Mopsa Sternheim

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Annemarie Schwarzenbach : Mopsa Sternheim (Paris, 1933)
Franz Grainer : Mopsa with her mother Thea Sternheim (ca.1913)

Dorothea "Mopsa" Sternheim (born as Elisabeth Dorothea Löwenstein on January 10, 1905 in Oberkassel near Düsseldorf ; died on September 11, 1954 in Paris ) was a German set designer , costume designer and resistance fighter in France. In the 1920s, before emigrating to Paris, she designed costumes and sets for plays by Carl Sternheim and Klaus Mann . Because of her membership in the Resistance , she was imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

Life

childhood

Dorothea Löwenstein's biological parents were the playwright Carl Sternheim (1878-1942) and the writer Thea Sternheim (1883-1971), who at the time of Dorothea's birth was married to Artur Löwenstein, who recognized the child . When the Löwensteins divorced in 1906, "Mopsa" and her older sister Agnes initially stayed with him. When he remarried, Mopsa came to his mother in 1912, who had meanwhile married Sternheim and gave birth to their son Klaus Sternheim (1908-1946). In 1913 the family moved into the villa "Clairecolline" in the foreword La Hulpe in Brussels . Towards the end of the First World War she avoided the neutral Netherlands , in 1919 she went to Uttwil in Switzerland , from 1922 to 1924 the Sternheims lived in the Waldhof in Wilschdorf near Dresden .

Mopsa Sternheim received school lessons from private tutors and her mother. As a child she read Kleist , Dostoevsky , Tolstoy and Schiller . According to Lea Singer's research , her head of house described her as a twelve-year-old girl with the intelligence of a 50-year-old woman, "in other words, an incredibly precise, analyzing child". In her parents' house, according to Singer, there was "every kind of pampering and upper-class luxury", but no security and continuity. In the time after the end of the war, Carl Sternheim sexually pursued his daughter , while her mother, who was suffering from depression, tried to formally save the marriage.

education and profession

Mopsa Sternheim began training in drawing at the Dresden Art Academy in 1923 . Through her father, she received the order for the set and costumes for a production of his play Der Nebbich in Berlin. In 1924 she began an apprenticeship as a costume and set designer at the Cologne Theater . She became friends with Klaus Mann , Erika Mann and Mann's fiancé, the actress Pamela Wedekind . The four were considered the "poet children", who were denied originality. In 1925, Sternheim was responsible for the costumes and set design for Klaus Mann's Anja and Esther and in 1927 for the Revue zu Vieren . Pamela Wedekind appeared in both productions directed by Gustaf Gründgens . The pieces did not go down well with the critics. For the world premiere of Carl Sternheim's comedy Die Schule von Uznach or Neue Sachlichkeit on September 21, 1926 in the Hamburger Schauspielhaus , Mopsa Sternheim realized the stage design without her father's consent, and then for the productions in Cologne and Mannheim . A critic in the Vossische Zeitung praised her “pretty and talented” sets for the Hamburg performance.

Relationships and marriage

At the age of 21, Mopsa Sternheim had a brief, intense affair with the poet Gottfried Benn , a friend of her parents who she had already met during the First World War when the Sternheims were living in Belgium. She never got over the fact that Benn didn't want to have a relationship with her. A suicide attempt is attested. In her diary in 1952 she noted in retrospect: "I only loved Benn to the point of madness - the impregnable fortress, the negation itself." Through her mother's correspondence and her mother's correspondence with Benn, she remained in contact with him for life with interruptions during the Second World War . She also commented on Benn's literary development in her diary. About his turn to National Socialism , she wrote: “And then, around 1932, with the intoxication of National Socialism (to which he immediately succumbed), the great temptation of the German approached him: what I call virilism, this German manly madness, the masculine Megalomania. […] Yes, from 33 onwards he becomes one-sidedly “thoughtful” - despite all the poems that follow: They are often perfect philosophy in rhyme. Also a German specialty. "

