Lessing was born into an upper-middle-class assimilated Jewish family. His father was a doctor in Hanover, his mother the daughter of a banker. He remembered his schooldays as unhappy; he was a mediocre student and graduated from Ratsgymnasium Hannover only with great difficulty. In his memoirs he wrote: "This humanistic German gymnasium specialising in patriotism, Latin, and Greek... this institute for the furtherance of stupidification, half of it built on white-collar boundering, the other half on mendacious, platitudinous German nationalism, was not just incredibly irresponsible, it was utterly boring... Nothing, nothing could ever make up for what those fifteen years destroyed in me. Even now, almost every night I dream of the tortures of my schooldays." At the time he was friendly with Ludwig Klages, but this friendship came to an end in 1899 (although whether anti-Semitism was a factor is unclear). Each later maintained that his own adult views had been determined by this shared background.