Lessing had already been perceived as an intellectual authority by his contemporaries. This rank was never disputed during his lifetime and remained equally undisputed after his death. No biography of Lessing can go without the words of praise with which Friedrich Schlegel and Goethe honoured him: “He himself was worth more than all his talents” (St, 178), it is said in Schlegel’s great character portrait from 1797. “A man like Lessing is what we need,” Goethe remarks in his conversations with Eckermann, “for what was it that made him so great but his character, his perseverance!” (St, 254). The appreciation of Lessing as a person knows no boundaries: No German can pronounce his name “without something of an echo sounding in his chest” (St, 262), Heinrich Heine declares. To the theatre critic and journalist Alfred Kerr, Lessing is a “high-ranking civilian” (St, 437). “If we knew nothing about Lessing but his life, we would already have reason enough to pay homage to this flawless man, this great fighter” (GLJ, 20), Ricarda Huch writes in the Book on the Occasion of the Goethe and Lessing Anniversaries 1929 (Buch des Goethe-Lessing-Jahres 1929). – On Humanity in Dark Times (Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten; St, 486) is the title Hannah Arendt gave to her speech on being awarded the Hamburg Lessing Prize in 1960. And so on, ad libitum.