| Johanne Sophie Dorothea Albrecht | |
| Birth Date: | December 1756 |
| Birth Place: | Erfurt |
| Death Date: | 16 November 1840 |
| Death Place: | Hamburg |
| Nationality: | German |
| Occupation: | Actress and Writer |
Johanne Sophie Dorothea Albrecht (née Baumer; December 1756,[1] Erfurt – 16 November 1840, Hamburg) was a German actress and writer. She played leading roles in plays by Friedrich Schiller, who was a good friend of hers. She wrote poetry, novels, and prose, and was married to the doctor and writer Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht.
Sophie Albrecht was born to the Baumer family. Her father was a Professor of Medicine at University of Erfurt, until he died when Sophie was 14. At age 15, she married Dr. Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht, who was one of her father's students. In 1776, Friedrich and Sophie traveled to Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), where Friedrich was the personal physician of Count Manteuffel. There, Friedrich edited a literary anthology, which included Sophie's first published poems. The Albrechts returned to Erfurt in 1781 due to Sophie's mother's failing health. Her mother died the next year. In Erfurt at age 25, Sophie published her first book of poetry and started acting.[2]
Albrecht's first performance as an actress was in an amateur production of Christian Felix Weiße's Romeo and Juliet with great success in her hometown of Erfurt. Her debut as a professional actress happened in 1782, with the Grossmann troupe. The troupe did performances in Frankfurt and Mainz. A year later, she met Friedrich Schiller and played Luise Miller in his first performance of Kabale und Liebe. Sophie Albrecht and Friedrich Schiller had similar interests and became close friends.
In 1786, Albrecht joined the Bondini troupe at Dresden Court Theater. In 1787, she traveled to Leipzig to act in the Leipzig premier of Schiller's Don Carlos, where she played Princess Eboli. The following year, Albrecht traveled to a small court theater in Schwerin, where her performance often consisted of acting like a naive girl. Later, she traveled to Prague, Mannheim and eventually Hamburg to be a guest performer at the Theater am Gänsemarkt.
In 1796, Albrecht and her husband, now a popular playwright, managed the National Theater in Altona (at that time part of the Kingdom of Denmark). Sophie commemorated the event with her Antrittsrede bei Eröffnung des Nationaltheaters (Welcoming Address at the Opening of the National Theater) on September 1, 1796. A year later, Albrecht quit the Altonaer Nationaltheater and divorced her husband.[3]
In Reval, Albrecht's poems were first published in a literary anthology edited by her husband. Although Sophie never did find popularity among male literary establishments, she did have a strong network of women on whom she relied to write about female relations.[4] Her works drew attention to the importance of female friends in her life. Sophie dedicated her first two volumes of poetry (1781; 1785) to women friends. She wrote a love poem for fellow actress, Catharina Felicitas Abt, whom Albrecht never met and who had recently died. The poem was entitled An dem Grabe der Madame Abt in Göttingen den 19ten August 1784 (At the grave of Madame Abt in Göttingen the 19th of August 1784).[5]
Sophie Albrecht wrote about love, but not in its tranquility. Ruth P. Dawson describes Sophie saying, "Sophie Albrecht glorified love but could find no way to embed it in positive social narratives, connecting it instead directly and indirectly with death, and particularly, suicide".[6] Her work is often described as melancholy with sorrow or regret as underlying themes. Another analysis of Sophie Albrecht's works by Mary Helen Dupree explains: "she channels her experience of loss and death into opportunities for self-exploration, resistance to social norms, and artistic productivity." However, by 1792 Sophie Albrecht had stopped writing poetry.
Later in life Sophie a wrote Gothic horror novel about ghosts and mystery. Albrecht's novel, Das höfliche Gespenst (The Polite Ghost), was published on three separate occasions under three different names — Legenden (Legends) (1797), Das höfliche Gespenst (The Polite Ghost), and Ida von Duba, das Mädchen im Walde; eine romantische Geschichte aus den grauenvollen Tagen der Vorwelt (Ida von Duba, the Girl in the Forest; a Romantic Story from the Dreadful Days of the Past) (1805). The Polite Ghost told a story about what happens after the war ends and the hero is dead, leaving behind a widow, who is haunted by a ghost. The nature of the relationship between the two characters — Ida and Katharine — has led many to believe the text is in part about same-sex attraction.[7] [8]
In 1808, Albrecht published Romantische Dichtungen aus der ältern christlichen Kirche (Romantic Literature from the Early Christian Church); unlike The Polite Ghost, it did not display Gothic themes.
Albrecht used writing as a source of income after her divorce, although her ex-husband did help sustain her until his death from typhus in 1814. She spent the next quarter century in poverty, and at the age of 80 had begun writing cookbooks to earn money. Sophie Albrecht died at the age of 82. In 1841 a friend published a collection of Albrecht's poems to pay for a gravestone.
Sophie Albrecht was the first eighteenth-century German woman poet to have her works published during her lifetime.
From An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers