Theodor Lessing - Life

Life

Lessing was born into an upper-middle-class assimilated Jewish family. His father was a doctor in Hanover, his mother the daughter of a banker. He remembered his schooldays as unhappy; he was a mediocre student and graduated from Ratsgymnasium Hannover only with great difficulty. In his memoirs he wrote: "This humanistic German gymnasium specialising in patriotism, Latin, and Greek... this institute for the furtherance of stupidification, half of it built on white-collar boundering, the other half on mendacious, platitudinous German nationalism, was not just incredibly irresponsible, it was utterly boring... Nothing, nothing could ever make up for what those fifteen years destroyed in me. Even now, almost every night I dream of the tortures of my schooldays." At the time he was friendly with Ludwig Klages, but this friendship came to an end in 1899 (although whether anti-Semitism was a factor is unclear). Each later maintained that his own adult views had been determined by this shared background.

After his graduation he began studying medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau, Bonn, and finally Munich, where, in greater conformity with his real interests, he turned to literature, philosophy, and psychology. He concluded his study of philosophy with a dissertation on the work of the Russian logician Afrikan Spir.

His plans of habilitation at the University of Dresden were abandoned in the face of continuing public outrage over the influence in academia of Jews, socialists, and feminists. The next few years he spent as a substitute teacher and lecturer. In 1906 he travelled to Göttingen in order to obtain a habilitation under Edmund Husserl. This plan also came to nothing, but resulted briefly in a position as theatre critic for the Göttinger Zeitung; his critical notes were later collected in book form as Nachtkritiken.

In 1907 he returned to Hanover, where he lectured on philosophy at the Technische Hochschule. In January 1910 he created a literary scandal with a vicious attack on the critic Samuel Lublinski and his Bilanz der Moderne (1904), in a piece published in Die Schaubühne filled with "Jewish jokes" and gibes about his appearance; it drew strong condemnation from Thomas Mann.

On the outbreak of World War I Lessing volunteered for service, hoping to put his medical studies to good use at the front. At this time he wrote his famous essay Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen ("History as Making Sense of the Senseless"). Its publication was delayed by the censor until 1919 on account of its uncompromising anti-war position. After the war he returned to lecturing in Hanover and established the Volkshochschule Hannover-Linden with the help of his second wife, Ada Lessing. From 1923 he was highly active in public life, publishing articles and essays in Prager Tagblatt and Dortmunder Generalanzeiger, and quickly became one of the best-known political writers of Weimar Germany. In 1925 he drew attention to the fact that the serial killer Fritz Haarmann had been a spy for the Hanover police, and this resulted in him being excluded from covering the trial. In the same year he wrote an unflattering piece on Paul von Hindenburg, describing him as an intellectually vacuous man who was being used as a front by sinister political forces:

It was Plato's view that the leaders of men should be philosophers. No philosopher ascends the throne in Hindenburg. Only a representative symbol, a question mark, a zero. One might say "Better a zero than a Nero." Sadly, history shows that behind every zero lurks a future Nero.

This article earned him the enmity of nationalists, and his lectures were soon disrupted by anti-Semitic protestors. Lessing received only limited support from the public, and even his colleagues argued that he had gone too far. A six-month leave of absence failed to calm the situation. On 7 June nearly a thousand students threatened to move their studies to the Technische Universität Braunschweig unless he was removed, and on 18 June 1926 the Prussian minister Carl Heinrich Becker bowed to public pressure by putting Lessing on indefinite leave on a reduced salary.

On 30 January 1933 the Nazi Party entered government and in February, after the suppression of the Freie Wort congress, Lessing started packing his bags. On 1 March he and his wife fled to Marienbad in Czechoslovakia, where he continued to write for German-language newspapers abroad. But in June it was reported in Sudeten newspapers that a reward had been announced for his capture.

On 30 August 1933 he was working in his study when he was shot through the window by assassins. He died the next day at the hospital in Marienbad.