Carl Sternheim

Carl Sternheim (born William Adolph Carl Francke; 1 April 1878 – 3 November 1942) was a German playwright and short story writer. One of the major exponents of German Expressionism, he especially satirized the moral sensibilities of the emerging German middle class during the Wilhelmine period.

Early life and education

Sternheim was born in Leipzig, the son of Rosa Marie Flora (née Francke) (1856–1908) and Carl Julius Sternheim (1852–1918), a banker. His parents married two years after he was born. His father was Jewish, and his mother was a Lutheran from a working-class family. Sternheim grew up in Hannover and Berlin. Between 1897 and 1902, he studied philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence intermittently at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the University of Göttingen, and Leipzig University, but never graduated.

Family and career

In 1900, he began working as a freelance writer in Weimar, where he met and married his first wife Eugenie Hauth the same year. Their union ended in 1906, and he married the writer Thea Löwenstein (née Bauer) in 1907, with whom he had two children. Their daughter Dorothea ("Mopsa") was a resistance fighter during the Second World War and was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

The wealth brought by Thea from her rich manufacturing family enabled the couple to build the Schloss Bellemaison in Munich. Here, Sternheim worked in the company of fellow artists such as Mechtilde Lichnowsky, Max Reinhardt, and Frank Wedekind. In 1908, he collaborated with Franz Blei to launch the Expressionist literary journal Hyperion, which published the first eight prose works by Franz Kafka. He also contributed occasionally to the Expressionist journal Die Aktion.