Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Mopsa Sternheim
(maiden name: Elisabeth Dorothea Löwenstein, married name: Dorothea von Ripper)
born on January 10, 1905 in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, Germany
died on September 11, 1954 in Paris, France
German-Austrian stage designer, costume designer and resistance fighter
70th anniversary of her death on September 11, 2024
Biography
Her life began with two names. But from an early age, she was always called Mopsa and never Elisabeth or Dorothea. It was not until she was eleven years old that she learned that Arthur Löwenstein — the man to whom her mother Thea Sternheim had been married at the time of Mopsa’s birth — was not her father. Her mother did not marry Mopsa’s father and her long-time lover, the Jewish writer Carl Sternheim, until later. As a condition of her divorce from Löwenstein, he had insisted on being awarded custody of both Elisabeth and Agnes, the older sister she adored. Mopsa was only allowed to spend two months each summer with her mother, and the longing she felt for her mother in her early childhood years was to develop into a close bond that lasted her entire life. When Löwenstein remarried, he delivered Mopsa to her mother, and it was then that Mopsa learned that Carl Sternheim was her father.
Mopsa Sternheim moved in with her new family in Belgium. Her mother taught both her and her brother Klaus, who was three years younger, at home. They lived through the end of the First World War in the neutral Netherlands. It was there that Mopsa Sternheim first became interested in politics when at the age of thirteen she met a politically active woman.
After the end of the war, Carl Sternheim began to stalk his daughter. She had to learn early on to defend herself against his sexual assaults. Although her mother argued with him, she did not leave him to protect her daughter; she withdrew instead into illnesses, and she attempted suicide. Mopsa felt responsible for protecting her mother and ensuring that she was in good spirits. No matter how hard she later tried to escape her mother, she never succeeded. During the time she lived with her parents, she felt torn between the two.
After a brief stay in Switzerland, the family moved into a manor in the countryside near Dresden in 1922. Her parents' visitors were to have a great influence on Mopsa. Among them were Franz Pfemfert, who published the literary and political magazine Die Aktion, which she read enthusiastically as a child and teenager; his wife Anja Ramm-Pfemfert, who had run the Aktion art shop and antiquarian bookshop in Berlin since 1917; and the Soviet trade union secretary Helene Lerner, whom she loved very much and who seemed to her to embody freedom. The writer Alice Rühle-Gerstel and her husband Otto Rühle, a communist, also lived in the neighborhood. Mopsa followed all the many political discussions that took place in their home with great interest. She retained a life-long interest in the philosophical and practical aspects of communism, but she never became a member of the party. She was to regret that there were not enough women with whom she could discuss politics her entire life.
At the age of seventeen, it was already clear to her that she would not be able to earn a living doing what she loved best, namely drawing. Nevertheless, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden from the spring of 1923. She often felt out of place there and was convinced that she lacked talent. Although she felt attracted to some of the young women there, she was unable to talk to them. Her father suggested that she design the set and costumes for the performance of his play Nebbich in Berlin. She agreed, and the result of her first paid work was well received.
When the director Gustav Hartung offered her the opportunity to learn the trade with his head of costume design Theodor Caspar in 1924, she accepted and moved to Cologne. During her training as a costume and set designer there, she met the actress Pamela Wedekind, through whom she came into contact with Erika Mann and Klaus Mann. They shared not only an interest in politics, but also an addiction to drugs. She was closest to Klaus Mann (until his suicide in 1949); she designed the stage set for his first play, Anja und Esther, in the fall of 1925 and for his next play, Revue zu vieren, in 1927.
Pamela Wedekind took on a role in Carl Sternheim's Die Schule von Uznach, and Mopsa was responsible for the costumes and the set design of the play. She greatly enjoyed life in the theater – she loved seeing an idea take on a concrete form through her work on stage, and she relished the pressure that accompanied every production.
After Pamela Wedekind became engaged to Carl Sternheim in the same year and married him in 1930, Mopsa Sternheim found it impossible to maintain the contact. She herself had had a brief affair with the poet and essayist Gottfried Benn in 1926.
She completed her training in Cologne in 1926, then moved to Berlin and stayed there for the following seven years. She met the writer Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, with whom she had her first longer love affair after numerous short affairs with women. Landshoff-Yorck introduced her to the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who was also friends with Erika Mann and Klaus Mann. However, Landshoff-Yorck would later regret this, as Mopsa Sternheim was already addicted to morphine and Schwarzenbach acquired a taste for it through her. Landshoff-Yorck did not share Mopsa’s interest in the Mann siblings; bored by their political discussions and disapproving of the drug addiction, she withdrew further and further from their circle. Yet the two lovers continued to see each other even after their relationship had ended. An actual breach between the two would only occur later in exile, when Mopsa Sternheim - in contrast to Landshoff-Yorck - became politically active on the left.
It was also in Berlin that Sternheim met the French surrealist writer René Crevel, with whom she would remain close friends until his suicide in 1935. He proposed to her on the condition that they would continue their love affairs with others, she with women and he with men. She met numerous surrealists in Paris through him, but she did not like most of them and they did not like her. She was especially repelled by their contempt for women and for homosexuality.
