Ninon Hesse
Quick Facts
Biography
Ninon Hesse (née Ausländer, born 18 September 1895 in Czernowitz, died 22 September 1966 in Montagnola) was an art historian and Hermann Hesse's 3rd wife.
Ninon Ausländer was born to a Jewish lawyer in Czernowitz and studied archaeology, art history and medicine in Vienna, Austria. In 1918, she married caricaturist B. F. Dolbin, whom she left in 1920; the official divorce only took place in 1931.
Although she had written a letter to Hesse after reading his novel Peter Camenzind in 1910, she only met him in 1922. The two lived together from 1927 and got married in 1931.
Ninon Hesse played an important role in Hermann Hesse's life not only as the love of his life, but also as she helped him to continue with his work when his eyes got weak by reading to him and writing for him and by collecting and editing his writings and letters after his death in 1962.