the aesthetic and rhetoric representation of friendship in some of their texts: Mendelssohn's ‘Sendschreiben an den Herrn Magister Lessing’ and ‘An die Freunde Lessings’, and Lessing's Nathan der Weise (where the hero is allegedly modelled on Mendelssohn). Mendelssohn presents friendship as essential to civilizational progress, all the while flaunting his own intimate relationship with Lessing. In his texts their friendship appears as something theatrical. But how does this theatre of friendship connect with Lessing's emphasis, in Nathan der Weise, on the ‘naked human being’, i.e. his so-called ‘Humanitäts-Ideal’? How distinguish between a true friend and someone who just pretends to be a friend? What is true friendship, and the true theatre of friendship?