There has long been discussion of the meaning and function of the play of rings staged to such effect by the titular heroine of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1767 drama Minna von Barnhelm, and the rings that stand at the center of the parable recounted by the title character at the center of his 1779 »dramatisches Gedicht« Nathan the Wise. However, I am unaware of any sustained examination of the question of whether and how these rings might serve related functions in the two works. Prominently deployed, the rings are readily recognizable as devices that in each case enable a moment of recognition that in turn allows for a comic resolution, a happy end. »O über die Blinden, die nicht sehen wollen!« exclaims Minna before Tellheim realizes that the betrothal ring he has just drawn from his pocket is indeed the one that he once received from her as a pledge of her love, and consequently that they can be reunited after all (V.xii, WB 6:106). In the later play, the Sultan Saladin’s enjoinment to Nathan to become his »friend« (III.vii, WB 9:560), in response to Nathan’s telling of the ring parable, anticipates the scene of reconciliation with which the curtain falls at the drama’s end. Whatever one makes of these conclusions, however, the current article shifts attention away from such moments of apparent resolution, instead considering the two dramas together in order to argue that each ring needs to be understood as a token – symbolon – of the working of recollection and forgetting, and that both the complexity of the ring-thematic and of the interpretative attempts the dramas have inspired reflect an essential ambivalence in each drama’s understanding of memory. I concentrate intentionally on two works with overtly comic dimensions, in which the necessity of reconciliation and forgetting is contrasted by a tragic counter-force – one revealed in the struggle to break the hold of the past. As I argue, to trace the history of the rings in these texts is to follow the contours of this ambivalence regarding the workings of memory and the authority of past experience to shape life in the present. In each drama, the rings represent a play with memory whose outcome can be understood to define this present.

I.

Minna von Barnhelm announces itself on its title page as a Lustspiel, yet the weight of contemporary history is palpable throughout the drama and in its finest details. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe famously refers to the integration of historical experience into Lessing’s play when he characterizes it as »die erste, aus dem bedeutenden Leben gegriffene Theaterproduktion, von spezifisch temporärem Gehalt.«Footnote 1 The play’s closeness to historical events has regularly been noted, as has the fact that Lessing, who served from 1760 to the beginning of 1765 as secretary to Frederick the Great’s General Friedrich Bogislav von Tauentzien, had occasion to become closely familiar with the daily lives of soldiers in the Prussian army in the second half of the Seven Years’ War.Footnote 2 Both Major von Tellheim and his former sergeant Werner are based on historical characters.Footnote 3 And although Lessing completed the play in 1767, he added the note »Verfertiget im Jahre 1763« to its title page, in this way directly connecting the work to that year’s Treaty of Hubertusburg, which in Germany marked the War’s end. It has been further observed that, when the play’s Innkeeper records the date of the action as August 22nd (II:ii, WB 6:32), he more specifically ties the drama to Frederick’s historically consequential implementation of a financial regulatory commission intended to stabilize the immediate post-War economy in the aftermath of a wave of bankruptcies that had shaken markets from Amsterdam to Berlin.Footnote 4 These details, and the frequent and overt references in the play to the Seven Year’s War and the particular conflict between Prussia and Saxony, make it clear that that soldier’s »luck« or »fortune« named in the play’s full title (Minna von Barnhelm, oder das Soldatenglück) refers, not just to a general motif, but to historically specific military and economic upheavals. Further, Daniel Fulda has drawn on Reinhart Koselleck to show that »history« does not simply provide a frame for the play, but rather that the drama is shaped by an awareness of historical development and that, in its historicity, it changes the comic genre itself. (Fulda refers to an »Einbruch der verzeitlichten Zeit in die Komödienzeit.«)Footnote 5 As Fulda has pointed out more generally, comedy is traditionally »shaped by forgiveness and forgetting,« whereas tragedy is precisely incapable of conciliatory forgetting – Fulda cites as an example Lessing’s 1755 play Miß Sara Sampson.Footnote 6 The drama Minna von Barnhelm represents an innovation in the comic genre not just through the thematic role of its historical references, in other words, but through the structural role that historical consciousness and memory take up within it and that make of this a comedy of a new kind.

In the aftermath of the Seven Year’s War, then, the young Saxon aristocrat Minna arrives at an inn with her lady’s maid Franciska on their journey to track down Minna’s fiancé, the discharged officer of the Prussian forces Major von Tellheim. Already before Minna appears on the scene at the start of Act II, we know that all is not well. Down on his luck, Tellheim has asked his servant Just to pawn a ring to help cover expenses. This is the last precious object in his possession, Tellheim says;Footnote 7 as Just notes, however, Tellheim has already ceased wearing it. The alliance it represents has already undergone a rupture.

The couple’s engagement rings appear singly or together in each of the play’s acts and in some 16 scenes. As a motif, they recurrently illuminate and shape the drama’s action. When the innkeeper, to whom Just has sold Tellheim’s ring, shows it to his new guest Minna, who takes it, she recognizes in it the pendant to her own betrothal ring, realizing both that she may be close to finding Tellheim, but also that something is amiss. For his part, the innkeeper breezily suggests that there is no telling where the ring originally came from – many things changed ownership in the recent war, after all, and this can hardly be the only ring that got lost along Saxony’s borders during that time: »Es werden mehr Ringe aus Sachsen über die Grenze gegangen sein« (II.ii, WB 6:36). Things are further complicated when Tellheim’s sergeant Paul Werner playfully and misleadingly suggests to Franciska that Tellheim must have acquired the ring during one of many carefree erotic encounters in Saxony during the Prussian occupation. As the innkeeper frets about retrieving Tellheim’s ring from Minna, in Act IV the latter undertakes her own mischievous intervention in the plot of the two rings, handing her engagement ring to her maid and slipping Tellheim’s onto her own finger. Franciska asks why she wishes to keep it. »Recht weiß ich es selbst nicht,« Minna responds, »aber mich dünkt, ich sehe so etwas voraus, wo ich ihn brauchen könnte« (IV.v, WB 6:79). In the following scene, a stage direction specifies that Minna slowly draws the ring from her finger as she informs Tellheim that things are over between them and that they must forget each other: »Wir wollen einander nicht gekannt haben!« (IV.vi, WB 6:87).

With its first appearance in Act I, Tellheim’s ring, symbol of the couple’s betrothal, implies a temporal circularity. Whatever may have happened to the world and to the characters since then, the drama opens with a return to that time, during Prussia’s occupation of Minna’s homeland, when she and Tellheim first met and fell in love. However, the seeming stability of this circularity is at the same time belied by the instability of a different kind of circularity – not the return to a prior order, but instead a return to that unchecked circulation of wartime loot to which both Werner and the innkeeper refer and that Werner further associates with the fleeting sexual encounters and broken promises favored by wartime’s state of exception.Footnote 8 Lessing’s backdating of his play and his innkeeper’s punctilious dating of the start of the action associate the drama’s events directly with the climax of an economic crisis spurred by uncontrolled speculation in the war’s immediate aftermath.Footnote 9 There is no going back, we may conclude, because the play undermines the very principle of temporal return: the world has changed radically with that destabilization, brought about by the war, of all values and pledges. Minna’s search for her fiancé is predicated on the assumption that a return to the past is possible and that she can take possession of that Tellheim whom she remembers from before. The success of the play as Lustspiel, one might assume, is likewise predicated on the possibility of such a return, by which the intervening time and the changes it has wrought might be forgotten and effaced. Such recollection implies its own elision. Franciska correctly suspects that things are not so simple: »Wir haben den Mann wiedergefunden; aber wie haben wir ihn wiedergefunden?« (II.v).Footnote 10 When Minna subsequently replaces the ring on her finger with Tellheim’s, adding that she herself is unsure why she is doing so, she exchanges the ring as a sign of the return to past commitments, for the ring as a sign whose referent appears indeterminable: apparently, not even she can interpret this act, nor the new significance that the ring acquires through it. In surmising that she may yet find a »use« for the ring (»mich dünkt, ich sehe so etwas voraus, wo ich ihn brauchen könnte«), she accepts and hopes to profit from the ring’s status as a commodity in that unpredictable wartime and early post-war economy of speculation and exchange to which Werner and the innkeeper have alluded. The ring no longer implies the return to a stable past, but rather a process of exchange in which values and alliances have come unhinged and become subject to reevaluation and renegotiation.

