Maria Hepner

Maria Hepner and her twin sister Leonie were born on December 3, 1896 in Kopanin in what is now Poland. 
The twins had two older siblings. The middle-class Jewish family owned a country estate and their income came mainly from growing sugar beet. The children played a lot with the animals on the estate or went on long hikes. Due to their mother Käthe's lung disease, the family sold the estate in 1899 and subsequently lived near the mountains, for example in Meran or Berchtesgaden. Despite their relative prosperity, the moves were a financial burden for the family. During this time, the siblings received schooling from various private teachers. Even more important to the mother than the lessons was that the children spent time in nature during the hours of sunshine, which they enjoyed immensely. They grew up very close to nature. Around 1905, the family lived in Switzerland, including Zurich and St. Moritz. Maria and her twin sister were able to indulge in skiing and ice skating to their heart's content. 
In 1909, the family moved to Berlin-Grunewald. There, the sisters attended a regular school for the first time and also took part in Christian religious instruction for the first time. Their parents had previously seen no need for religious instruction, regardless of denomination, and the Jewish faith was also barely present in their upbringing. Maria and Leonie were inquisitive and hard-working pupils. Although it took a while for the sisters to get used to a regular school routine, they managed to graduate without any problems. At school, Leonie and Maria were nicknamed "the practical Hepners" because they were often very patent. After finishing school, the family moved to the newly acquired estate in Heidewilxen in Lower Silesia in 1915.

Author: Pascal Paterna 

When Maria Hepner's mother Käthe died of a lung disease in 1914 at the age of just 44, her father - now alone with four children - was faced with new challenges. On the advice of his sister-in-law Alice Salomon, he sent the twins to the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House in Berlin. There were various training and practice centers for socio-pedagogical women's work there. Initially, Maria and Leonie worked in a facility for children from poor backgrounds. However, the living conditions of the children shocked the bourgeois socialized girls so much that they looked for alternatives. As a result, Alice Salomon employed Maria in the social welfare office for educated people who were unemployed due to the war.
In 1915, Maria began training as an auxiliary nurse with the Rittberg Sisters in Berlin. During the First World War, she quickly took on practical work in the local military hospital alongside her theoretical lessons and was responsible for 20 soldiers' beds. Due to a lengthy illness, she returned to Heidewilxen without completing her training. Nevertheless, nursing remained of crucial importance to her and she worked as a nurse again and again. In Heidewilxen, her medical experience was valued throughout the area. She treated infected wounds and attended births; with her professional help, she was often able to avert life-threatening conditions for her patients.
The political situation in the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic did not leave the Hepners' lives untouched: They suffered from the consequences of inflation and their father was briefly imprisoned during the Kapp Putsch in 1920. He was worried about the safety of his family. In 1924, he decided to sell the Heidewilxen estate. After the household liquidation, Maria went to Zurich to support her twin sister with the birth of her first child, Käthe, who was born in 1925.

Author: Pascal Paterna

Although Maria Hepner mainly worked as a nurse or geriatric nurse, she had a passion for graphology. Even as a child, she was fascinated by writing: "I remember the large letter 'D', which was the only one I remembered from the book 'Der Struwwelpeter' [...]. The huge curve of the 'D' occupied my imagination so much back then that I can still see and feel it today!" 
Before attending a course with the eminent graphic designer Ludwig Klages in 1926, she had already acquired knowledge of typography through self-study. She carried out handwriting analyses on difficult children, mentally ill people and alcoholics at the Berlin "Welfare Office for the Mentally Ill Kreuzberg", among other places. In the writing, and later also in the palm lines, she believed she could find character traits of people and thus also help in dealing with them. She drew up expert reports on patients and developed the "Hepner writing test": a basis for systematic research into the handwriting of children and adolescents.
Maria was already giving lectures in the 1930s and was soon training graphologists herself, and in 1931 she was elected to the board of the Graphological Study Society. In the course of the National Socialist reprisals against the Jewish population, Maria had to close her seminar at Knesebeckstr. 33 in Berlin in 1933. As a freelancer, she wrote expert opinions, for example making recommendations for or against the hiring of applicants based on type samples. When she emigrated to Switzerland in 1935, she was initially prohibited from working in the field of graphology. It was not until the 1960s that she began accepting commissions again, including writing reports on Parkinson's patients. Maria again trained the next generation of graphologists and in 1970 began her work "The Key to Children's Writing", in which she published the results of her many years of work in 1978.

Author: Filiz Çakır

In 1933, Maria visited her sister in Zurich and wrote to her father: "When I left, I had the same feeling as when the war broke out, the incitement in the newspapers was indescribable, one can only wonder how little actually happened."
The pressure on the Jewish population increased, Maria feared being banned from her profession and having her assets confiscated. After a stay in Palestine, she emigrated to Switzerland in 1935. As she was unable to obtain a permanent residence permit and was constantly harassed by the immigration police, she married the Swiss Attilo Tozzini in 1936 in order to obtain Swiss citizenship (as this marital status was explicitly oriented towards men, the historical term is used here and not gendered. The woman's citizenship was not her own, so to speak, but depended on her husband) - a legal practice at the time. In line with the androcentric concept of Swiss nationality, a foreign woman lost her citizenship and was granted Swiss nationality along with a work permit. After six months, Maria divorced again. 
In 1939, Swiss citizenship law changed. The Swiss immigration police tightened their controls and took action against immigrant women who had married into the country. At this time, suspicions of "citizenship marriages" mainly affected left-wing politicians and Jewish women. In 1941, Maria's Swiss citizenship was revoked along with all her privileges - such as her work permit - due to abuse in acquiring Swiss citizenship. 
Luckily, as a stateless person, she could not be deported to Germany, but was initially interned in a camp in Leysin. Here she drew on her experience as a nurse and made herself useful in the infirmary. She was then sent to refugee camps in Sumiswald and on the Sonnenberg (Kriens), where, plagued by hunger, cold and uncertainty, she took on gardening and heating work. After 16 months, she was finally allowed to return to her family in Zurich.

Author: Filiz Çakır

When Maria Hepner's sister Leonie Cahn's husband died unexpectedly in 1959, she moved in with Leonie in their Zurich apartment. Together with her daughter Käthe and her son-in-law, the elderly ladies undertook a trip to Scandinavia in 1963. On a kind of road trip - with spartan equipment and a tent - they traveled through Norway, Sweden and Denmark and experienced adventures that made a lasting impression on them. 
Back in Zurich, Leonie took over the household chores and Maria continued to give graphic design lessons. In addition, she quietly devoted herself to her work "Schlüssel zur Kinderschrift. Einführung in den Hepner-Schreibtest zur Früherfassung kindlicher Reaktionsformen und seelischer Störungen", in which she published the results of her many years of graphological work in 1978.
A year earlier, the twins had decided rather spontaneously to move to London to be near Leonie's daughter Eva. Eva lived there with her family and ran a Jewish kindergarten. Maria had a very close relationship with her nieces as a child and they had given her the lifelong nickname "Meisi". So at the age of 81, the sisters had managed one last big move to a foreign country. The "practical Hepners" - as they were called as children - settled in quickly and appreciated the rural surroundings and helpful neighbors. They led an active life and spent a lot of time with their family. Sport, gardening and traveling kept them fit into old age. In 1986, Maria wrote her autobiography "Memories of a Ninety-Year-Old", in which she recorded her eventful life. One of the sources for this was the family estate of the Cahn/Hepner families, which the sisters had preserved over the years and brought from Berlin via Zurich to London. 
On December 7, 1992, Maria Hepner died in London at the age of 96.

Author: Filiz Çakır