From 1926 Mopsa Sternheim lived mainly in Berlin. Since she was treated with the pain reliever Eukodal after a motorcycle accident in 1927 , she became addicted to the drug and remained so for life despite rehab. After brief affairs with women, she lived for a while with the writer Ruth Landshoff-Yorck , whom she introduced to Annemarie Schwarzenbach . Her friendship with Pamela Wedekind ended when she got engaged to Carl Sternheim in 1927 after Carl and Thea Sternheim were finally divorced. In January 1928 she met the homosexual surrealist writer René Crevel know. He proposed marriage to her. But she decided on the Austrian painter Rudolph von Ripper . Crevel was supposed to share an apartment with them in Berlin, they envisioned “une belle vie à trois” ( a beautiful life for three ), but this never happened. Shortly before they were married in 1929, Klaus Mann dedicated the story, The Adventure of the Bridal Couple, to her . Her marriage to Ripper gave her Austrian citizenship. She spent several months with him in Austria before he emigrated to England. René Crevel remained her friend until he died in 1935 by suicide using gas. She commuted between Morocco , Paris , Berlin , Salzburg and Vienna , it didn't stop her anywhere for long.

Emigration, Resistance and Imprisonment in Concentration Camps

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , she emigrated to Paris in early 1933, like her mother had before. Sternheim was involved in communist refugee aid. She wrote anti-fascist newspaper articles that she was able to publish in the British Manchester Guardian , where she was helped by the contacts of her friend Edy Sackville-West , and worked with Willi Munzenberg on the Brown Book on Reichtagsbrand and Hitler's terror . After the annexation of Austria in early 1938, she was considered a Reich German in France and only received a temporary residence permit . After the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, Mopsa Sternheim moved in with her mother because she could no longer survive financially with casual translations, also as a result of her drug addiction. In January 1941 “Rudolf Carl von Ripper and Dorothea von Ripper, geb. Löwenstein ”was expatriated from the German Reich , which made it even more difficult for Mopsa Sternheim to stay in German-occupied France , as she was now considered stateless .

In early 1942, she joined a resistance group of the Resistance that worked with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to help her French friend Michel Zimmermann, who was persecuted as a Jew, to flee to England. On December 2, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sternheim, tortured her and knocked out her teeth. But she didn't reveal anything. She was then imprisoned in Fresnes Prison. In 1944 she was sent to the Compiègne assembly camp and from there on January 31, 1944, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Since she spoke German among the deported French women , she was the block elder in the infirmary for 200 to 400 prisoners who suffered from typhus , scarlet fever or dysentery . Her commitment to the sick, whom fellow prisoners testified after the war, and her resistance to the camp SS resulted in her being demoted to a work detachment. On April 23, 1945, the Swedish Red Cross evacuated around seven thousand women from the camp as part of the “Aktion Bernadotte” and brought them to Sweden , including Sternheim.

Post-war Paris

After the end of the war, she was back with her mother in Paris from June 1945, where the two of them were in dire financial straits. From a vacation with a friend in Italy in 1946, she wrote to her mother: “I've been thinking about Ravensbrück ever since I've been here and wonder a little anxiously what degree of contrasts life has intended for me. Because it's almost inconceivable for the same brain. ”In 1948 she was summoned to the British zone of Germany as a witness in the fourth Ravensbrück trials against Benno Orendi and Martha Haake .

The following years were a time of disappointment for her. Ripper wanted a divorce in order to remarry. Sternheim earned some money with translations and worked on an autobiographical novel. The art historian Gert Schiff offered the manuscript to Rowohlt Verlag , who rejected it "as interesting but too fragmentary for publication". The manuscript is considered lost. The orders she had hoped for for film scripts did not materialize. Only in 1951 did she get a job for the set for the comedy Der Snob , staged by Gert Weymann at the Nuremberg Theater .

Death and inheritance

In the winter of 1953/1954, Sternheim fell ill with cancer. The painkillers no longer worked after decades of getting used to morphine preparations. She died at the age of 49. Gottfried Benn wrote to her mother on September 14, 1954: “Our little Thea [Dorothea] had a strange life, a life of nerves, restlessness, often of mishap - and now a death early and full of pain [...] her posture and she kept her bravery, which she had all her life, [...] until the end - that's wonderful and u. I am deeply touched and moved that I was able to stand close to her for once. "

After numerous lawsuits that Mopsa Sternheim had led to compensation for her internment in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the German reparation payments only reached her mother after her death.

