The reception of lessing, of his works and ideas, has been marked for 200 years by attempts to place him historically somewhere between the classic and the modern, between national literature and world literature, between literary history and art theory, and to judge whether he was an innovator and a mediator of new developments. His contested place in German literary and intellectual history has often served to define German culture at the crossroads between French and English models, between the Roman and the Greek traditions, between delayed and accelerated progress toward modernization. While German culture generally lagged behind English and French developments, mostly due to the devastating aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, German intellectuals such as Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, as individuals, pushed the emerging German culture to join and in some cases even spearhead European advances. It was Lessing who, on the one hand, brought such authors as Aristotle and Diderot to German readers, and who, on the other, was the first German author to find a European audience. It was mainly through Lessing that German literary culture arrived on the European stage.

As a result of this Janus-like nature of his various roles, Lessing's reputation at any given time has always been subject to difficulties in affirming his historical place and defining his theoretical significance. Lessing has always been celebrated as a pioneer in literary criticism, art history, critical theology, and drama, but in some areas, which are the focus of attention in current debates of literary and cultural theory, his contributions have gained new poignancy. But while, at least in the English-speaking world, the focus may be shifting back and forth between the author of Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779) and the author of Laokoon (Laocoon, 1766), between cultural communication and textual representation, Lessing's historical place as a “classical modernist” remains uncontested in many areas:

1. • In terms of intellectual history, it was Lessing, in journalistic collaboration with his friends Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai, who raised criticism to the level of public discourse, thus inspiring the heated discussion of literary and philosophical issues, which became the preferred area of bourgeois emancipation and identification.

As the present volume is based on a conference held in St. Louis, the host city on the Mississippi is likely to figure prominently in many contributions. This one is no exception. Obviously, it is tempting to invoke the title of Vincente Minelli's film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) when people do meet in St. Louis to discuss instances of imagined and real interaction between various cultures. While in the late nineteenth century St. Louis was a major, possibly the most important, center of German settlers, the city's symbolic role in the cultural transfer between Germany and the United States also has a more problematic side in the early twentieth century. There are three such instances that may serve as a springboard for the discussion of how the German concept of cultural history made its way to the United States.

First, in 1902 the German-born Harvard Germanist Kuno Francke (1855–1930) courted both the emperor in Berlin and German-born brewers Adolphus Busch (1839–1913) and his art-collecting son-in-law Hugo Reisinger (1856–1914) in St. Louis to sponsor the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. Opened in 1903 and appropriately renamed the Busch-Reisinger in 1950, the museum has become a major American depository of art works banned from the very culture the museum was originally supposed to represent. It exhibits works by Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Lionel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Otto Mueller, and Otto Schlemmer, all of whom were barred by the Nazis as “degenerate” artists. The St. Louis brewers thus lent their names to an institution that ultimately turned into a safe haven for German art and artists on the run.

Second, in 1904 Francke's Harvard colleague, the German-born psychologist Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), used the St. Louis World's Fair to provide leading German scholars, among them Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, and Karl Lamprecht, with an international forum for ideas that might be adopted in the United States. This International Congress of Arts and Science was an odd meeting of the minds. Lamprecht, who at home was isolated by his enemies in the discipline of history, had the opportunity here to advocate in their very presence a materialist and universalist concept of cultural history that was not welcome in Germany's nationalist academy.