In 1929, a new love entered her life: the Austrian painter and illustrator Rudolph von Ripper, whom she married in the same year. They had planned to live together as a threesome - with René Crevel - in Berlin. But Sternheim travelled between Morocco, Paris, Berlin and Salzburg, never staying in any one place for long.
For Mopsa Sternheim, there was never any doubt that intimate tenderness could only exist in relationships with women. Unfortunately, women did not share her passion for politics. There were only three exceptions in her life: the actress Yvonne George, for whom she had already had a crush as a child, the trade union secretary Helene Lerner and the writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. However, the desires she felt for a particular woman would then ebb as she quickly became bored. In fact, she was bored by any routine.
Disgusted by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Thea Sternheim had already moved to Paris in the winter of 1931/32. Mopsa too did not want to live in a country ruled by Nazis, and she joined her mother in France at the beginning of 1933. She immediately began working for the Thälmann Committee, which looked after German refugees and whose ideas about a society without classes, without churches and without borders appealed to her greatly.
The death of her beloved friend René Crevel in 1935 meant the end of her youth and everything that was important to her.
Even though they only saw each other sporadically, she supported Rudolph von Ripper in all of his creative efforts, as she greatly appreciated his work; she hoped for his breakthrough. He was arrested again and again and spent some time in the Oranienburg concentration camp, but was eventually able to flee to England and from there to the United States for a few years in 1938.
She had met Edy Sackville-West, Vita Sackville-West's cousin, in Berlin. Sackville-West supported the entire circle of friends that had fled Berlin to the best of his abilities. He helped Mopsa Sternheim get her articles critical of fascism and National Socialism published in the Manchester Guardian.
After the beginning of the war (1939), Mopsa Sternheim moved in with her mother as she was no longer able to keep her head above water financially. This was only intended for the duration of the war. Her drug addiction repeatedly devoured her money—without drugs she lost the will to live, and while under drugs she felt more energetic and able to act.
After the annexation of Austria, Sternheim was considered an “ex-Austrian” and was only granted temporary residence permits. In 1940, her identity card was revoked and a year later she was officially expatriated and thus considered stateless. During this time, she earned her living by translating and working on films; she spent most of her money on clothes, cigarettes and drugs.
She worked repeatedly on a novel with the working title of Vivian (later: Im Zeichnen der Spinne); she wanted to write about her suicide attempt after the end of her affair with Benn, and also about her relationship with Ruth Landshoff-Yorck. The manuscript of her novel is considered lost.
Her fear that the Nazis would kill everyone she loved was later to became a certainty when the list of the dead became longer than the list of the living.
Mainly to save a Jewish friend, she joined a resistance group that worked with the British SOE (Special Operations Executive). However, the group was caught between the fronts and infiltrated by several double agents; from the summer of 1943, almost all of them were arrested by the Nazis, including Mopsa Sternheim. Like all resistance fighters, she was taken to the prison in Fresnes, where she was interrogated and tortured. In 1944, she was first sent to the transit camp in Compiègne and from there to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Due to her language skills, she was initially given work in one of the offices. She later became a block elder in the infirmary, where she continued to use her language skills to help her French comrades however she could. She accepted the fact that she was transferred to the manufacturing block as a result. She felt nothing but contempt for her tormentors; she instinctively and immediately sought out other women in the communist resistance in the camp. Her relationship with the French student Betty George, whom she had already met on the way to the concentration camp, gave her additional strength and courage. Thus, her contempt for the Nazis evolved into an active resistance that helped other women in the camp to survive.
While in the concentration camp, Sternheim had assumed that she would die there. But although seriously ill, she survived; she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross and taken to Sweden. It was not until the end of June 1945 that she was able to fly back to Paris, where she set out in search of friends. She spent the next few years mainly dealing with lawsuits, negotiations and visits to the authorities. As she was stateless, she received no financial support, and those who had collaborated with the British Secret Service were treated as traitors by the French government. She did not receive any compensation from Germany either, so she suffered constant financial hardship. It was only after Mopsa died that her mother received a reparation payment.
She returned to Germany for the first time in 1948, when she was called upon to testify at the second Ravensbrück trial. She found it satisfying to testify against the concentration camp staff.
The following years were a time of disappointment for her. Ripper wanted a divorce from her because he wanted to marry another woman. When she saw how not only those disappointed by Marxism turned to yoga, she wondered if the end of the age of reason had finally arrived. She was unable to resume the relationship—already difficult before the war—with Marthe Jacob. The rift between the two had deepened as a result of their different wartime experiences.
Sternheim continued to work on her novel, while translating to earn some money. She began taking drugs on a regular basis again. She was disappointed with the whole political situation in France and essentially felt sorry for herself. Her hopes were not fulfilled: she had wanted to earn money by writing film scripts and to become active again as a stage designer. Although her work on the set design for her father's comedy, Der Snob, which was performed in Nuremberg in 1951, revitalized her, no further commissions followed.
When she fell ill with cancer, she had the feeling that her life had run its course and that she had done everything she had wanted to do. She preferred not to survive an operation in 1954 and, if she did, she hoped that someone would help her die - a wish that was ultimately granted.
(Text from 2016, translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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