Cornelia Schroeder obituary

My mother, who passed away at the age of 73, was a doctor and editor of her mother's memoir.

After the collapse of East Germany, she moved to London to work at the National Institute for Medical Research. She was a research fellow at the institute from 1990 to 1993 and worked on the isolation of the flu vaccine. There, she met an international crowd of like-minded people with whom she remained friends and went hiking in west Wales every year.

After her official retirement in 2016 she stayed on at the Max-Planck-Institute to finish her research and supervise PhD students.

Edith Anderson and her husband, Max Schroeder, a left-wing intellectual and publisher who had only returned to Germany two years earlier from his exile in New York, were the parents of "Corky". She attended the Heinrich-Hertz Schule in Berlin-Friedrichshain, a selective secondary school and sixth form for students who excelled at math and science, after growing up in the suburb of Grnau.

She met a PhD student at the university where she finished her studies in chemistry and biology. They separated in 1976.

After completing her PhD in 1980 at the Institute for Biochemistry and the Charité Institute for Virology, Cornelia went back to school. She was a junior research scientist when she worked on the herpes simplex virus. She became more involved in flu research in the 1980's.

Her family history motivated her the most. She published her memoir in the US after her mother died. The book was an angry account of how a working class Jewish woman from the Bronx experienced the postwar period among the overwhelmingly male East German cultural elite.

She wanted her mother's work to be released in Germany, so she translated it with the author. An endorsement from Lessing helped get the paperback rights.

I and two granddaughters are the survivors of Corky.