Rings: Minna, Nathan, and Memory-Play

The literature has long debated the meaning and function of the play of rings staged to such effect by the titular heroine of Lessing’s 1767 Minna von Barnhelm, and the rings that stand at the center of the parable told by the titular hero of his 1779 Nathan the Wise. What has been missing is a sustained examination of the question of whether and how these rings might serve related functions in the two works. This article considers the Lustspiel and Dramatisches Gedicht together in order to argue that the rings in each case need to be understood as tokens of remembrance, and that the complexity of the ring-thematic reflects an essential ambivalence in Lessing’s understanding of memory. Each ring comes to represent both the circularity of a return to past realities and commitments, and those historical ruptures and developments that prevent such a return. By extension, the dramas’ rings more broadly represent a fraught transition, one both emancipatory and destabilizing, from what Aleida Assmann (Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses [1999]) has described as a memory model inherited from the memoria tradition and based on the principle of archival retrieval, to a modern memory model based on a principle of reshaping and renewal rooted in the present.