What is the effect of this destabilization of the ring as a symbol of commitment? My suggestion is that turning the ring into a loose signifier has the effect of representing a relation to the past and its memory that both contrasts and competes with Tellheim’s. Realizing that she is losing Tellheim, Minna must find a way to break the hold that the past has on them both. The ensuing plot of the rings represents the ambivalent engagement of the play’s characters with their past and with the role of memory itself in their lives. In highlighting what will become a struggle over the control of the rings, Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm foregrounds a struggle in the control over memory. By extension, each ring represents a form of recollection that consists, not in the retrieval of a static memory-content, but rather in the recognition of temporal changes that have altered both the objects of remembering, and the remembering subjects themselves. The two rings accordingly point to changing conceptions of memory that were being articulated in the philosophy of the German Enlightenment. The following pages attempt to elaborate on these points.

Tellheim and Minna are part of a society that is still reeling from the upheavals of the recent war. The weight of these memories is most evident in the character of the wounded war veteran and discharged officer (abgedankter Officier) Major von Tellheim. Hilda D. Cohn perceptively compares his character to that of the »difficult« protagonist of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1921 Der Schwierige. The male figures at the center of these two post-war dramas are difficult in their relationship to the society into which they have returned from the battlefield, and difficult in their relationship to those whom they love. Both are driven by an impulse to push away, and flee, those around them. In both cases, it falls to a woman to counter this impulse, to draw her male counterpart out of himself, out of his silence and back into this society.Footnote 11 One might add that in Der Schwierige, Hans Karl Bühl’s memory of being at one point verschüttetFootnote 12 – buried and trapped – serves as a metaphor for forms of remembering and repression that similarly manifest themselves in the character of Tellheim. Comparing the two plays and their main characters, however, Cohn concludes that the works in the end represent opposite historical attitudes:

Beide, Lessings Repräsentant einer abgetanen Epoche und Hofmannsthals

Vertreter einer unwillkommenen neuen Ära, sind Heimatlose […].

In diesen beiden Figuren ist die entgegengesetzte historische

Blickrichtung der Dichter zum Ausdruck gekommen.

Lessing blickt in die Zukunft, Hofmannsthal in die Vergangenheit.

Lessing lacht über ein verblichenes, vergangenes Stück Geschichte,

dem nachzutrauern kein Grund vorliegt – und Lessing lacht wirklich.

(Cohn (note 11), 267)

Does Lessing’s play indeed »laugh« in this way? To answer this question, we might begin with the female protagonist. Minna, whose laughter has attained its own fame in the history of German literature,Footnote 13 does indeed attempt to laugh away the memories, indeed trauma, of the recent Seven Years’ War. Her laughter is not unreflective, however. She is aware that laughter can be both therapeutic, and a necessary corrective. In fact, it seems to be an awareness of this kind that prompts Lessing’s heroine to argue precisely for a form of laughter that favors forgetting:

Tellheim:   Sie wollen lachen, mein Fräulein.

Ich beklage nur, daß ich nicht mit lachen kann.

Das Fräulein:   Warum nicht? Was haben Sie denn gegen das Lachen?

Kann man denn auch nicht lachend sehr ernsthaft sein?

Lieber Major, das Lachen erhält uns vernünftiger, als der Verdruß.

Der Beweis liegt vor uns. Ihre lachende Freundin beurteilet

Ihre Umstände weit richtiger, als Sie selbst.

Weil Sie verabschiedet sind, nennen Sie Sich an Ihrer Ehre gekränkt:

weil Sie einen Schuß in dem Arme haben, machen Sie Sich zu einem

Kriepel. Ist das so recht? Ist das keine Übertreibung?

Und ist es meine Einrichtung, daß alle Übertreibungen des Lächerlichen

so fähig sind? (IV.vi, WB 6:82)

The traditions of the commedia dell’arte and the sächsiche Typenkomödie had already refined ways of holding up individual personal failings – and the character »types« who personified them – to ridicule as a way to reinforce norms of social behavior. In light of those traditions, one might say that Minna’s goal in this passage is to make Tellheim recognize that his behavior is exaggerated, ridiculous. In doing so, of course, her aim is not to bring about Tellheim’s ostracization, to induce him, like the Young Scholar of Lessing’s early drama, to turn his back on his homeland, family and friends. Here, the point is not to reinforce a social norm by ejecting that individual who violates it, but instead to bring that individual to his senses and, accordingly, back into the social fold – to make him more reasonable, as Minna says – vernünftiger. Doing so means enabling Tellheim and Minna to laugh together (»mit lachen«) at his failings and thus, together, to overcome them and their effects. A sharp-witted psychologist and agile rhetorician, Minna trains her sights on the obdurate self-righteousness, indeed stiff pedantry of her counterpart.Footnote 14 If Tellheim can join Minna in her laughter, so the seeming logic of this exchange, the two of them can unite in assigning his Übertreibungen to the past. The latter can be forgotten; the hold of the past can be broken and the two characters can indeed look to the future, as Cohn suggests.

As becomes clear a few lines later in the same scene, however, the main hindrance to the lovers’ union is not an exaggerated sensitivity on Tellheim’s part to a question of honor that remains merely theoretical, but rather a past turn of events that directly affects the stability of his social and financial existence, and that as such does not so easily relinquish its hold on the present action. What is not a laughing matter, according to Tellheim, are the consequences for him of that historical moment that first established a connection between the two of them, when he himself was among those responsible for imposing severe levies on Minna’s homeland of Saxony on behalf of the Prussian forces:

Tellheim:   Sie erinnern Sich, gnädiges Fräulein, daß ich Ordre hatte,

in den Ämtern Ihrer Gegend die Kontribution mit der äußersten Strenge

bar beizutreiben. Ich wollte mir diese Strenge ersparen, und schoß die

fehlende Summe selbst vor. –

Das Fräulein:   Ja wohl erinnere ich mich. – Ich liebte Sie um dieser

Tat willen, ohne Sie noch gesehen zu haben. (IV.vi, WB 6:83)

The invocation of this particular memory, a key one that only at this late stage of the play will make clear the roots of Tellheim’s resistance to marrying Minna,Footnote 15 occurs just after Minna has urged Tellheim to recognize the value of and need for forms of laughter that are »serious« (ernsthaft, IV.vi, WB 6:82). As Tellheim goes on to explain, the promissory note that he received in return for his loan was subsequently not recognized as being rightfully his. Worse, he not only was not repaid the money, but it came to be assumed that he had accepted the note as a bribe. As has been pointed out before, this moment demonstrates that Tellheim’s insistence on his honor is in fact anything but ridiculous. Rather, it reflects an accurate evaluation that he is socially doomed and that he cannot realistically marry his fiancée, since doing so would force both of them to abandon the society in which they live.Footnote 16 With this, Tellheim not only attempts to justify himself. He does so by forcing Minna to remember – to remember the history of a relationship that is itself an outgrowth of the still unresolved history of the Seven Years’ War. Here, Erinnerung does not belong to Tellheim alone. His refusal or inability to forget, which Minna has only just subjected to playful, gentle, relentless mockery, at this moment threatens to drag Minna herself back into a past that she appears eager to forget, or at most to remember only in a highly selective manner. There is indeed reason to think, as Horst Lange has suggested, that »the play is not about the war itself, but about the deep wounds – one cannot yet speak of scars – that the war has left in the characters’ psyches.«Footnote 17 Lange’s reference to »characters« in the plural seems to me important, as is his implication that these figures find themselves in a process of psychological healing that has only begun. As in Hofmannsthal’s play, we see, not just an individual male character who embodies the shock of war and its attendant upheavals, but rather a whole society that has been marked, and altered, by war’s effects. Tellheim most starkly represents those more general motivations that hinder war survivors – whether the victors or the defeated – from simply putting the past behind them. Minna, with a resoluteness that at times anticipates such a figure as the eponymous heroine of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, insists on rejecting the hold of the past, but in doing so likewise reflects its threatening power. This is the drama’s conflict. And if the play is less about the war than about the wounds that the war has left, then the military metaphors that Lessing puts into his characters’ mouths refer in the first instance to this conflict over the value, role and power of individual and historical memory.Footnote 18 Love and war: if in an age-old metaphor of comedy the plots of courtship resemble the advances and retreats of military campaigns, in this drama it is no less true that the conflict between Tellheim and Minna is one over the strategies and stakes of remembering and forgetting.

