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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise [Nathan the Wise] is a world-famous work of literature. Published in the year 1779, Lessing’s play, taking as its protagonist the Jewish merchant Nathan whose story of the “Parable of the Ring” is a plea for religious toleration, has lost none of its topicality to this day. Indeed, the problem of the peaceful co-existence of Christians, Jews and Muslims seems more urgent now than ever, in Europe and America as much as in Africa or the Middle East.
No wonder the drama is still being performed on stage and read in schools. And being a great work of international literature, its subject has been adapted again and again for all kinds of different artistic genres. Lessing himself, after all, took the core of his play – the parable of the three rings, standing for the three world religions – from Boccaccio, who in his own turn derived it from even older traditions.
There has now been an adaptation that is entirely new of its kind. Mirjam Pressler has made Lessing’s material the basis of a novel for young people entitled Nathan and His Children. Pressler, born in 1940, has made her name first and foremost with the German translation of the diaries of Anne Frank, and among her many distinctions has won the Federal German Cross of Merit. She has taken a keen interest in Jewish subjects all her working life, and translates, not least, from the Hebrew. Readers will recognize her familiarity with the theme on every page of the book. To Pressler, Lessing’s Nathan is “a philosophical discussion in dramatic form.” Her declared aim is to make the subject more accessible to young people in our own time. And the most appropriate form for that is the novel, because who voluntarily reads plays today? The characters in Lessing’s play, says Pressler, are “put rather too much to the service of the ideas that he wanted to convey,” and human beings as real people get short shrift in this ideological drama. In a story for young adults, the characters should be more rounded and lifelike, set against a background of everyday life. Pressler wanted to give them “social reality”, but at the same time to “keep as close as possible to Lessing’s guidelines.”
Easier said than done, you might think. After all, over two centuries lie between us and the age of the Enlightenment in which Lessing lived, and we are almost a thousand years away from the period in which his Nathan is set: the Middle Ages at the time of the Third Crusade. In addition, bringing the story to life for the present day and remaining faithful to Lessing might appear to be conflicting aims. But Mirjam Pressler has brought off this balancing act with masterly skill. As you read the novel, you have an astonishingly strong sense of reading the drama itself, but in the form of narrative fiction. Pressler has succeeded in turning the idealistically committed language of Lessing’s five-act Dramatic Poem, with its sparse state directions, into a novel for the young that preserves the spirit of Lessing but does not sound in the least old-fashioned or stuffy.
The time and place are the same in Pressler as in Lessing – Jerusalem, around 1192 – and the characters keep their names: Nathan, his daughter Recha, the Sultan, the Templar (who saves Recha from the fire), the Sultan’s sister Sittah, the dervish Al Hafi and the Patriarch. The first difference we notice is the fact that Mirjam Pressler has enriched the plot by adding several new characters. Nathan’s household acquires the crippled orphan boy Geshehm, the cook Zipora, the steward Eliyahu, and an assistant called Jakob. We gain a picture of a credible family community of the kind that may well have been usual at the time in a prosperous merchant’s house.
Pressler also adds a new Muslim character: Abu Hassan, one of Sultan Saladin’s captains. He will turn out to play an important part in the plot: he kills Nathan. This is Pressler’s major dramatic coup: the wise old man is dead, now it is for his children to put his ideas into practice.
Each chapter is told in the first person by one of the characters, helping the author to achieve, by simple means, what the text of the play can do only in live performance on stage. The plot directly affects the audience, or here the reader. The characters not only narrate the course of events but describe their emotions, their fears and wishes. We learn that Nathan gave Geshehm, the orphan boy, a new life: “Until Nathan gave me a name, I had few reasons to thank God for my life. But now I am truly grateful to him.”
Through the story of Recha, who comes originally from Germany, we can understand the enthusiasm and then the disappointment of thousands upon thousands who set off on the Crusade to the Holy Land at that time: “When I think of the journey, it is all confusion – a mixture of images and words, blessings and curses, cruelty and moments of delight and joy.” And when the Templar describes the public execution by beheading of all his Christian comrades in arms, we become directly aware – as is not the case in Lessing – that a real war was being fought, and Saladin was capable of cruelty to those of other faiths.
Mirjam Pressler, who once spent a year in a kibbutz, makes the action of Lessing’s drama credible in every respect. She describes flesh-and-blood people, their fears, anxieties and hopes. Above all, her verdict on the religious conflict that she presents is unsparing. It would have been unlikely for a rich merchant like Nathan, with enemies seeking to kill him because of his wealth, his popularity and his religion, to survive in the turmoil of Jerusalem at this time. Nathan and His Children is not a tale of the victory of religious toleration, but of hope that the efforts of Nathan’s children and their descendents – for instance, the readers of this fine book for young people – will help it to win through some day.
In this latest version of a very old story, Nathan at one point strikes the same note as the black leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that some day men and women will rise up and live out the true meaning of their faith. I have a dream that some day Jews, Muslims and Christians will sit together in a spirit of true brotherhood.” Mirjam Pressler’s Nathan is a dreamer – although a sceptical one. “But it is only a dream. The reality is different.”
Anne Nordmann
September 2010
[Translated by Anthea Bell]
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