This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Leonie Cohn
Published: 5:41PM BST 01 Sep 2009

Leonie Cohn, who has died aged 92, was a distinguished producer of radio talks, especially for the Third Programme, and had worked as a wartime translator in the BBC German service; after the war she was seconded to Hamburg Radio.

In 1950 Leonie Cohn moved over to the BBC's domestic radio networks, becoming a producer in the talks department in 1952. Her insatiable intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and the world of ideas found their natural home in the Third Programme and later on Radio 3.

Her many memorable programmes for the Third Programme included discussions with leading British – and, later, American – artists, and architects such as Le Corbusier (famously, she "dragged him into a taxi and brought him to the studio"). When Radio 4 replaced the Home Service in 1967, she produced major series including This Island Now and This Europe Now, as well as a season of the Reith Lectures.

Many of Leonie Cohn's programmes won both public and professional acclaim, establishing her as an outstanding talks producer. Her persistence brought many eminent speakers to the microphone, while her resilience ensured that those of her programme ideas which did not at first win over her colleagues in the end found their way into the schedules.

One figure who eluded Leonie Cohn in the early 1960s was the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, whose lengthy prose piece about her upbringing was being planned as the centrepiece for a radio documentary, to be produced by Leonie Cohn, called Landscape on Childhood.

Leonie Cohn had suggested a title for these reminiscences – Ocean 1212-W – but arrangements for the recording were abruptly terminated when Plath, the estranged wife of the poet Ted Hughes, committed suicide in February 1963. Leonie Cohn's final letter to Plath, dated three days before her death, is possibly the last Plath received.

Although familiar with literary figures, Leonie Cohn's particular area of expertise was the visual arts. She produced a remarkable series of conversations with artists; along with other producers in the talks department, she imposed what one of them, Philip French, called "a certain kind of exclusivity on the Third".

Formidably intellectual, Leonie Cohn (like many of her colleagues) regretted the passing of the Third Programme and its highbrow content in the reorganisation of the domestic radio networks in the late 1960s. In 1975 she was one of six senior programme staff who demanded more speech on what by then had mutated into Radio 3, arguing that existing restrictions on speech programmes resulted in "a lack of cultural impact of the network as a whole".

When Leonie Cohn retired from the BBC in 1977, George Fischer, her head of department, wrote that few producers had matched Leonie Cohn's fierce loyalty to ideas and contributors.

"The mountainous regions of the intellectual landscape have never deterred her," he added, "even when the weather was less than promising."

Leonie Clara Cohn was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia), on June 22 1917, the only child of a prosperous Jewish lawyer.

She grew up in a large apartment at 11 Paradeplatz, in a house that had been built by her grandfather, Isidor Cohn, a wealthy trader in amber. The family had to sell it when the business and much of their wealth was lost in the depression and inflation that followed the Great War, but her father's income from the Law kept them reasonably comfortable until the Nazi pogroms.

Leonie attended a private infants' school (where she said she was the only Jewish child) and then went to the Königsberg Lyceum, which specialised in modern languages, in particular English and French. As a child she became aware that she was Jewish only because she and other Jewish pupils did not join in Christian prayers or take part in Christian catechesis. At first she had many friends, but as Nazism flourished many of her non-Jewish friends rejected her.

She achieved her Abitur (the equivalent of matriculation) "very handsomely", and went on to domestic school in Berlin. After qualifying, she went to Naples to work for the musicologist and composer Professor Guido Pannain. En route she broke her journey at Rome, where she was met by a young man, Peter Heller, also from Königsberg.

Leonie Cohn did not get on with the very conservative Pannain family, especially when Peter Heller visited (with her own family's consent). Her parents allowed her to return to Rome to study, and Heller found her some students whom she taught English and German to help pay her way. Later she even took bit parts in films being made at Cinecittà. She loved Rome, and enrolled at the university there to study languages – principally Arabic and Hebrew.

At the end of her second year, however, Leonie Cohn was forced to leave because of laws passed by the Fascist government under pressure from Hitler. When Mussolini, at Hitler's behest, ordered all German Jews to return to Germany, she decided to go to England, even though she had no visa.

Her professor travelled to London before her and met the art critic and author Herbert (later Sir Herbert) Read, to whom she explained Leonie's predicament. Read promised to support her visa application by offering her a job as a nanny or au pair. Leonie arrived in England in December 1938, and went to live with the Reads near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.

Once in Britain, Leonie Cohn tried unsuccessfully to get her parents out to America. Following the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, her father's gentile clientele had fallen away. He had considered emigrating to the United States. but an entry visa required a guarantee of financial support from an American citizen. Leonie's parents and other members of her family were later deported to Riga and never heard of again.

From early 1939 until 1941 Leonie Cohn worked for the Read household, looking after their young son, Tom, and later their daughter Sophie. In addition she performed household chores and gave Herbert Read secretarial help. While strict with children, Leonie lacked a natural talent for childcare: she dropped Tom, then a baby, down the stairs.

