Thea Sternheim

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Thea Sternheim (around 1910). Photo by Franz Grainer
Thea Sternheim with her daughter Dorothea ("Mopsa") during the time the family lived in Königstein im Taunus

Thea Sternheim (born November 25, 1883 in Neuss ; † July 5, 1971 in Basel , Switzerland ; born Thea Bauer ) was a German author.

Life

Thea Bauer was the daughter of the wealthy screw manufacturer Georg Bauer, who left her with a fortune of two million Reichsmarks after his death in 1906 . She was raised a Catholic and attended boarding schools for girls, including one in Brussels. As a schoolgirl, she began exchanging letters with Maurice Maeterlinck . In November 1901, against the wishes of her parents in London, she married Arthur Löwenstein , ten years her senior , the father of her first daughter Agnes ("Nucki") Löwenstein (1902–1976). In 1903 she met Carl Sternheim , who was still married. With him she had the daughter Dorothea ("Mopsa") (1905-1954), born in 1905, and the son Klaus (1908-1946). In 1906 she left Arthur Löwenstein for good; the marriage was divorced in 1906, custody and asset management for both daughters was given to Löwenstein, although the second was Sternheim's child.

During her first marriage, she began to keep a diary , which she continued until May 25, 1971 shortly before her death on July 5, 1971. Thea Sternheim began collecting paintings by Vincent van Gogh at an early age and also acquired paintings by Henri Matisse , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pablo Picasso .

In 1907 she married Carl Sternheim. In 1908 she and the family moved into the castle-like property " Bellemaison " in Höllriegelskreuth near Munich, which she had designed herself and subsequently built by the architect Gustav von Cube . She estranged herself from Sternheim because of his sexual infidelity, his delusions and the waste of her fortune and finally withdrew his administration: “I have to get used to living with Karl without being his wife. [...] Since November I have been managing my assets alone. [...] If I had never placed absolute trust in him, I would never have been exposed to the embarrassing feeling of being betrayed at my expense. ”In 1927 she divorced Carl Sternheim.

Before the beginning of the First World War , she moved into the La Hulpe Castle in Belgium with Sternheim , but kept returning to Germany for temporary stays, primarily to Munich. In 1919 she went to Switzerland, from 1922 to 1924 she lived in the Waldhof in Wilschdorf near Dresden , in 1925 she designed a small palace that was built in Uttwil on the Swiss shores of Lake Constance near Romanshorn. She made close friendships with, among others, Frans Masereel , André Gide , Gottfried Benn and the Belgian painter Herman-Lucien de Cunsel (1908–1971), her decades-long friend , and most recently in Basel with Peter Geiger. She translated various French-language works into German, including by André Maurois .

Before the handover of power to the National Socialists , she emigrated to France on April 1, 1932 . Her diaries show that she foresaw the course of political events very early on; she recognized what developments in Germany would lead to. In France, when the war broke out in 1939, she was briefly interned in the Camp de Gurs camp, but was able to escape with Alexandra Ramm-Pfemfert , among others . Her fortune was frozen in Germany, after all she lived impoverished in a small apartment in Paris. In 1944 her German citizenship was revoked. After the end of the war she stayed in France. There she maintained contact for a while with the Berlin society photographer Frieda Riess, who emigrated to Paris in the 1930s .

Her two drug-addicted “Sternheim children” died early: Klaus in Mexico in 1946 and Mopsa, who was imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp until 1945 , died in 1954 of cancer. Thea Sternheim received a reparation payment for her daughter's suffering in the concentration camp , which saved her from complete impoverishment.

In 1963, for financial and health reasons, she moved to her first daughter Agnes, who married the Lorca translator Enrique Beck and worked as a singer and music teacher at the Freiburg University of Music under the stage name Inés Leuwen-Beck . Br. Was active, to Basel. Thea Sternheim died there in 1971 at the age of 87.

In addition to her diaries, she wrote the novel Dead Endings . Her correspondence with Gottfried Benn was published posthumously, including excerpts from Mopsa's diaries. The diaries I – V were edited by Thomas Ehrsam and Regula Wyss on behalf of the "Heinrich Enrique Beck Foundation" and were published in 2002 by Wallstein Verlag Göttingen.

Fonts

  • Diaries 1903–1971. 5 volumes. Edited by Thomas Ehrsam and Regula Wyss. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0748-3 . [With all the transcribed text on CD-ROM.]
  • Thea Sternheim's diary (1903–1971). Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3892443157 .
  • Gottfried Benn , Thea Sternheim: Correspondence and records. With letters and excerpts from Mopsa Sternheim's diary. Edited by Thomas Ehrsam. Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-714-4 .
  • Dead ends. Novel. With an afterword by Regula Wyss. Edited by Monika Melchert. Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89626-498-2 ; first Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1952.
  • Memories. Published by Helmtrud Mauser in conjunction with Traute Hensch. Kore, Freiburg im Br. 1995, ISBN 3-926023-66-X . (The typescript was created in 1936, essentially the work was created in 1952.)

literature

  • Melancholy and caviar. In: Fritz J. Raddatz : The red of the freedom sun became blood. Springer, Berlin et al. 2007, ISBN 978-386674-013-6 , pp. 139-174.
  • Monika Melchert: Farewell at the Adlon. The story of Thea and Carl Sternheim. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-942476-89-8 .
  • Thomas Ehrsam, Regula Wyss: Thea Sternheim and her world. “No one dare to tell me: You should!” Accompanying volume to the exhibition of the same name in the University Library of Basel, 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1769-7 .
  • Lea Singer : The poetry of bondage. Hoffmann & Campe, 2017, ISBN 978-3-455-40625-2 .

Radio feature

  • Fritz J. Raddatz. Melancholy with caviar. Thea Sternheim in her diaries. Feature on Sunday. Broadcast on February 22, 2004 in SWR 2 . - Again broadcast on May 11th, 2008 in the night studio under the title: Rich life and awake political conscience. The diaries of Thea Sternheim in Bavaria 2 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Agnes Löwenstein became a singer in the alto vocal subject under the stage name Ines Leuwen and was Hildegard Behrens' singing teacher . She was married to the Lorca translator Enrique Beck .
  2. ↑ cf. Thea Sternheim: Diaries 1903–1971. 2., through Edition. Wallstein Verlag 2011. Volume V; P. 611
  3. ↑ Quoted from Fritz J. Raddatz: The red of the freedom sun became blood. Springer, Berlin et al. 2007, ISBN 978-386674-013-6 , p. 144.
  4. ↑ http://www.askart.com/artist/Herman_Lucien_Cunsel/11162596/Herman_Lucien_Cunsel.aspx
  5. ↑ http://www.artnet.de/k%C3%BCnstler/herman-lucien-de-cunsel/auktionslösungen
  6. ↑ https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource.action?param.idSource=FR_DO-9d4b44bc19f15e5bb438dfd28a158857¶m.refStatus=nsr
  7. ↑ Björn Hayer: Gottfried Benn and the women - "Sex was an elixir of life for him". Review, Spiegel online , May 21, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Sternheim, Thea
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bauer, Thea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuss , Germany
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 1971
Place of death Basel , Switzerland