Kristofer William Hess, ’97, 1972-2024
Kristofer William Hess
Kristofer William Hess, age 52, died on July 9, 2024, in Hamburg, Germany. Kristofer was born the son of William and Carole (Baumgardt) Hess, on February 3, 1972, in Wausau, WI. He married Gudrun Nobelmann on July 2, 1995, in the Town of Maine.
Kristof, as he preferred to be called, grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin, attending Maine Elementary and Wausau East High School, from which he graduated as Valedictorian in 1989. Throughout high school and college, he worked as an IT Specialist and legal intern at his father’s law firm in the earliest days of personal computing and networks. Kristof was in the International Baccalaureate program at Wausau East and focused on German and travelled with his instructor Darlene Lee and other students to Germany. That was the beginning of his love of Germany and its language and history.
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992 with double majors in Mathematics and European History. He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Bonn studying European History. Kristof was a Fullbright Fellow studying German Legal History at the University of Cologne in 1993/94. He also was a graduate student in European History at the University of Bonn in 1993. It was in Bonn that he met and fell in love with Gudrun.
Although he had a love for math, physics and history, Kristof chose to become an attorney like his father. He graduated with a Juris Doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1997. He passed the Wisconsin Bar Exam and was sponsored by his father to the Wisconsin State Bar.
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