In November 1941 she joined the BBC, working for the German Service at Bush House, her application having been supported by Herbert Read and TS Eliot. Her ability in German was highly valued by the BBC, especially as she was one of the few German nationals not interned. (She was briefly arrested, but freed after Herbert Read and other influential people appealed to the Home Office). She remained in the BBC External Services until 1950.

During this time she met Paul Findlay. He was the chief engineer of Hamburg Radio and working as deputy to Hugh Carleton Greene, the controller of broadcasting in the British zone of occupation in north-west Germany. Findlay was effectively running the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg. He and Leonie went dancing, and subsequently married.

After leaving the BBC in 1977, Leonie Cohn produced some further programmes on contract to them, and then worked with Monica Pidgeon on a series of taped interviews with architects. Later she produced cassette tape and slide sets of interviews with artists on her own account through her company, Lecon Arts.

She also took an active part in local affairs in Belsize Park, north London, serving for some years as chairman of the Belsize Area Conservation Advisory Committee. Although a champion of modern art and architecture, in the early 1960s she was outraged by the threatened demolition of the Euston Arch, and took her son and daughter to see it before its destruction in 1963.

Paul Findlay died in 1992, and Leonie Cohn, who died on August 9, is survived by their two children.

This is taken from The Times, September 20, 2009:

Leonie Cohn: BBC radio producer


The distinguished BBC radio producer Leonie Cohn was part of the formidable intellectual benefit brought to Britain by fascist persecution of European Jews. Born in what was then East Prussia and living in the 1930s in Italy, Cohn was able to escape increasingly oppressive anti-Semitic legislation and come to Britain while her parents perished in the Holocaust. She then built an impressive career first in the BBC German Service and then as a producer in domestic radio, specialising in coverage of the arts.
She shared the misgivings felt by many BBC staff about the transition from the intellectual heights of the Third Programme to Radios 3 and 4. But on the new networks in the 1970s, in addition to maintaining her cultural interests, Cohn pioneered environmental coverage and also produced the Reith lectures.
Leonie Cohn was born in 1917 in Königsberg in East Prussia, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad but then famous for having been the home town of Immanuel Kant, a place steeped in the traditions of Prussian classical education. Her father was a lawyer and the family was prosperous, though suffered some loss from the interwar depression. Her Jewish family’s assimilation into German society had seemed unquestioned in previous decades, but as Nazism gained support locally so Leonie, like other members of the family, became much more aware of the separate and exposed identity she bore.
After studying at a school specialising in languages in Königsberg, she continued her education in Berlin and later moved to Italy, beginning to study Arabic and Hebrew at university in Rome. Anti-Semitism was less pronounced in Fascist Italy than in Nazi Germany but Mussolini’s attempts to keep up with his German counterpart made life steadily more difficult for Jews living in the country.
In 1938 Cohn moved to Britain with the help of the art critic Herbert Read, who initially employed her to look after his children, who included the future novelist Piers Paul Read. During the war Cohn’s linguistic gifts took her into the German Service of the BBC at Bush House in London. She recalled later how impressed she was with BBC journalism after years of enduring propaganda on German and Italian radio. She also became aware of a distinct difference between the news on the BBC Home Service and that broadcast from Bush House. “We dared to be more frank and less circumspect, for instance over British defeats in war.” This, she knew, was why many Germans were listening to such broadcasts at great risk.
Sadly her parents would not be able to join the audience. She had tried and failed to secure their emigration, and learnt later that they had been deported to Riga and disappeared in the cruel chaos of the Holocaust.
After the war Cohn’s former boss in the German service, Hugh Carleton Greene, was in charge of broadcasting in the British-occupied zone of Germany and Cohn was seconded for a time to work in Hamburg radio. There she met the station’s chief engineer, Paul Findlay, whom she later married.
In the early 1950s Cohn found a base from which to exercise the breadth of her intellectual gifts when she moved to the talks department of the domestic BBC radio services. She quickly demonstrated the key producer’s skill of cultivating broadcasting talent, and understanding how to turn a wide variety of subjects into compelling broadcasting. Architecture was a particular specialism — including interviews with Le Corbusier — and she later became an honorary fellow of the RIBA. She also produced ambitious series about the visual arts, and was worked closely on a broadcasting project with the poet Sylvia Plath before her suicide in 1963.
Cohn’s reputation for high standards and intellectual rigour ensured regular commissions for new work from the BBC powers that be. But she could be sharply critical when she felt overall standards were threatened, and in 1970 joined colleagues in writing a letter to The Times critical of the BBC management’s replacement of the Third Programme with Radio 3 and Radio 4, warning of the “refusal to devote a large well-defined area of broadcasting time to a service of the arts and sciences”.
However she continued to produce her own much respected programming, including the 1970 Reith lectures given by Donald Schon on Change and Industrial Society.
Cohn retired from the BBC in 1977 but continued to work on interviews with artists and architects and was very active in the community life of the Belsize Park area of London where she lived.
She is survived by her two children. Her husband Paul Findlay predeceased her in 1992.
Leonie Cohn, radio producer, was born on June 22, 1917. She died on August 9, 2009, aged 92