That Lessing renders the characters of this drama psychologically complex has of course long been noted. For instance, Jürgen Schröder observes that, especially in Act V, the play draws heavily in its metaphors on the biblical theme of the blind who cannot see and the deaf who cannot hear until their eyes and ears are opened, but that Lessing uses the apparently simple motif to highlight the complexity of Tellheim’s character.Footnote 19 While Schröder focuses on this adaptation of »parabolic« elements in the drama, others have reached analogous conclusions by examining the ways in which Lessing, in Minna, adapted contemporary conventions of the comic genre itself. For instance, in their analyses of the problem of »honor« in the play, Peter Michelsen and Tilman Venzl have shown that Tellheim cannot be reduced to a type, nor the play itself to a straightforward satire of a type’s failings. Tellheim may for extended parts of the drama indeed appear exaggerated in his insistence on the injury to his honor, but a closer look at the details of his situation and the historical context to which it draws attention reveals, over the course of the action, that his predicament is indeed real and consequential.Footnote 20 Robert Vellusig accordingly sees Minna von Barnhelm as emblematic of the new kind of comedy that Lessing both theorized (in particular in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie) and developed in his own dramatic work, a kind that equally avoided, as Vellusig puts it, »das aggressive Verlachen der Typenkomödie« and »die selbstgefällige Rührung des ›weinerlichen Lustspiels‹.«Footnote 21 Lessing’s development of the genre reflects, as Vellusig notes, an understanding of both weeping and laughter as constituting »mixed emotions.«Footnote 22 The psychological complexity that this new form of theater enables in turn opens the comic genre to new possibilities of remembering. In an adaptation of Moses Mendelssohn’s notion of »vermischte Empfindungen,« one might refer to a psychologically dynamic »mixing« or Vermischung of remembering and forgetting, of recall and suppression. This memory work involves a constant creative reconfiguration in the managing of individual and collective memory-contents.

The question of honor matters because Minna’s and Tellheim’s conflict over the reality and importance of the latter’s loss of it displays this complexity and the competing relationships to the past that underlie it. Their debates over honor are debates over remembering and its obligations. When Tellheim speculates bitterly that those in power (»die Großen«) have already concluded his guilt and must accordingly have abandoned any sense of debt toward him, Minna counters: »Ich sage den Großen meinen großen Dank, daß sie ihre Ansprüche auf einen Mann haben fahren lassen, den ich doch nur sehr ungern mit ihnen geteilet hätte. – Ich bin Ihre Gebieterin, Tellheim; Sie brauchen weiter keinen Herrn. – Sie verabschiedet zu finden, das Glück hätte ich mir kaum träumen lassen!« (IV.vi, WB 6:81). From this point of view, Tellheim is no longer bound in honor to the commitments that his role as a Prussian officer bound him; he can simply be hers. His loss is her gain, Minna suggests – except that, as she also implies, his loss is in fact no loss at all. Minna’s mocking reference to »the great ones« to whom she owes »great thanks« suggests that Tellheim’s subservience to them is misplaced. If her chambermaid Franciska announces playfully to the Innkeeper at the beginning of the play that she and her lady have come to »seize« (wegkapern) an officer from the Prussian king (II.ii, WB 6:34), here Minna echoes the motif: she will henceforth take over as Tellheim’s master (Gebieterin; IV.vi, WB 6:81), freeing him from his prior obligations. But it is not just a matter of transferring Tellheim’s allegiance from his past masters to his future wife: the very principle of honor that Tellheim invokes is, in Minna’s understanding, devoid of value, significant only inasmuch as Tellheim clings to it and thus renders it an impediment to their union:

V. Tellheim:   Ich brauche keine Gnade; ich will Gerechtigkeit.

Meine Ehre –

Das Fräulein:   Die Ehre eines Mannes, wie Sie –

V. Tellheim (hitzig):   Nein, mein Fräulein, Sie werden von allen Dingen

recht gut urteilen können, nur hierüber nicht.

Die Ehre ist nicht die Stimme unsers Gewissen, nicht das Zeugnis

weniger Rechtschaffnen – –

Das Fräulein:   Nein, nein, ich weiß wohl. – Die Ehre ist – die Ehre.

The tautology empties the concept of meaning. However, since Tellheim ignores her interjection and insists that only a restoration of his honor could allow him to marry her (»wenn meiner Ehre nicht die vollkommenste Genugtuung geschieht; so kann ich, mein Fräulein, der Ihrige nicht sein«), the circularity of the equation honor = honor also presents the apparent impossibility of a resolution. The same matter of the Major’s honor that means nothing in Minna’s eyes is what blocks Tellheim from marrying her and, by extension, from taking up something like a settled family life following his military discharge. Tellheim can no more forget the problem of his honor than he can forget the war in which he sees himself as having lost it.

In any plot in which the loss or gain of honor plays a role, »honor« is connected to memory. The guilt with which it is always implicitly associated links the concept of honor to that of Schuld in which Nietzsche, in the second treatise of his Genealogy of Morality, finds memory’s anthropological roots. Blamelessness (including Unschuld in its lingering association with female virginity) always already implies the risk of its being blemished and »lost.«Footnote 23 The taboo of this loss, and its associated trauma (remembered, repressed, or feared as a possibility) shows its power in its age-old literary thematizations. The very invocation of »honor« (and the spoken or unspoken possibility of its loss) serves as an incitement to narrative and dramatic development. Even where a particular guilt may be disputed, the burden of proving guiltlessness itself persists as a formidable debt that the dishonored individual bears toward society. Tellheim sees in himself the object of a cynical calculation: »Die Großen haben sich überzeugt, daß ein Soldat aus Neigung für sie ganz wenig; aus Pflicht nicht vielmehr: aber alles seiner eignen Ehre wegen tut. Was können sie ihm also schuldig zu sein glauben? Der Friede hat ihnen mehrere meines gleichen entbehrlich gemacht; und am Ende ist ihnen niemand unentbehrlich« (IV.vi, WB 6:81). The soldier described by Tellheim can be expected to do »everything« for honor, meaning in turn that this honor must bear for him a value that effaces all others. Indeed, the comparison to Nietzsche’s theorization of debt-as-guilt (or guilt-as-debt) highlights this aspect of guilt and, by extension, of honor. Whereas a monetary debt can in principle be repaid, the stain to a character’s honor may be impossible to efface: doing so would at least require a radical life-change (marriage, a commitment to the religious life) or a manifest willingness to die (through a duel, say, or suicide). In its extreme implications, the loss of honor approaches the effects of that Schuld that – in Nietzsche’s analysis – belongs to the concept of original sin and, as such, lies beyond the possibility of repayment.Footnote 24 For those who believe in their honor, this honor is, necessarily, a burden that can never be cast off, however blameless their individual lives may appear. The very invocation of a character’s »honor« raises the specter of those forms of memory that most insistently and, potentially, most destructively, maintain their hold on the present. In insisting on his honor, Tellheim maintains his commitment to a principle of remembering that at once defines his character and confines him within a state of paralysis: he loses all agency, undertaking – as in his break with Minna – »Nichts, als was mir die Ehre befiehlt« (IV.vi, WB 6:80). Only an eleventh-hour public acknowledgment of his guiltlessness by those in power, in Act V, will break the hold of this haunting memory and affirm the drama’s fragile victory of comedy over tragedy.

