They decided to leave exactly as they had spent their lives: together. Alice and Ellen, the Kessler twins, were inseparable and wanted to die at the same time, choosing their exit date long ago, resorting to assisted suicide. A long life, 89 years, lived side by side on and off the scene, with a promise they had made to each other long ago: to leave together and be buried in the same urn, next to the remains of their mother and their beloved dog Yello.
After many successes, many in Italy, they had retreated to their home in Gruenwald, a small town on the outskirts of Munich. And it was there that the Bavarian police, arriving with a patrol around noon, found them yesterday, unable to do anything but declare them dead, ruling out third-party liability. Confirming their conscious and planned choice was the German Association for a Dignified Death (DGHS), which explained to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that it was an assisted suicide. The two sisters had been in contact with the organization for some time about resorting to a practice that, in Germany, is permitted under certain conditions: assisted suicide can be performed by adults who are capable of acting and do so solely on their own responsibility (euthanasia is prohibited in the country). They had planned every detail, even the date.
The Bavarian newspaper Abendzeitung revealed that it received a letter canceling its subscription just yesterday.
Alice, who then signed the letter, drafted the text on the computer, indicating November 30th as the cancellation date. Then she corrected it by hand, communicating the cancellation as "effective from November 17, 2025." "Underneath was her autograph, perhaps the last of her life. With a bold and long underlying line, lively like the life of the showbiz twins. A definitive line," commented Abdenzeitung's editor-in-chief, Michael Schilling. There is something in this final decision that has marked their lives: the desire for independence and to guide all their own choices to the very end.
Born in Saxony, near Leipzig, in 1936, they left the GDR at sixteen to move to Düsseldorf, West Germany. "Our careers would have been very different if we had stayed in the GDR," Ellen Kessler once told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
From childhood, they had had to deal with their father, an alcoholic, who, despite encouraging them to dance, often beat their mother. "Domestic violence was a daily occurrence. We promised ourselves it wouldn't happen to us," Ellen told the weekly magazine Bunt. They also made it clear that for them, slowly fading away, losing their autonomy and independence, wasn't an option. It was also unimaginable that one of them could continue to live without the other. Their grandmother also had a twin sister, and after her husband's death, she spent her old age with her sister. "When one died, the other followed shortly after," Alice and Ellen recalled.
According to the German press, the two women decided together to end their lives, after arranging for their ashes to be kept in the same urn, along with those of their beloved mother, Elsa, and their poodle, Yello, as they revealed last year to the German newspaper Bild. They had made everything ready, even their inheritance, deciding to leave their belongings to Doctors Without Borders: "We have no relatives left, and if we do, we don't know them. We chose them because they risk their lives for others, they won the Nobel Peace Prize, and they are serious," they said in several interviews in recent years. Just last July, they received the Bavarian Order of Merit from Markus Soeder, an honor awarded only to a group of no more than 2,000 people. And just a few weeks ago, they appeared in public: on October 24, they attended the premiere of the Roncalli Circus show "ARTistART" in Munich. They had gone once again, for the last time, together. And together they embarked on the final journey.
(Unioneonline)