Portrait of Victor and Eva Ehrenberg
In 2000 the Centre for German-Jewish studies was proud to receive from Professor Lewis Elton the generous gift of an important collection of family papers for its archive.
The Elton family, whose name was orginally Ehrenberg, included members who occupied politically and culturally prominent roles in German-Jewish life. Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg (1773-1853) was the founder of the famous 'Samson'sche Freischule' in Wolfenbüttel (1807), which he transformed from a traditional Talmud school into a progressive institution. His activities occupy an important place in the Jewish Haskalah and educational reform in Germany. The family's roots in Germany can be traced back further still, at least to the early seventeenth century. During the nineteenth century, marital alliance joined the Ehrenbergs with other notable families. Lewis Elton's great uncle, Victor Ehrenberg (1851-1929), married Helene von Jhering, daughter of the famous legal historian Rudolf von Jhering. In the twentieth century, family members included Max Born (1882-1970), the eminent physicist and Nobel Prize winner. However, the two most significant members of the family with regard to the collection are Victor Ehrenberg (1891-1976) and Eva Ehrenberg, née Sommer (1891-1964), the parents of Geoffrey and Lewis Elton.
Victor Ehrenberg was born in Altona, near Hamburg and educated in Stuttgart, Göttingen, Berlin and Tübingen, before becoming a professor of ancient history at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 1929 Victor Ehrenberg was appointed to a professorship at the German University in Prague, so he, his wife and two boys left their home town of Frankfurt and settled in Prague. In the autumn of 1938, with the political atmosphere in Prague becoming ever more tense and hostile, Victor Ehrenberg received a grant from the British Society for the Protection of Learning and the Sciences, enabling him to travel to England for one year. Crucially, this meant that he and his wife were entitled to British visas. The family also managed to find, through the generosity of its governors, free places at Rydal School in Colwyn Bay for their children, Geoffrey and Lewis Elton. Geoffrey was eighteen and Lewis sixteen when they left Prague. One month after they left, Hitler invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia.
After his arrival in Britain, Victor Ehrenberg was able to continue his academic career in Newcastle upon Tyne and London. His books on aspects of ancient history, such as From Solon to Socrates and The People of Aristophanes, had an influence beyond the confines of the academy, and his impact on classical studies in England included his role as a co-founder and guiding spirit of the London Classical Society.
After her early years in Frankfurt, Eva Ehrenberg had spent her adolescence in Kassel (1904-1912), where her father, Siegfried Sommer, a personal school friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, became the first Jewish Oberlandesgerichtsrat in Prussia. In addition to extensive correspondence, Eva Ehrenberg left numerous original works of fiction and translation, including her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Unusually for a Jewish woman in this period, for whom a paucity of documentation is the norm, Eva may be said to have embodied an intersection between the public and the private. She corresponded with many eminent people, though she herself hardly appeared in the limelight. Nearly all her writings remain unpublished, with the exception of her poetic memoirs, Sehnsucht - mein geliebtes Kind (1963).
In Britain both the Ehrenbergs' sons went on to have distinguished academic careers, Geoffrey Elton as a renowned historian of the Tudor period, and Lewis Elton as a scientist and professor of education.
The collection fills 36 archive boxes and consist of various kinds of material, including the correspondence of several family members, original works of fiction, memoirs, journals, certificates and awards and numerous photographic records of the immediate family of Victor and Eva Ehrenberg.
The historical period covered by the material stretches from the Enlightenment, to the late twentieth century. The Papers capture the development of a family group that exemplifies both the attempted synthesis of Jewish and German cultures in Germany, and the acculturation of German-Jewish refugees in Britain.
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