Farewell to the Kessler twins.
Ellen and Alice, 89, died together, as they had always said they wanted to. The singers, dancers, and actresses, born in 1936 in Nerchau, Saxony, died in Gruenwald, near Munich, after resorting to assisted suicide, a practice permitted in Germany under certain conditions .
Police, informed today, have launched an investigation to reconstruct what happened. Alice and Ellen Kessler had long ago chosen the date of their death , according to a spokesperson for the German Society for Human Deaths (DGHS), an organization that helps those in need of help in dying, to which the twins had turned over six months ago.
The historic showgirls had openly told Bild that they had given specific instructions in their will to be kept in a single urn : "We want our ashes to be mixed one day with those of our mother and for all three to be kept together."
"Our wish," they said in a recent interview with Corriere della Sera, "is to leave together, on the same day. The idea that one of us might get it first is very hard to bear ."
Their legacy should go to Doctors Without Borders : "We no longer have relatives and if we do we don't know them," Ellen and Alice, who have never married and never had children , explained in some interviews. "We chose them because they risk their lives for others, they won the Nobel Peace Prize and they are serious."
Dubbed "the legs of the nation," they had been participating in the Opera Ballet since childhood. In 1952, at the age of sixteen, they left the German Democratic Republic and settled in Düsseldorf, West Germany, where they began a career that would lead them to perform around the world with artists such as Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire . In 1961, they moved to Italy, where they made a name for themselves in the variety shows of the 1960s and 1970s, starting with "Da-da-un-pa," the Studio Uno theme song that became TV legend.
(Unioneonline/D)