Until that moment, and from the start of the play, Tellheim is thus anxiously determined to cancel those debts that still bind him, even as he takes on new ones. Entwining comedy and pathos, the play showcases Tellheim’s attempts to reconcile his debts with and separate himself from Just (»Höre Just, mache mir zugleich auch deine Rechnung; wir sind geschiedene Leute« [I.iv, WB 6:17]) and Werner (»ich will dein Schuldner nicht sein« [III.vii, WB 6:60, 61]). The link between – indeed the uneasy conflation of – honor and means is foreshadowed in the slapstick of the opening scenes in which an exasperated Just enjoins Tellheim to avenge the slight inflicted on the latter by the innkeeper, who has abruptly evicted the hapless discharged officer in order to provide an accommodation for the rich young lady who has just arrived. Tellheim and Just thereupon imagine the satisfaction (»eine vortreffliche Rache!«) of having, not Tellheim, but his servant contemptuously fling the owed money at the innkeeper’s feet (I.iv, WB 6:17). In fact, this gratification must be deferred since, as Tellheim concedes, he has no cash – a predicament that is only exacerbated when he subsequently cancels the debt owed him by Witwe Marloff. Tellheim’s exchange with that character in turn highlights the play of dutiful remembrance and magnanimous forgetting that informs the actions of a zealously honorable circle of characters: unbidden, the widow comes to Tellheim to fulfill her husband’s »last wish«: »Er erinnerte sich kurz vor seinem Ende, daß er als Ihr Schuldner sterbe, und beschwor mich, diese Schuld mit der ersten Barschaft zu tilgen« (I.vi, WB 6:19). In a pantomime of thwarted recollection, Tellheim draws a notebook from his pocket and makes a show of not finding confirmation of the debt. The widow’s suggestion that he has simply lost the corresponding note prompts Tellheim to insist on the fiction that the very absence of such a record is proof that the deceased Marloff either never incurred this debt toward him, or that this debt has already been paid. Indeed, Tellheim continues, »Ich wüßte mich auch nicht zu erinnern, daß er mir jemals etwas schuldig gewesen wäre.« The absence of such recollection resolves itself into a contrasting memory of his indebtedness toward the deceased: »er hat mich vielmehr als seinen Schuldner hinterlassen. Ich habe nie etwas tun können, mich mit einem Manne abzufinden, der sechs Jahr Glück und Unglück, Ehre und Gefahr mit mir geteilet. Ich werde es nicht vergessen, daß ein Sohn von ihm da ist. Er wird mein Sohn sein, so bald ich sein Vater sein kann.« Tellheim’s avowed inability to remember manifests itself in this scene as an insistence on his own power to shape the web of memories and obligations that uncomfortably connects him to the play’s other characters. The scene concludes when Tellheim, who has »remembered« the widow’s son and has promised to take on the responsibilities of a father toward him, further recollects (»bald hätte ich das Wichtigste vergessen«) that both he and the fallen soldier have unfulfilled claims before the military that should rightfully be repaid. He gives his word that, if he receives his due, Marloff’s widow and son shall receive theirs as well (I.vi, WB 6:20).

One unresolved war-debt recalls the other; their recollection incites gestures of remembrance, pretended and authentic, that serve in turn as the justification for redoubled obligations. Dishonored, Tellheim substantiates his own claim that a soldier will do anything for the sake of honor, and does so in competition with a widow who comes to him with her own honorable claims. A skirmish unfolds that anticipates the central conflict between Tellheim and Minna, one that likewise reveals itself as a struggle for control over the memories that link the protagonists to each other and to the other figures in the play. This conflict represents itself in the plot of the two rings and in the struggle over their value, meaning and ownership. Even as he implies deceptively that Tellheim’s ring has a dishonorable provenance, Werner correctly observes of the ring relinquished by Tellheim that its function as a memory token may be ambivalent: »So was erinnert einen manchmal, woran man nicht gern erinnert sein will« (III.v, WB 6:56).

Whereas Cohn sees Lessing’s drama as ultimately laughing off the effects of war, then, it appears truer that the play Minna von Barnhelm remains concerned throughout with the »deep wounds« described by Lange.Footnote 25 If the ring initially serves Minna as a simple reminder of a commitment that Tellheim is now called upon to uphold, she discovers that she cannot rely on this reminder to compete successfully with that injury to his honor that he sustained during the war in his relations with the Prussian military leadership and that he bears within him as a debilitating trauma that prevents his resuming anything resembling a normal civilian life. More than his physical injury or even his financial predicament, this dishonor, which Tellheim experiences as an existential threat and as an insurmountable barrier to his union with Minna, is what triggers his ring’s initial slippage from his finger and into his pocket, and from there, into the hands of Just and then the innkeeper.

In this drama, then, which from its first appearance struck its recipients through its intense engagement with recent history, the rings of the betrothed represent historical consciousness, and the tensions and ambivalences of memory. In particular, the ring-motif that accompanies the action throughout brings into relief two attitudes toward the past. One is shaped by the assumption that the past can be invoked as a stable referent, and as a truth that wields power over actions and decisions undertaken in the present. Minna accordingly appeals to the fact of her betrothal; Tellheim appeals instead to the fact of his wounded honor and, by extension, to the traumas inflicted upon him by the war. Initially, both characters accordingly adhere to particular fixed memories, and they invoke these memories as a defense against the reality of the changes, in themselves and their environment, wrought by recent events. The second attitude toward the past is represented in the plot of Minna’s and Tellheim’s rings as these objects come untethered from these truths. Released into a new speculative economy, the rings reveal themselves, particularly through Minna’s so-called ring-intrigue, as objects whose value and significance manifests itself through processes of negotiation and play, as argued by Fritz Martini and, more recently, Edgar Landgraf.Footnote 26 That such negotiation is risky, that it guarantees no comic outcome, is highlighted by the fact that it is ultimately an event that is out of the characters’ hands – a letter from the King, vindicating Tellheim – that saves the day (V.vi-ix, WB 6:96-103). However, the drama – and, I would suggest, Lessing’s work more generally – also shows that such processes of negotiation with the past may be unavoidable. If Lessing repeatedly thematizes the dangers of invoking the past dogmatically (one thinks of Lessing’s critique of historical dogmatism a decade later in the course of the public altercations following his publication of the Reimarus Fragments), he also rejects the possibility of ignoring or repressing the past. Minna attempts to laugh the past away and discovers, instead, the limits of such laughter: »Ihr Lachen tötet mich, Tellheim!« she exclaims when the Major responds to her mocking by revealing the extent of the hold that the past has on him and, therefore, on Minna as well (IV.vi, WB 6:83).

Furthermore, however, Minna’s and Tellheim’s rings may be recognized as the tokens of two roughly opposite, but entangled conceptions of memory that inform 17th and 18th-century German thought. The memoria tradition that influences theories of memory well into the eighteenth century cites as a key source that scene (in the sense of Urszene) of redemptive recollection associated with Simonides of Ceos, whom Cicero describes as having reconstituted descriptively, through his poetry, a gathering of guests who had been crushed in the collapse of a hall in which he and they had been dining.Footnote 27 Renate Lachmann refers to this scene when she notes: »am Beginn der memoria als Kunst steht die Technisierung der Trauerarbeit.«Footnote 28 The mnemotechnics developed in this tradition is based on a principle of reconstitution, as are its potentially therapeutic effects: thanks to Simonides’ efforts, what are initially perceptible only as mangled and indistinguishable remains can be reassigned to the individual guests, and these can now be properly interred.Footnote 29 But what happens when memory work and mourning cannot find closure through such a process of reconstitution? Perpetually on the edge of tragedy, Minna von Barnhelm reflects this tension between the impulse – and need – to return to and reclaim the past, and a recognition of the limits of such a return. If the protagonists’ rings represent a »return« to an unstable economy of exchange, they also necessarily represent a form of memory less akin to the model of archival retrieval associated with Gedächtnis than to a modern model of Erinnerung that by the eighteenth century increasingly replaces that of the memoria tradition. In elaborating this distinction, Aleida Assmann contrasts the mnemotechnics of Antiquity and a new form of identity-creating memory (»identitätsstiftende Erinnerung«). The latter, as she writes, is constituted through its engagement with time and is spurred by an energy (vis) that contrasts with the protective, conservative function of the art (ars) of the memoria tradition:

Im Falle des Erinnerns wird die Zeitdimension, die beim Speichern

stillgestellt und überwunden ist, akut. Indem die Zeit aktiv in den

Gedächtnisprozeß eingreift, kommt es zu einer grundsätzlichen

Verschiebung zwischen Einlagerung und Rückholung. Während bei der

Mnemotechnik die exakte Übereinstimmung von input und output

entscheidend war, kommt es bei der Erinnerung zu ihrer Differenz.

