Friederike Caroline Neuber

Friederike Caroline Neuber, also called Die Neuberin, (9 March 1697 in Reichenbach im Vogtland – 30 November 1760 near Dresden), was a German actress and theatre director. She is one of the most famous artists in the history of the German theater.

Friederike Caroline Neuber's father was a legal court inspector. She ran away from home in 1717 with the student Johann Neuber, whom she married in 1718. In 1727, she was made royal court actress and the leader of her own theatre troupe. She was active in the introduction of the French theatre in Germany. In 1737, she produced the play about Hanswurst, intending it as a banishment of the coarse comic character. The staged banishment has generally been regarded as an emblematic moment in German theatre history for the transition from popular, improvised, so-called ‘Stegreiftheater’ to a modern bourgeois literary mode.