Neubert was born into the family of a Protestant minister in 1940 in Herschdorf, a hillside village near Erfurt in central southern Germany. He grew up in nearby . Between 1958 and 1963 he studied Theology at Jena. After 1964 he worked at initially as a vicar and later as the minister in charge for the parish. From 1973 he was combining his parish duties with work as a at nearby Weimar. In 1976, probably on the advice of Robert Havemann, he joined the CDU, in western Germany a political party of the moderate right, but in the politically and by this time physically separated eastern German state, one of the so-called "block parties" controlled by the ruling &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party of Germany ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands"/SED)&lt;/a&gt; party through an organisation known as the &lt;a href="National%20Front%20%28East%20Germany%29"&gt;National Front ("Nationale Front der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik"/NF)&lt;/a&gt;. In 1984 Neubert resigned from the CDU. In 1984 he became community sociology secretary in the Theology Studies department with the Berlin-based .