Stefanie "Nini" Hess
1884 - 1943

Stefanie "Nini" Hess was born in Frankfurt am Main on August 21, 1884, the daughter of the merchant Samuel Hess (1848-1924) and his wife Caroline, née Salomon (1858-1943), who came from Koblenz. Nini Hess' sister Cornelia, known as "Carry", was born on November 11, 1889, also in Frankfurt am Main. At that time, the family lived at Schleidenstraße 12. Both sisters grew up in an upper middle-class, liberal home. According to the Frankfurt address book of 1890, their father ran Portefeuillesfabrik Hess & Co. at Börnestraße 28, a factory for fine leather goods such as wallets and cases.
The Hess family later lived at Miquelstrasse 7. Nothing is known about Nini Hess' school education. What is known is that she and her sister trained as photographers.

Together with her sister Carry, Nini Hess opened a photo studio for portrait photography at Börsenstraße 2 in Frankfurt in 1913. At the time, she lived with her parents at Miquelstraße 7. The sisters were exceptionally talented photographers who were able to build up an excellent reputation within a very short space of time. They soon became one of the most outstanding photographers in Germany. Their artistic activities included theater, portrait, dance, nude and architectural photography. For example, the sisters photographed the young Jewish artist Erna Pinner in 1917. Another photograph of Erna Pinner by the Hess sisters even made it onto the cover of the "Für die Frau" supplement of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927.
In the 1920s, they entered into a contractual collaboration with the Frankfurt Theater, for which Nini and Carry Hess took a series of portraits of actors (Elisabeth Bergner, Heinrich George, Käthe Dorsch), singers and dancers (Claire Waldoff, Mary Wigman) or composers and conductors (Paul Hindemith, Wilhelm Furtwängler). But the Hess sisters also took scene photography, photographs for notices for theater showcases or photographs for program booklets and autograph cards. The contract with the Frankfurt theaters guaranteed them regular commissions and fees.

The Frankfurt theater ended the collaboration in 1933 for "racial reasons". Carry Hess emigrated to Paris in the same year, while Nini Hess tried to continue running the photo studio. Orders for print media were no longer received, so turnover fell rapidly. During the Pogrom Night in November 1938, members of the SA destroyed the entire Hess photo studio, including the negative and image archive and the photographic equipment. This destroyed her ability to continue working as a photographer.
As early as 1935, Nini Hess was forced to move out of her house in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen (Unter den Eichen). The last known address was a so-called "Jews' house" in Eschersheimer Landstraße. She lived there together with her mother Lina. Lina Hess was deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942, where she died on January 6, 1943 due to the catastrophic living conditions there. Nini Hess was also deported in 1942 and probably murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. Stumbling stones were laid for Lina, Nini and Carry Hess at their last freely chosen place of residence (Unter den Eichen 7 in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen) in 2014.
Carry Hess survived persecution in German-occupied France. She died impoverished in August 1957 while on vacation in Chur (Switzerland).

Nini Hess joined the Alpine Club in 1921. Nothing is known about trips to the mountains or activities in the Alpine Club. At the beginning of the 1920s, Eleonore Noll-Hasenclever, the most important alpinist in Frankfurt to this day, was photographed in the Hess sisters' photo studio. One can only speculate whether the alpinist brought Nini Hess into the Alpine Club. After Noll-Hasenclever's death on the Weisshorn in Valais in 1925, this photograph was published in the 1932 memoir "Den Bergen verfallen - Alpenfahrten von Eleonore Noll-Hasenclever".
It is currently not known whether Nini Hess left the Frankfurt am Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club in 1933 or was later expelled as a Jew.