5 Mark Caroline Neuber

Caroline Neuber — actress, playwright, and theatrical reformer — was selected for this issue on the 300th anniversary of her birth. She spent much of her career in direct conflict with Johann Christoph Gottsched, the Leipzig professor whose dramaturgical theories she had championed and then publicly repudiated in 1741 in a staged allegorical piece that essentially ended their collaboration in the most theatrical way possible.

The GDR minted a consistent series of commemorative 5-Mark pieces celebrating German cultural figures the state wished to claim as socialist heritage. Neuber, as a working-class professional woman who challenged male academic authority, fit the ideological brief neatly.