The Kessler twins have died. Faced with the first headlines that bounced around the web and social media on Monday afternoon, everyone’s reaction was one of profound disbelief. The idea that two sisters, who lived in symbiosis between public and private, had died together was objectively shocking, yet dramatically true.

Once the initial shock was overcome and they learned that it was an assisted suicide, for some things became romantic, for others even more macabre. It is the responses that everyone gives to death, but also – perhaps above all – the meaning we give to life, that make the difference. And the Kessler twins, who throughout their career have embodied the image of a golden era of Italian television, made up of stardom and lights which in addition to notoriety often gave a nice social redemption to those who were lucky enough to be enlightened by it, explained it very well with this choice of theirs.

A life in symbiosis

Their childhood in East Germany with the war, their debut at 17 at the Lido in Paris as dancers, then – in ’61 – their unstoppable success in Italy and their consecration in the world of entertainment, but also in the collective imagination of our country, which led them to never shake off the well-deserved label of “icons”. Or perhaps it would be better to say “icon”, for their real fusion. Alice and Ellen have always been the Kesslers, one name, one identity. Eternally synchronous in their famous and unforgettable choreographies, obsessively symmetrical, on stage as in life.

Neither of them ever married or had children. It was Ellen who boasted the longest relationship, engaged for twenty years to the actor Umberto Orsini. In a 2012 interview with Daria Bignardi on “Le Invasioni Barbariche”, however, she revealed that they saw each other little because it was difficult to reconcile the engagement with work and the twin. “In twenty years we would have seen each other eleven,” he said. In the same interview, strictly as a couple, both spoke of men as ‘accessories’, never as life partners. Even Burt Lancaster, with whom Ellen had a fleeting affair. They were already there to support each other, to be there for each other, and they were enough.

That’s what they did until the end. Once out of the limelight, they have never reinvented themselves artistically, nor together, much less individually. The Kesslers were the Kesslers, on and off TV. They lived in the same house, in Monaco. A sliding door divides the two apartments, mirrored and furnished in almost the same way. The most realistic portrait of an existence in which perhaps individuality has failed, but not love. That love so visceral that neither of them can imagine themselves without the other, and that no one should judge just because it is less ‘conventional’. One could do a more psychological than ethical analysis, but that’s another matter.

The choice to die together

In many interviews they had said they wanted to die together. Only now did we understand that it wasn’t just a figure of speech. They had probably decided this before, when death was not at the top of their list of thoughts and worries, and assisted suicide was not an option. In Germany it has been allowed since 2020 and it is not necessary to be seriously ill, as Alice and Ellen were not. It is enough that a person no longer sees a prospect for his life, or that he does not like this prospect, such as the possibility of ending up sooner or later in a retirement home. What would have happened to the Kesslers.

Debatable, but not judgeable. This should teach us their free choice. One may believe that free will must necessarily stop in the face of death, that a life is worth living even at the threshold of ninety, accepting the detachment of those who leave us earlier, but one should not have the presumption of passing judgment on human frailties and solitudes. For the first time the Kesslers don’t make us dance or sing, but reflect. And perhaps, for the more intelligent, open up to dialogue. Other than “Dadaumpa”.