[…] Das Erinnern verfährt grundsätzlich rekonstruktiv;

es geht stets von der Gegenwart aus, und damit kommt es unweigerlich

zu einer Verschiebung, Verformung, Entstellung, Umwertung, Erneuerung

des Erinnerten zum Zeitpunkt seiner Rückrufung. […] Das Wort ›vis‹

weist darauf hin, daß in diesem Falle das Gedächtnis

nicht als ein schützender Behälter, sondern als eine immanente

Kraft, als eine Energie mit eigener Gesetzlichkeit aufzufassen ist.

(Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des

kulturellen Gedächtnisses, C.H. Beck Kulturwissenschaft, München 1999, 29.)

Regina Freudenfeld has elaborated the history of this paradigm shift in the German and French Enlightenment and points to increasingly dynamic theories of recollection (understood in connection with the imagination) in Christian Wolff as well as in Johann Christoph Gottsched; Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger; and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.Footnote 30 More recently, Frank Grunert has focused more narrowly on the philosophers of the early German Enlightenment, examining how this shift begins to manifest in particular in the writings of Wolff, but also in those of Christian Thomasius, Johann Georg Walch, and Georg Friedrich Meier.Footnote 31 My suggestion here is that Lessing’s characters, as they negotiate their own historical ties to the war that still overshadows their lives, elaborate in dramatic form the two forms of memory work that Assmann describes. At the outset, Minna comes to reclaim that Tellheim of whom she had once formed a specific image, even before meeting him, based on his reputation for generosity toward her homeland: when Tellheim mentions the occasion, she interrupts him: »Ja wohl erinnere ich mich. – Ich liebte Sie um dieser Tat willen, ohne Sie noch gesehen zu haben« (IV.vi, WB 6:83). As the play of rings brings to light what has changed between then and now (starting with Tellheim’s order that Just pawn his ring to help him cover his debts), it gradually becomes clear to Minna that she cannot in fact simply reclaim her betrothed; rather, it turns out, both she and he, together, have to find a way to come to terms with the past that has both linked them and that threatens to pull them apart. We might see in her a personification of that energy – that vis – that provokes this engagement with the consequences of time and that makes of recollection a work of Erinnerung that by the end decisively reshapes the characters. This coming-to-terms is a prerequisite for that union that allows the play, as comedy, to conclude firmly in the present. Minna’s and Tellheim’s rings, for their part, lose their status as tokens of return and recollection, and come instead to represent a form of memory that is based in the present and whose reach into the past alters this present.Footnote 32 The circularity of the ring-form implies, then, not just the impossibility of a return to and retrieval of a stable past reality (that reality is always already subject to the negotiations of an unstable economy of exchange), but also a form of Erinnerung that, for better and for worse, introduces this instability into the remembering subject as a force that dynamically reconstitutes its identity and its relations with other subjects.

II.

What relation to the past is reflected in the theme of the ring and its counterfeits in Nathan der Weise? Historical memory lies heavily in this play as well, and if, as Ritchie Robertson has argued, the drama presents characters whose ethical humanism realizes itself through a substantial elision of their historical specificity,Footnote 33 it is also true that the characters’ historical experience reasserts itself through acts of demonstrative forgetting or repression. For instance, the drama’s closing tableau of reconciliation presents itself, in its implausibility, as one such act of forced forgetting that brings the very possibility of forgetting all the more starkly into doubt.Footnote 34 If the »difficult« Tellheim (to cite again Hofmannsthal’s epithet for his own veteran-protagonist) outwardly and inwardly bears the wounds inflicted by war on himself and his contemporaries, Nathan for his part remains deeply and emotionally conscious of a past that is even more explicitly destructive. He represents an Enlightenment humanist ideal, but he is also that new Job who cannot forget the pogrom in Gath in which the Christians massacred all the Jews and in which his wife and seven sons were burned alive (IV.vii, WB 9:596). Nathan manifests the fragility of the theodicy that his own Enlightenment ideals urge upon him and that he in turn urges upon the other characters in the play.Footnote 35 As for the motif of the ring, if in Minna von Barnhelm it is introduced at the start and accompanies the action through to the end, in Lessing’s late drama it appears only within the ring-parable that is told by Nathan roughly at the play’s mid-point, in Act III, scene vii. More overtly than in the earlier drama, the rings whose story is told here are imbricated, not just with the histories of the individual characters, but also with history writ large, and with a historical perspective that opens into the temporality of myth.

In Lessing’s late play, the ring acquires its historical relevance as a result of Saladin’s conniving inquiry, which prompts this parable about the impossibility of asserting a single »true« religion among the three monotheisms associated with the play’s setting in Jerusalem.Footnote 36 Nathan introduces the mythical dimension with the opening words of the little story (Geschichtchen) that he tells Saladin: »Vor grauen Jahren lebt’ ein Mann in Osten,/Der einen Ring von unschätzbarem Wert’/Aus lieber Hand besaß« (III.vii, WB 9:555). As Nathan recounts, the ring has the power to render its bearer pleasing to others and to God insofar as it is worn with confidence in its effect; and it distinguishes the chosen son as master (Fürst) of the house. This patriarchal succession is after generations interrupted, however, when a father who loves his three sons equally finds himself unable to designate a single one his successor and separately promises the ring to each. Subsequently feeling death’s approach, he spares no expense to have two impeccable copies made which, when they are finished, he is himself unable to distinguish from the original. Upon his passing, the squabbling begins, for, as Nathan tells Saladin pointedly, the original ring is »almost« as unidentifiable as the true religion (»der rechte Glaube«).

The story up to this point is that of historical continuity and breakage. There is the rupture in patriarchal lineage, a rupture that Friedrich Kittler associates with the historical development of the bourgeois family and that exhibits itself, in his reading, in the replacement of the feudal despotic father by the father who loves his sons equally and refuses to designate a successor as sole patriarch. Kittler argues that with the ending of patriarchal authority we also see a breakage in the model of education or Erziehung that Lessing’s work repeatedly associates closely, even exclusively, with the roles of fathers. Kittler accordingly identifies both a connection, and tension, with the concept of education as Lessing elaborates it in his Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts – a text that appeared in its complete form in 1780, the year after the publication of Nathan der Weise.Footnote 37 Does religion reveal its truth through an originary revelation, or rather through its practice in the course of human education and cultural development? Lessing’s Erziehungsschrift foregrounds the tension between these possibilities, even as it proposes that revelation anticipates effects that may be achieved through human reason. In Nathan, the relation to an originary truth is no less complex. The parable of the rings highlights this complexity in the relation between, on the one hand, the authority of the past – and the purported origin that defines this past; and, on the other hand, the authority of interpretation and action rooted in the present.

