Carl Sternheim
Carl Sternheim · Arts & Literature
Expressionist playwright of the comedies From the Heroic Life of the Bourgeoisie
1er avril 1878, Leipzig, Allemagne — 3 novembre 1942, Bruxelles, Belgique
Leipzig, Berlin, Bruxelles
Carl Sternheim is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Expressionist playwright of the comedies From the Heroic Life of the Bourgeoisie
Origins and early life
Carl Sternheim was born on 1 April 1878 in Leipzig, the son of the Jewish banker Carl Jakob Sternheim — the Neue Deutsche Biographie traces the family through Julius Coppel and Jeanette Leeser — and of a Protestant mother; he was baptized a Protestant in 1897, and this fiche says so plainly, as it says the rest: the Encyclopaedia Judaica, which devotes an entry to him, records antisemitic outbursts in his writing that it reads as a probable form of self-contempt, and this directory records them too, as the ambivalence of a man who could not make peace with his origin.
Work and career
His work needs no such excuse. With The Underpants (1911), The Snob, 1913 and the cycle he called From the Heroic Life of the Bourgeoisie, he wrote the sharpest comedies of the German stage before the First World War — the German bourgeois exposed in his greed, his conformism and his appetite for rank in a clipped, telegraphic prose that the Expressionists took as their own. The Kleist Prize crowned him in 1915.
Later years
Wealthy through his wife's fortune, he lived in a castle near Munich and in Belgium; the Nazis burned his books in 1933, and he died in occupied Brussels on 3 November 1942, ill and forgotten, a Jew by birth in a city under the rule of those who counted him one.
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Source: https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/118617958.html
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Expressionist playwright of the comedies From the Heroic Life of the Bourgeoisie
Source: https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/118617958.html
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