Neuber, Caroline

(Friederike Caroline Weisenborn, 1697-1760)

   Actress, manager. "Die Neuberin," as Neuber came to be celebrated even in her own lifetime, was most significant as a theater reformer in the 18th century. Many scholars and critics, including Johann Wolfgang Goethe, have credited her with changing the course of German theater history, largely because she established standards of respectability and esteem among both middle-class and aristocratic audiences. Prior to die Neuberin, most troupes performing in German endured reprobation as boorish vulgarians; by the mid-1720s she was the leader of Germany's preeminent troupe, concentrating on a repertoire that excluded the low Hanswurst comedy type and the excesses of improvisation. By 1730 she and her husband Johann Neuber (1697-1756) had built Germany's most literate and cultivated troupe, demanding memorized texts among performers and circumspect behavior off the stage. In a letter to Johann Christoph Gottsched she stated that her artistic goals included the betterment of society, especially by "seizing any opportunity to do something useful and worthwhile." Her collaboration with Gottsched in the 1730s expanded her company's repertoire, though she still did Haupt- und Staatsaktion plays along with adaptations of English sentimental comedies and the French comédies larmoyantes. She premiered Gotthold Ephraim

   Lessing's Der junge Gelehrter (The Young Scholar) in 1748. Neuber was a superb actress in her own right, and she trained numerous actors who subsequently formed their own troupes, borrowing many of the techniques she had employed. Neuber was also gifted as a playwright of "afterpieces," short play scenarios performed after the main offering. Goethe memorialized her as Madame Nelly in his four-volume novel about touring theater troupes, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). She is the subject of the 1941 film Komödianten (The Comedians), directed by G. W. Pabst (1885-1967) and starring Käthe Dorsch as die Neuberin.