the day of Frau Caroline Neuber, the status of the
German stage had risen considerably. The theatrical companies of
Schonemann, of Koch, of Ackermann had attained fame through their
liberation from French types. Simplicity and naturalness became the
ideal of playwrights. Friederike Hensel won the reputation of being the
greatest German actress of her time, as Konrad Eckhof became foremost
among the actors. These two, and Ackermann, with his daughter, Frau
Lowen, and others, became so to speak the charter members of the newly
founded National Theatre of Hamburg, for which Lessing was appointed
dramaturgiste. After two years the enterprise failed, but nevertheless
the ideal of what a German national theatre ought to be, was created and
expressed. Gifted women and Lessing an extraordinary combination indeed!
had founded it!

Female literary work began more modestly. While a great poet like
Lessing celebrated the great era of Frederick, while Ewald von Kleist
sang his king and the Prussian army and of death for the fatherland
which glory fell to his share at the battle of Kunersdorf, there arose
also a female poet, Anna Louisa Karsch, of the newly won province of
Silesia, who, in spite of her mediocrity, was celebrated as a Prussian
Sappho. The experiences of her life, springing from abject poverty, or
rather misery, her service as a stable maid, her marriage to a brutal
old husband, and yet her constant endeavors to improve her mind under
the most trying circumstances of menial labor and want, her divorce and
remarriage with a drunken, lazy tailor, Karsch, who sold even the
clothing of her children to indulge in his vice of drunkenness, read
almost like a terrible nightmare. But the hour of salvation came. When
her good-for-nothing husband was obliged to go to the Seven Years' War,
the Silesian Baron von Kottwitz noticed her talent and took her to
Berlin. In Berlin she soon became the fashion; she was received in
literary circles, and her poetry was encouraged. The "German Horace, the
thought-singing Ramler," informed her that Gleim, the poet of Prussian
war songs, desired to know "his sister in Apollo." She hastened to write
to the "Apollinian brother." Her friends secured her even an interview
with Frederick the Great, who promised to take care of her, a promise
which he forgot, however, in spite of her repeated rhymed exhortations.
Later, he sent her a royal present of two Prussian thalers, which she
promptly returned b