The question that Saladin puts to Nathan and that provokes the latter’s telling of the ring-parable examines the relevance of any religion’s historical development to the legitimacy of its belief, and does so by focusing on the matter of personal choice:

Ein Mann, wie du, bleibt da

Nicht stehen, wo der Zufall der Geburt

Ihn hingeworfen: oder wenn er bleibt,

Bleibt er aus Einsicht, Gründen, Wahl des Bessern. (III.v, WB 9:553)

In his response, Nathan suggests that religions ground themselves (sich gründen) in their histories, and that they do so in the same way that individuals adopt as given the beliefs that they have inherited: »Nun wessen Treu und Glauben zieht man denn/Am wenigsten in Zweifel? Doch der Seinen?/Doch deren Blut wir sind?« (III.vii, WB 9:557). However, such a historical ground is distinct, as a basis for judging the legitimacy of a religion, from the moral value of the action and beliefs of its adherents. This consideration, in the ring-parable, prompts the judge’s advice – which demonstratively takes the place of a judgment – that each of the three brothers demonstrate the authenticity of his ring through his own moral example (III.vii, WB 9:559). Of chief importance in this consideration is not historical derivation and expression, but what Lessing refers to, for instance in the seventh and tenth of his Axiomata, as each religion’s »innere Wahrheit« (WB 9:69, 78-82). Implicit in Lessing’s argument is not just a warning against dogmatism, but also against the memory-model of the dogmatic – one that presumes the possibility and necessity of retrieving a fossilized memory content and invoking it as a determining force over thought and action in the present. Even as they are caught up in the competing appeals to historical privilege and wrongs that are the standard stuff of sibling rivalry, the judge of Nathan’s ring-parable recalls the three brothers to the present: »ihr nehmt/Die Sache völlig wie sie liegt« (III.vii, WB 9:559). At issue is religious practice in its current facticity, he suggests, not its purported origins. A similar contrast informs Lessing’s »Die Parabel,« where the heated and confused disputes among the dogmatics over the blueprints of the king’s palace stand in opposition to the »Licht und Zusammenhang« that informs the structure in the present (WB 8:41-44). This »light,« which »Die Parabel« associates with a neo-classical (and specifically Winckelmannian) aesthetic of »Einfalt und Größe,« is also coupled with a rationality that demonstrates itself in the ease and efficiency with which those inside the building move about its interior (WB 8:42). This rationality in turn implies a degree of autonomy over the power of recollection. We must not let our lives be dictated by a fixed conception of the past: the judge of Nathan’s parable speculates that the father who had the counterfeit rings made wanted to eliminate once and for all »Die Tyrannei des Einen Rings« (III.vii, WB 9:559). Nor, however, should we instrumentalize such a conception of the past in order to dictate the thoughts and actions of others. In the Axiomata we read: »wir kommen alle, mit den Grundbegriffen der Religion bereits versehen, zu ihr» (WB 9:82). These »core concepts« take precedence over the authority of historically and philologically asserted proofs. The positive form of memory that does play a key role here is one rooted in the dynamics of lived experience and not tethered inflexibly to the word – and law – of a written record. If, as Lessing argues in the Axiomata, scholarly analysis of documentary evidence (»das gelehrte Studium der Schrift«) has been indispensable in saving humanity from »barbarism« (WB 9:83), the same text makes the case for the truth of religious belief that has integrated scripture into living memory: Lessing inserts into his polemic the parable of an observant community, founded on an island in British-controlled Bermuda by a Lutheran pastor, whose language, generations after the community’s founding, continues to resonate with that of Luther’s »catechism« even though no living descendent of the first arrivals is able to read, and though the catechism itself physically survives only as a pair of empty book covers (WB 9:73-75). The text marks the transition to the narrative’s interpretation by asking rhetorically: »waren diese guten Leutchen wohl Christen, oder waren sie keine?» The ruined artifact of the catechism, with its empty Bretterchen, presents itself as an image for the dynamic form of memory that sustains the little collective in the New World. As is made evident to a baffled army chaplain who happens upon them, the wordless book remains paradoxically filled, with a content that is both original and that, as a living force, maintains itself in the present life of the community:

In diesen Bretterchen, sagten sie, steht das alles, was wir wissen.

– Hat es gestanden, meine Lieben! sagte der Feldprediger. – Steht

noch, steht noch! sagten sie. Wir können zwar selbst nicht lesen,

wissen auch kaum, was Lesen ist: aber unsere Väter haben es ihre Väter

daraus herlesen hören. Und diese haben den Mann gekannt,

der die Bretterchen geschnitten. Der Mann hieß Luther, und lebte kurz

nach Christo. (WB 9:74-75)

Oral tradition maintains and continues to shape the community’s links to its history, specifically to the teachings of an original patriarchal authority who continues to exercise his influence. That influence, however, operates through the spoken word and, accordingly, through the mediating effects of human memory. The word of God, as conveyed by Luther, is contained within and at the same time radically emancipated from the written text. It is »still« present in the book, yet time and use have eviscerated the volume itself and made of it a vessel whose content exists wholly in the thoughts and practices of the community. The book is vividly remembered, not as an artifact from the past, but as a material representation of belief as practiced in its current, lived form. It serves as a model, not of Gedächtnis, but of Erinnerung.

This distinction between a static and dynamic conception of memory informs Lessing’s writings on religion and is indeed integral to the tension between Offenbarung and Vernunft as elaborated in his Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. In Nathan der Weise, Recha stands out as a representative of the simplicity (Einfalt) of unscholarly belief, and the drama highlights the theme by stressing that her father Nathan, no friend of »kalte Buchgelehrsamkeit, die sich/Mit toten Zeichen ins Gehirn nur drückt,« has maintained her in a state of illiteracy. What Recha does know, she has learned »aus seinem Munde«; this oral connection has in turned ensured that she has acquired such knowledge with an awareness »Wie? wo? warum? er michs gelehrt.« Saladin’s sister, in whom Recha confides, responds approvingly: »So hängt/Sich freilich alles besser an. So lernt/Mit eins die ganze Seele« (V.vi, WB 9:614-15). As in the Axiomata, Lessing presents a pedagogical idyll premised on the learner’s personal connection to a patriarchal figure whose wisdom is imparted from mouth to mouth and absorbed, not in the form of »dead signs,« but as a life-giving force.Footnote 38 Remembering, here, is a process of formation through this life force’s assimilation and re-activation.

However, the traces that mark such lineages – the communicative patterns that mark the connections between one generation and the next – pose their own problems. Lessing maps his drama about religious tolerance onto the conventions of a comedy of errors and its structures of mistaken identity and recognition. Family relations, suspected and confirmed, bridge sectarian lines and provide a basis for the recognition of the relatedness, and equal claims to respect, of the three religions and religious cultures foregrounded in the play. These paths of recognition intersect in the figure of the Templar, in whom Saladin recognizes the exact image (Ebenbild) of his own brother Assad, a.k.a. Wolf (III.vii, WB 9:561). Anticipating this moment, Nathan likewise recognizes the image of Saladin’s brother in the Templar: »Wolfs Wuchs, Wolfs Gang: auch seine Stimme. So,/Vollkommen so, warf Wolf sogar den Kopf…,« he remarks to himself before reflecting on the logic of the recognition itself, framing it as the recovery of a buried memory: »Wie solche tiefgeprägte Bilder doch/Zu Zeiten in uns schlafen können, bis/Ein Wort, ein Laut sie weckt« (II.vii, WB 9:536). For his part, the Templar serves as the trigger for and object of such moments of recollection not just in others, but also in himself. The drama underscores the still malleable nature of his character and identifies in his moments of recollective recognition the potential for an intellectually and emotionally enlightened world view for which the mold already lies within him. »Mit sich kämpfend,« as the stage direction indicates at the opening of III.viii, the Templar exclaims: »Nun gut! Ich mag nicht, mag nicht näher wissen,/Was in mir vorgeht; mag voraus nicht wittern,/Was vorgehn wird.« In this state of confusion, he finds a structure for self-reflection in a comparison between past and present that intertwines remembering and forgetting. The Templar begins by recalling the moment in which Saladin refrained from having him executed, and he marks this moment as the one, possibly, of a new self:

Der Kopf, den Saladin mir schenkte, wär’

Mein alter? – Ist ein neuer; der von allem

Nichts weiß, was jenem eingeplaudert ward,

Was jenen band. – Und ist ein beßrer; für

Den väterlichen Himmel mehr gemacht.

