Margarete Kessler was born on January 7, 1906, in Memmingen. Her father was the actor Hugo Kessler, and her mother was Martha Kessler (born Handtrag) of Memmingen. Margarete Kessler received acting lessons from her father and made her debut in 1926 at the theater in Kaiserslautern. In the years that followed, her talent and lively stage presence brought her to theaters in Dresden, Berlin, and Neisse (today Nysa, Poland), where she performed as Grete Kessler. In the 1932/33 season, she joined the Hessian Landestheater Darmstadt, where her father was one of the ensemble’s leading figures. There she played smaller roles in Paul Abraham’s The Flower of Hawaii, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Rose Bernd, and Erika Mann’s Christmas fairy tale Jans Wunderhündchen.
Her promising career came to an abrupt end with the Nazis’ seizure of power. As a Jewish woman, she lost her position in the spring of 1933 and emigrated shortly afterward to Paris, where she worked as a domestic servant for acquaintances and, in 1937, married Otto Nelson, a Jewish refugee born in 1908 in Freiburg. Soon after, Nelson was conscripted into the French labor service. After his return, the couple moved to Avignon in 1941 and fled to Switzerland in 1943 to escape German persecution. Until the end of the war, they were forced to live in various internment camps before they were able to leave Europe, traveling from Paris to New York in 1946.
There, the couple initially lived in modest circumstances on the income from a photography business. However, their situation improved when Nelson succeeded in establishing himself as a photographer within the art world. He photographed contemporary art as well as museum collections and those of private collectors such as David Rockefeller. He also created portraits of prominent artists, including Vladimir Horowitz, Nathan Milstein, and Arturo Toscanini. Margarete Kessler worked alongside her husband, developing his photographs and appearing in public not only as his wife but also as his professional partner.
Margarete Kessler died on February 12, 2005, in New York. Otto E. Nelson died on November 17, 2013, at the age of 105.
1906 Memmingen
2005 New York