Who's Woop : Biographical Elements
Woop and his wife, Lotte.
William Wolpe seldom spoke of his origins or family, and many details of his life are lost in a cloud of mystery. The brother of Stefan Wolpe, the composer, William was born in Berlin, or Prague according to some accounts, in the beginning of the twentieth century. A Fine Art student, he rapidly moved away from classical references and became acquainted with the Bauhaus School, founded in 1919 under the Weimar Republic. He progressively developped a talent as a politically-minded cartoonist and soon became known for his ferocious cariccatures published in Berlin's alternative press.
Tagged as a "decadent painter" and a "cultural bolchevist", he was arrested following the Burning of the Reichstag, in February 1933, along with fellow artists and other usual suspects: opposition figures, leftist radicals, Human-Rights militants... and Jews. Tortured by the Gestapo, he was freed two and a half years later thanks to the relentless efforts of friends and officials (notably, François-Poncet, French ambassador in Germany). He left Germany and headed for Czechoslovakia. Throughout his life, he would bear an eyepatch and a big mustache to conceal the eye he had lost to, and the teeth that were broken by, his tormentors. His broken wrists thankfully healed. Upon the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, Wolpe obtained a refugee visa and caught the last plane to London. Shortly thereafter, thanks to connections in the press, he was able to resume his activity and from then on signed his cartoons as Woop.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Woop is interned, along with all refugees and aliens, in the Isle of Man. By 1941 he is in London again and publishes his cartoons in magazines and newspapers. His work allows him to build solid connections, notably within the Free French community. He is employed by François Quilici, founder of La Marseillaise, and follows him in Algier in 1943. After the Liberation, he is a fulltime employee on L'aurore, where he'll work until 1958. An accute observer, he draws a pitiless chronicle of the French Fourth Republic.
In 1948, he discovers that Lotte, whom he had met in 1922, was living in Paris. Also a Jew, she had went through two concentration camps, from which she managed to escape thanks to her connections with officers of the Wehrmacht, and had spent the rest of the war in hidding. They finally recommenced their life together, bought and moved to a watermill in Blaru, on the outskirts of Normandy. The following years were a liberation after the horrors they had both suffered. He died in 1958.
He has published in Combat, Le courrier de Paris, La marseillaise, L'aurore, The Daily Mail, Time and Life, The New York Herald Tribune.