Mopsa Sternheim wrote a diary from the age of thirteen until the end of her life. Excerpts from it and letters were first published in 2004. Her diary entries about Ravensbrück, partly in French, have been preserved, as well as a portrait she drew of the interned Jewish Resistance fighter Odette Fabius . In her will she had decreed that letters to her, with the exception of those from René Crevel, should be destroyed. Except for a dedication from 1949 in his volume of poems Trunkene Flut, nothing remains of Gottfried Benn's letters to Mopsa Sternheim .

Trivia

Anna Thalbach played Mopsa Sternheim in the multi-part TV series Die Manns - A novel of the century from 2001 .

Fonts

  • Carl Sternheim: Letters Volume 2: Correspondence with Thea Sternheim, Dorothea and Klaus Sternheim: 1906–1942. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1988.
  • René Crevel : Lettres à Mopsa . Edited by Michel Carassou. Paris-Méditerranée, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-84272-009-1 .
  • Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and notes, with letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary. Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 .
  • Diary entries about Ravensbrück , edited and partly translated from French by Thomas Ehrsam. In: Sinn und Form , issue 1/2017, pp. 48–59

literature

Fiction

Web links

Commons : Mopsa Sternheim  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Dorothea Sternheim was called "Mopsa" by her mother as a toddler (sometimes "Moiby", "Mops" or "Mopse"). How the name came about is not known from the current state of research. As an adult, she kept the name.
  2. ↑ Agnes Löwenstein (1902–1976) was later married to the Lorca translator Enrique Beck .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Thomas Ehrsam: “But I can't lie to myself.” Mopsa Sternheim, attempt at a portrait. In: Sinn und Form, issue 1/2017, ISBN 978-3-943297-33-1 , p. 40f
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Doris Hermanns: Mopsa Sternheim , in: FemBio
  3. ^ Mopsa Sternheim and Gottfried Benn. How a poet's power of speech led to obsession . Lea Singer in conversation with Fank Meyer, in: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, May 11, 2017 (accessed February 20, 2019)
  4. ↑ Compare Lea Singer: The poetry of bondage. Novel. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-455-40625-2 , p. 49 f.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Dance on the powder keg: Gottfried Benn, women and power. Structure, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-03666-9 , p. 226, p. 197
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Dance on the powder keg: Gottfried Benn, women and power. Structure digital, 2017. Re. Excerpt from Google Books
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Dance on the powder keg: Gottfried Benn, women and power. Structure, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-03666-9 , p. 195
  8. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and notes, with letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 375
  9. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and notes, with letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 227. Quoted in: Review of the book, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 14, 2005
  10. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and notes, with letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 219. Quoted in part in: Review of the book, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 14, 2005
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Dance on the powder keg: Gottfried Benn, women and power. Structure, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-03666-9 , pp. 197/198
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Dance on the powder keg: Gottfried Benn, women and power. Structure, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-03666-9 , p. 226
  13. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and notes, with letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 381
  14. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and records. With letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2004 ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 478
  15. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . Volume 1, Saur, Munich 1985, p. 458 (list 217)
  16. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and records. With letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2004 ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 145
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Martynkewicz: Dance on the powder keg. Gottfried Benn, Women and Power , Construction, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-03666-9 , p. 351
  18. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and records. With letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2004 ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 489
  19. ↑ Delphine Conzelmann: Thea Sternheim kept diaries between the wars , in: Bz Basel, September 22, 2015
  20. ^ Dorothée de Ripper: Portrait d'Odette Fabius, Ravensbruck, Allemagne, 1944 . In: Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme
  21. ↑ Thomas Ehrsam (ed.): Gottfried Benn - Thea Sternheim. Correspondence and records. With letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary . Published by Thomas Ehrsam, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2004 ISBN 978-3-89244-714-6 , p. 358
  22. ↑ Anna Thalbach in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  23. ↑ fictionalized biography , publisher's information, at DNB
personal data
SURNAME Sternheim, Mopsa
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Löwenstein, Elisabeth Dorothea (maiden name); Moiby, Sternheim (nickname); Ripper, Elisabeth Dorothea von (married name); Ripper, Dorothée de (French)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German set designer, costume designer and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberkassel (Düsseldorf)
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1954
Place of death Paris