Thea Sternheim

Vocation

German diarist, novelist and art-collector. Thea Bauer was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. As a student she began a correspondence with Maurice Maeterlinck. In November 1901 in London she married Arthur Lowenstein, ten years her senior, with whom she had her first daughter. In 1903 she met Carl Sternheim who was married. With him she had a daughter, Mopsa (1905-1954) and a son Klaus in 1906. She divorced Lowenstein in 1906. During her first marriage, she kept a diary which continued until 1971. She collected early artworks by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pablo Picasso. In 1907 she married Carl Sternheim. In 1908 they moved into a castle-estate designed by the architect Gustav von Cube. In 1927 she divorced Sternheim. In 1919, she went to Switzerland, and from 1922 to 1924 resided near Dresden, in 1925 designing a palace which was built in Uttwil on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance. She made ​​friends with André Gide and Gottfried Benn and translated works by André Maurois into German. Before the transfer of power to the Nazis, she emigrated on 1 April 1932 to France. Her diaries show that she had anticipated the course of political events, clearly seeing how the situation would develop in Germany. In France, she was interned briefly at a detention camp when war broke out in 1939, but managed to escape. In Germany, her assets were frozen, so she lived in a small apartment in Paris. In 1944, she was stripped of German citizenship. After the war, she remained in France, emigrating to Paris with the help of her friend, the Berlin society photographer Frieda Riess. In 1946 her son Klaus died in Mexico; her daughter Mopsa, who was imprisoned until 1945 in a concentration camp, died in 1954 from cancer. Thea Sternheim received a restitution payment for the detention of her daughter in the concentration camp. In 1963 she moved to Basel with her first daughter Agnes. Thea Sternheim died there on July 5, 1971, aged 87. Her novel, Sackgassen (Blind Alleys) was published in 1952. Her correspondence with Gottfried Benn was published posthumously. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)