Mopsa Sternheim

photo by Annemarie Schwarzenbach in 1933

Dorothea “Mopsa” Sternheim (born Elisabeth Dorothea Löwenstein, 10 January 1905, Oberkassel - 11 September 1954, 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 Carl Sternheim and Klaus Mann's plays. As a member of the French Resistance, she was late captured and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Life

Dorothea Löwenstein was the daughter of the writer Thea Sternheim and the playwright Carl Sternheim. Following her parents' divorce in 1906, she and her older sister, Agnes, lived with their father. After their mother her remarried in 1912, the sisters rejoined her, and the family moved to La Hulpe in 1913. At the end of the First World War, Dorothea moved to the Netherlands, later relocating to Uttwil in 1919, and then near Dresden from 1922 to 1924. Mopsa Sternheim was educated by her mother and private tutors; as a child, she already read Kleist, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Schiller.

Mopsa Sternheim studied drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden in 1923. She received a commission for the set and costume design for a Berlin production of her play, Der Nebbich. In 1924, she began an apprenticeship as a set and costume designer at the Cologne Theater. During this period, she became friends with Klaus Mann, Erika Mann, and the actress Pamela Wedekind. Sternheim was responsible for the set and costume designs of Klaus Mann's Anja and Esther in 1925, as well as Revue zu Vieren in 1927. Pamela Wedekind starred in both productions, which were directed by Gustaf Gründgens.

Mopsa Sternheim also created the set design for the premiere of Carl Sternheim's comedy The Uznach School or the New Objectivity, on 21 September 1926 at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. She later replicated her designs for subsequent productions in Cologne and Mannheim.

At the beginning of 1933, Mopsa Sternheim emigrated to Paris where she became involved in helping communist refugees. With the help of her friend Edy Sackville-West, she wrote articles for anti-fascist newspapers, including the British Manchester Guardian. She also collaborated with Willi Münzenberg on the Brown Book on the Reichstag fire and Hitler's Terror. After the annexation of Austria in early 1938, French authorities classified her as an Imperial German, and she received only a temporary residence permit.

In September 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, Sternheim moved in with her mother. In January 1941, "Rudolf Carl von Ripper and Dorothea von Ripper, née Löwenstein" were denaturalised from the German Reich. This stateless status madeher circumstances in German-occupied France even more difficult.

In early 1942, she joined a Resistance group that worked with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and helped her French friend, Michel Zimmermann, escape to England. On December 2, 1943, the Gestapo arrested and tortured Sternheim, knocking out her teeth. On January 31, 1944, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. As she was spoke German, she was put in charge of the infirmary block, overseeing 200 to 400 prisoners suffering from typhus, scarlet fever, and dysentery. On 23 April, 1945, the Swedish Red Cross evacuated roughly 7,000 women from the camp to Sweden as part of the "Bernadotte Action".

After the end of the war, she reunited with her mother in Paris in June 1945. In 1948, she traveled to the British zone of Germany to serve as a witness in the fourth Ravensbrück trial against Benno Orendi and Martha Haake.

The final years of her life brought deep disappointment. Ripper sought a divorce in order to remarry. Sternheim earned a meager income from translation work while writing an autobiographical novel. Although art historian Gert Schiff pitched her manuscript to Rowohlt Verlag, the publisher rejected it, calling it "interesting but too fragmentary for publication." In 1951, she received a final commission to design the set for Carl Sternheim's comedy The Snob, directed by Gert Weymann at the Nuremberg Theater .

Personal life

At the age of 21, Mopsa Sternheim had an affair with the poet Gottfried Benn. Mopsa Sternheim lived primarily in Berlin from 1926 onwards. She became dependent on Eukodal after being treated with this analgesic following a motorcycle accident in 1927 and remained so throughout her life despite withdrawal treatments. After brief liaisons with women, she lived for a while with the writer Ruth Landshoff-Yorc.

In January 1928, she met René Crevel. He asks her to marry him.[2] But she chose to marry Rudolph von Ripper. Shortly before her wedding in 1929, Klaus Mann dedicated the story The Adventures of the Bride and Groom to her. Thanks to her marriage to Ripper, she obtained Austrian nationality. She spent several months with him in Austria before he emigrated to England. She shuttled between Morocco, Paris, Berlin, Salzburg, and Vienna, but stays nowhere for long.