Mopsa Sternheim

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 plays by Carl Sternheim and Klaus Mann. She was a member of the Resistance; she was imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

 Life 
Dorothea Löwenstein was the daughter of the writer Thea Sternheim and the playwright Carl Sternheim. During the divorce in 1906, she and her older sister Agnes lived with their father, then, following her remarriage in 1912, joined their mother.. In 1913, the family moved to La Hulpe. She moved to the Netherlands at the end of the First World War, then to Uttwil in 1919 and to near Dresden from 1922 to 1924. Mopsa Sternheim was educated by tutors and her mother. 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 set design and costumes for a production of her play Der Nebbich in Berlin. In 1924, she began an apprenticeship as a costume designer and set designer at the Cologne Theater.

She became friends with Klaus Mann, Erika Mann, actress Pamela Wedekind  Sternheim was responsible for the costumes and set design of Klaus Mann's Anja and Esther in 1925 and Revue zu Vieren in 1927. Pamela Wedekind appeared in both productions directed by Gustaf Gründgens.

Mopsa Sternheim did 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, then for the productions in Cologne and Mannheim..

At the beginning of 1933, Mopsa Sternheim emigrated to Paris. She was involved in helping communist refugees. She wrote articles for anti-fascist newspapers, published in the British Manchester Guardian with the help of her friend Edy Sackville-West,  and worked with Willi Münzenberg on the Brown Book on the Reichstag fire and Hitler's terror. After the annexation of Austria in early 1938, she was considered an Imperial German in France and only received a temporary residence permit.

In September 1939, after the start of World War II, Mopsa 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, which made Mopsa Sternheim's stay in France occupied by Germany even more difficult since she was now considered stateless.

In early 1942, she joined a Resistance group that worked with the British Special Operations Executive ( SOE) and helped her French friend Michel Zimmermann to escape to England. On December 2, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Mopsa Sternheim, tortured her, and also knocked out her teeth. On January 31, 1944. She was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. As she was a German speaker among the deported French women, she became responsible for the infirmary block  of 200 to 400 prisoners suffering from typhoid, scarlet fever, or dysentery. On 23 April 1945, the Swedish Red Cross evacuated around seven thousand women from the camp as part of the "Bernadotte Action" and took them to Sweden.

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

The following years were a period of disappointment for her. Ripper wanted a divorce so he could remarry. Mopsa Sternheim earns some money from translations and is working on an autobiographical novel. The art historian Gert Schiff offered the manuscript to Rowohlt Verlag, which rejected it "as interesting but too fragmentary for publication."   In 1951, she received a commission for the set design of the 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.[1] From 1926, Mopsa Sternheim lived mainly in Berlin. 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.[3] 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.

 References 

Category:1905 births
Category:1954 deaths
Category:French World War II resistance members
Category:Scenic designers
Category:Costume designers