Das spür’ ich ja. Denn erst mit ihm beginn’

Ich so zu denken, wie mein Vater hier

Gedacht muß haben; wenn man Märchen nicht

Von ihm mir vorgelogen. (III.viii, WB 9:563)

The intermingling of recollection and its cancellation in this passage is complex. Condemned to decapitation, the Templar had received a »new« head through the Sultan’s sudden reprieve. His mind, subsequently, is one cleared of everything that had been »talked into« it previously and that had constrained it (»Was jenen band«). Even as he invokes his former ways of thinking, the Templar argues that those habits are forgotten and have been supplanted by those of a »better« mind. His new way of thinking is now more adapted to a »fatherly heaven« – that of his Christian divinity, presumably, but also, as he goes on to make clear, that of the psychological world of his own father Assad, the brother of the Sultan and, as such, presumably a Muslim himself. Only beginning with this new frame of mind that he was granted by Saladin has the Templar begun to think as his own father must have, if the stories that he remembers about him are not mere »fairy tales.« Thus does the Templar find his way to a better mentality, one no longer shaped by his former prejudices, by forgetting his former self as completely as an entirely new head replaces the thoughts of a previous one. On the other hand, the »new« and »better« head itself manifests as an inheritance from the past, one derived in particular from his deceased father. When Saladin later admonishes him for his resurgence of hatred against Nathan (»the Jewish wolf,« in the Templar’s words), the Templar, feeling the reproach, wonders to himself »Wie Assad, – Assad sich an meiner Stelle/Hierbei genommen hätte« (IV.iv, WB 9:587). Any chance of overcoming the prejudice and strife of the present lies in such recollection of the past, and particularly in the embrace and reanimation of the wisdom of fathers. Indeed, the play’s moments of anagnorisis are generally at once moments of recollection whose explosive force derives from the recognition of a repetition and difference: this individual, improbably, strongly resembles and recollects that one. The fractured current reality of a divided religious environment is belied as the contours of a common family tree come into view. The fact that such anagnorisis is triggered by the recognition of family relations encourages the notion that what is being realized is the memory of something that already lay deep within, and that is now being recalled in the present. Memory is revivification; in this revivification, it would appear, lies the key to an intercultural and interfaith concordance that had been lost.

On the other hand, tolerance, or indeed the full elimination of the prejudices that separate religious cultures, cannot simply be predicated on appeals to past models, however earnestly meant. If that were true, such a future would in this case depend on a highly unlikely concatenation of historical contingencies: the »miracle« of Recha’s being saved from the flames by a Templar who, incredibly, has been released by the SultanFootnote 39 – a decision that is itself prompted by the unlikely coincidence of the Sultan’s discovering in his prisoner the features of his own beloved brother. Given the ethical and cultural issues at stake, the very improbability of these events, along with the fractured and violent existing relations among the religions at the start of the play, highlights the danger of relying on »history« to solve the problems of the present. The menacing presence of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who most memorably rejects all reason in order to insist that »the Jew« Nathan be burned alive (IV.ii, WB 9:578-79), is a stark reminder that father figures can exert an influence that is anything but enlightened or benign. If patriarchies can guide their progeny to their better selves, they can also lead to unreasoned tribal conflict; and if the former option appears as a miracle, the latter option presents itself as the terrifying default.

This brings us back to the ring parable which, I propose, offers itself as a warning against the reliance on patriarchal historical models. By thematizing the apportionment of fatherly love, the parable plays on a theme that shapes the entire drama. As Nathan tells the story, the ring has the ability to render its bearer »pleasing« (angenehm) to God and to humanity alike, provided that it is worn with faith in its power to do just this (»In dieser Zuversicht«; III.vii, WB 9:555-56). The ring marks in its trajectory a genealogy that links one favored son to the next: the ring is always transferred from the father to his »most beloved« son (»dem Geliebtesten«). We learn nothing about these sons other than their shared attribute of being the most loved by the father and being agreeable to God and men. To the extent that the latter condition rests on each son’s faith in his ability to be pleasing, it seems not unlikely that the very fact of being recognized as the father’s best loved enables the son’s confidence in his ability to inspire the love of others and of God. The later father who makes exact replicas of the ring refuses to recognize a single son as his most beloved. When the deception reveals itself, the three sons, finding themselves thus unanointed, indeed lose the power of being beloved (»man zankt,/Man klagt«). The story concludes with the solution proposed by the judge to whom the sons turn to resolve their strife. In the absence of the dead father, he suggests, each son should prove his ownership of the original ring of the patriarchal tradition by demonstrating its »Wunderkraft beliebt zu machen« (III.vii, WB 9:558). Only the true ring, he suggests, will have this power. Or perhaps, he continues, none of the surviving rings is genuine – »Der echte Ring/Vermutlich ging verloren« (III.vii, WB 9:559). It therefore becomes the task of each son to behave as though he possessed the sole authentic token of his father’s favor (»So glaube jeder sicher seinen Ring/Den echten«).

Within the parable, filial relations are relativized in their determining effect. If the power (Wunderkraft) transferred from father to son once decided which son could be favored by God and men and could gain control over the father’s earthly possessions (becoming »das Haupt, der Fürst des Hauses«; III.vii, WB 9:556), the crisis triggered by the counterfeit rings points to a form of inheritance that is no longer granted, but continually earned, and that manifests as a particular relation between self and world. The presumed loss of the original ring also represents a gain, exhibiting the potentially emancipatory effects of a breakage in patriarchal tradition and the hold of the familial memory that upholds it. Outside of the parable, the salvation of humanity from arbitrary power and violence rests on the miracle of paternal connections that can be conclusively proven: lest there be any doubt about the Templar’s genealogy, a breviary is recalled and produced that confirms his family history (IV.vii, WB 9:598; V.viii, WB 9:627). Another word for the determining power of history is »blood.« Suddenly facing the possibility of losing his daughter Recha, a frantic Nathan insists that only that other man may lay claim to her who »at least« has such rights conferred by biology:

   Wer

Auf sie nicht größre Rechte hat, als ich;

Muß frühere zum mindsten haben –

[…]

Die ihm Natur und Blut erteilen. (IV.vii, WB 9:597)

In this world, much depends on family relations, and much, accordingly, is a matter of historical chance. Recha may insist that blood does not determine all: »das Blut, das Blut allein/Macht lange noch den Vater nicht!« (V.vii, WB 9:620). In the final scene of the drama, however, just before the characters fall into each other’s arms in a celebration of the family that has been thus constituted, the Templar’s last words, addressed to Saladin, summon a memory of dreams that had always already testified to blood’s primacy: »Ich deines Bluts! – So waren jene Träume,/Womit man meine Kindheit wiegte, doch –/Doch mehr als Träume!« (V.viii, WB 9:627).Footnote 40

In the parable, by contrast, the chain of memories is broken: the impossibility of identifying an authentic, original ring decisively relativizes the logic of historical transmission. As signifying thing, the ring indeed points forward to a humanistic »enlightened modernity« in which, as Helmut Schneider has argued, the individual is not merely subsumed back into the laws of his or her particular history.Footnote 41 With the father dead, no living memory can reconstruct what exactly has happened or whether an original ring even still exists. No breviary or other documentary proof comes to light that would settle the mystery of the »true« ring and accordingly allow historical precedent to reassert itself. The parable disrupts the logic of Gedächtnis and its model of memory-retrieval. Instead, as the judge points out, it is up to the sons to shape their lives ethically without relying on the Wunderkraft of a ring as a mark of succession – a memory-token – that shapes and sanctions their behavior and predetermines the love of God and men that their conduct evokes (III.vii, WB 9:558-59). The parable, in other words, tells the story of a vitally necessary effacement: as the rings lose the power to recall history as an unambiguous determinant of the present, a new modality of freedom in action and thought becomes possible. In the drama outside the parable, the characters obsessively examine each other’s faces for links to the past and to clues – derived from this past – as to how to understand and treat each other. The theme manifests itself as a preoccupation from the first report that the Templar’s life has been saved because his features reminded the Sultan of the latter’s brother. Without committing himself to the accuracy of the report, Nathan muses:

Pflegen

Sich zwei Gesichter nicht zu ähneln? – Ist

Ein alter Eindruck ein verlorner? – Wirkt

Das Nemliche nicht mehr das Nemliche? (I.ii, WB 9:493–94)

To the extent that such resemblances involve the imposition of past models onto the present, the manner in which one face manifests its effect (wirkt) is important: does »same« cause »same,« can earlier patterns do anything else than repeat? The trajectories of such causality are marked by singularity: what is the same is so »namely,« it is, paradoxically, the repetition of an identity, one that expresses itself in the repetition of a name. Such resemblances and implied causalities depend on a recognition, on the ability to retrace familiar (and familial) features. The features in question must remain discernible in their uniqueness. This is the uniqueness that asserts itself as false in the counterfeit ring. The predicament is highlighted in Saladin’s simultaneous refusal and inability to recognize the characters of the pieces in the chess game that he loses against his sister Sitah:

ich

War nicht so ganz beim Spiele; war zerstreut.

