Immermann, Karl Leberecht

Born Apr. 24, 1796, in Magdeburg; died Aug. 25, 1840, in Düsseldorf. German writer, playwright, and theater figure.

Immermann received a legal education. In 1822 he was first published, as a poet and playwright. In 1832 he organized a theater in Düsseldorf (in operation until 1837), in which he staged the best works of world and German drama. Immermann strove to create a sense of ensemble among individual actors; he asserted the director’s importance as the ideological and artistic interpreter of a play and paid great attention to crowd scenes. He elaborated his Rules, in which he defined the actor’s responsibilities, and he was the author of studies on the theater.

Immermann’s literary works included the collection Poems (1822), the tragedy Cardenio and Celinde (1826), the dramatic trilogy, drawn from Russian history, Alexis (1833), and the novel The Epignones (1836), in which he depicted the ruin of gentry estates caused by capitalism. The novel Münchhausen (1838; Russian translation, vols. 1–2, 1931–32) is a vigorous satire on German absolutism and the gentry. In the character of Baron Münchhausen, which had already been portrayed by R. E. Raspe, Immermann described a contemporary type of ignoble German aristocrat, a character who boasts of his fantastic “deeds” in hunting and in war. Immermann also wrote Memoirs (1840–43). Immermann’s literary work was a transition between romanticism and critical realism.