Failed Revolutionary Dramas or Political "Explorers"? Studies on Lessing's Anti-tyrannical Fragments

• Applicant: Elena Stramaglia
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556052313

This research project undertakes a synoptic study of G.E. Lessing's "anti-tyrannical" dramatic fragments – "Samuel Henzi" (1749), "Das befreite Rom" (1749-54), "Masaniello" (1754+1773), "Spartacus" (circa 1770) –, which reevaluates their function and significance in Lessing’s writing practice. The starting point is the critically consolidated understanding of Lessing's numerous unfinished dramatic projects as tied to his characteristic spirit of experimentation, which questions conventional judgments and boundaries through forms of a constantly experimenting and heuristic controversial thinking (Mauser/Saße 1993, Barner 1998, Fick 2016). The project develops this insight into the thesis that the dramatic fragments not only represent products of Lessing's spirit of experimentation, but above all spaces of a corresponding experimental practice. The thesis builds upon Lessing's own explanation, in the preface to his "Schriften", that his fragments are "explorers" (WB 2: 605), conveying inherently provisional and relative knowledge and not aiming at a bottom line, but rather scattering "nothing but fermenta cognitionis" (WB 6: 655) in the productive conflict of their partial moments. Viewed through this lens, the anti-tyrannical fragments do not merely represent failed heroic-republican dramas, but rather provide Lessing with a writing space to test various political positions and scenarios. Through the dramatic articulation of conflicting viewpoints, they offer insights into the versatility of Lessing's political thought, without asserting any specific orientation as absolute. The project thus intends, on one hand, to highlight a previously underappreciated dimension of political experimentation in Lessing's writing, whereby the conflict lines running through the fragments go far beyond mere artistic devices and offer valuable glimpses into tensions and issues that permeate Lessing's entire oeuvre and indirectly manifest overarching features of the German Enlightenment. On the other hand, the project aims for a comprehensive reconsideration of Lessing's fragments, liberating them from the stigma of 'failure' and opening them up for new research – starting with the anti-tyrannical plots, but potentially extending beyond them. The project particularly aims to provide new impetus for a more intensive examination of the fragments as a privileged site where Lessing concretely practices that openness towards the new, the foreign, and the controversial which has long been acknowledged by secondary literature (cf. Albrecht 2005b) and specifically focused on by recent research approaches (most systematically by Niefanger 2023). Finally, this approach sheds light on a modern-seeming function of the fragment form in Lessing – one which already dialogues with early Romantic conceptions – as a space of exploration, self-understanding, and discursive proposal.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position