A comprehensive portrayal of Lessing's life and work, providing an overview of research and setting new accents. Lessing is considered one of the main representatives of the German Enlightenment. He embodies the archetype of the free writer and intellectual and is famous for the linguistic elegance of his writings and his integrity as a critic. However, this image only partially does justice to Lessing: his career is marked by coincidences and contradictions, and he experimented with a variety of literary forms, leaving behind fragments from different disciplines. Friedrich Vollhardt traces Lessing's life and work, examines the research, and presents Lessing as a surprisingly modern poet and thinker. Vollhardt is interested in the writer's spaces of action, following Lessing into the current debates of his time.