The Widow of Cricklewood: Leontine Sommer's Fight for Restitution

Speaker: Jennifer Taylor (Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, ILCS)

This talk gives an account of the long widowhood in London of Leontine Sommer, née Illowy, who survived her husband, the German-Bohemian writer Ernst Sommer, for more than a quarter of a century. Based on the family archive, it will show that during this time much of her energy was devoted to obtaining financial compensation from the British and German authorities for the persecution to which she and her relatives had been subjected. This talk will consider the technical skills she brought to this task as well as the moral conviction and social assumptions which enabled her to persist despite the many difficulties encountered on the journey. Additionally it will be argued that the motivation to undertake this onerous task came from the desire to restore the geographical, social and familial networks that the perpetrators of the holocaust had sought to obliterate.

Jennifer Taylor is a founder member of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the ILCS and has published widely on exile – including internment, radio propaganda and the exile press. Her contribution to the Research Centre’s Conference on the Second Generation, a study of the pop artist Jo Bondy, will appear shortly, and this talk on restitution provides a further study of a post-war topic.

This talk will be held in person at the University of London Senate House and streamed online. All are welcome to participate. Attendance is free, but advance online registration is essential.