Und dann: wer giebt uns denn die glatten Steine

Beständig? die an nichts erinnern, nichts

Bezeichnen. (II.i, WB 9:516)

In the memoria tradition vivid images are associated with specific loci and, through this association, generate a meaningful context. In accordance with the Islamic prohibition on images, the chess pieces used by Saladin and Sitah are faceless and accordingly present collectively a refusal of those visual memory-supports that the rhetorical tradition had envisioned as sustaining memory itself. Too distracted to create and implement such an organizational structure in his own imagination, the hapless Sultan remains disoriented and without a winning strategy. For their part, the rings do induce remembrance, but they do so misleadingly. Their indistinguishability from one another presents its own form of slippery smoothness. Even as they recall historical precedent, their reproduction defeats attempts to invoke that precedent in the matter of inheritance at hand. As in Minna von Barnhelm, the rings symbolically circle back to the past, but in a way that makes it impossible to connect the token of remembrance to its referent in any way that would demonstrate its value in a stable, static manner. The meaning of each ring is highlighted as a matter of negotiation and interpretation. As in Minna von Barnhelm, indeed, the ring becomes token of a speculative truth.Footnote 42

The ring parable complicates this very notion of a direct and positive connection between patriarch and descendant. Recollection on the model of Gedächtnis presents itself as untenable and indeed destructive. To insist on the rights and powers of the individual religions on the basis of their histories is to give free rein to violence. Nathan’s brief account of the pogrom in Gath (IV.vii, WB 9:596); the fire that nearly costs his daughter Recha her life (I.i, WB 9:485); the Patriarch’s insistence that »the Jew« be »burned« (IV.ii, WB 9:578-79); and an overt reference to the Templar’s fiery passions in Act V, scene iiiFootnote 43 (itself ominous in laying bare the potential danger that emanates from this figure who saves Recha but who at one point also resolves to slit Nathan’s throat), highlight the violence that more generally shapes that geographical and historical meeting point of the three monotheisms Jerusalem in which the drama is set. The ring-parable, instead, suggests in the advice of its judge a way of breaking a chain of historical obligations that underpin this actual and latent violence.

There seems to be widespread agreement among the play’s readers that Nathan’s ring-parable undoes – here one can justifiably say »deconstructs« – that principle of the authority of the origin that the very notion of the original ring presupposes. We do not inherit unequivocal truths, nor do we inherit systems of belief that are unequivocal in their meaning. As Robert S. Leventhal writes in connection with the play: »Religion is history; but history, at least in the traditional sense of the one unified, absolute text, has become suspicious«; and as he continues: »By waiving the claim to [a] clear universal message, the text turns over the hermeneutic labor to the reader, and thereby places the reader in the position of the recipient of one of the rings […].«Footnote 44 As Leventhal’s formulation indicates, the connection to »history« remains, but it becomes the object of reevaluation. In the continuation of Nathan’s story, a judge before whom the quarreling sons appear is initially inclined to dismiss the three and their impossible riddle but then recalls that, if indeed the true ring has the power to render its bearer pleasing to others and to God, then each of the sons has the power to demonstrate his rightful possession of this ring by striving to make himself beloved. If, as Beate Allert has suggested, the original ring bears a Benjaminian »aura« that is subsequently lost,Footnote 45 through its replication it instead comes to represent, I think, a dynamic of semiotic exchange that is indeed describable in the terms that Benjamin adopts to describe the work of art in the »age of mechanical reproducibility.« Like the engagement rings that in Minna von Barnhelm are released into the unpredictable monetary and semiotic economy that follows immediately upon the Seven Year’s War, these rings too become the objects of interpretation and, as Landgraf has argued, of high-stakes play.Footnote 46 This does not mean that the rings in Nathan’s parable are ultimately cut off from their history, however. They are introduced thematically as an inheritance and as historical markers. They mark the connection to the ring – and bequeathed authority – of a succession of forefathers. They also mark a historical shift in this succession, and thus a genealogical breakage. As Schneider notes, the ring never represents a dismissal of history: in the play, origins are »illuminated but not eliminated«; the ring both highlights and disguises the ruptures in the transition from a world dominated by the particular to one shaped by universal principles.Footnote 47

How do we interpret Nathan’s ring-parable, then? The story presents a contradiction. In his theory, Peter Demetz writes, Lessing attempts to »emancipate belief from history«; in the discussion with Saladin that follows his telling of the story, however, Nathan argues that we justifiably adhere most faithfully to those beliefs that we have inherited, not those for which we independently discover our own reasons, Gründe.Footnote 48 In fact, Nathan seems to want to patch up the rupture that the parable had introduced into the logic of a continuous patriarchal lineage: »Wie kann ich meinen Vätern weniger,/Als du den deinen glauben?« This tension was anticipated in the parable itself. As Martha Helfer has observed, the authentic ring is said to be almost as unidentifiable as the »true« religion. The original ring may have been lost, as the judge impatiently suggests, but a primary ring does in fact exist – a thought that, in its reflection on the history of the three monotheisms in question, would appear to contradict the ostensible moral of Nathan’s story by reasserting Judaism as the first, and therefore uniquely authentic, religion.Footnote 49

The ring, or rings, thus dangle before us as a problem and a provocation. They are tokens of memory – memory of fathers and forefathers, memory of one’s own identity’s roots in contingent history. As in Minna von Barnhelm, however, Nathan’s rings also serve as prominent markers of the role of forgetting, which, as Nietzsche will later argue, is at least as important to the creation of historical identity as remembering is. As in Minna, the rings of the late play suggest the possibility, even necessity, of a return, a circling back to a defining prior historical moment or origin. As in Minna, however, Nathan’s rings also present the deficiencies and perils of a static conception of historical origins. Purported origins can be invoked as moral cudgels, as a way of insisting on a particular history and one’s ownership of it (an idea clearly foregrounded in Lessing’s Palace Parable of 1778). Loosened from their moorings in a specifically defined history, however, the two dramas’ rings not only reveal the necessity of independent acts of interpretation and evaluation; they also reveal the role of that forgetting that serves as a prerequisite for such creative acts. Because they are so recognizable and effective as symbols of remembering, the complex history of Lessing’s rings demonstrates a relation to history itself that shows how essential strategies of forgetting are. In his weakness, the last father described in Nathan’s parable forgets himself, which is to say that he sacrifices his inherited patriarchal authority and, with it, the control over his successors. He does not lose control accidentally; he willingly deceives himself,Footnote 50 and in doing so actively confuses the traces of the lineage of which he is himself a product and that shapes his behavior. By making indistinguishable copies of the original ring, he consciously disrupts the ring’s symbolic value as a symbol of historical continuity. The link to prior generations is disrupted and, only as a result of this act, the meaning of the assumed origin is thrown into doubt. The ring’s mythic origin presents itself as just that: a myth, and one that as such demands to be interpreted. This interpretation, for its part, is as much a creative remembering as a creative forgetting.