DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
INGRID ELISABETH SOMMER
22 April 1938 – 13 January 2026
LMU paediatric professor, child refugee from Breslau and doctor to generations of children
Ingrid Sommer was six years old when she left Breslau in the bitter January of 1945 with a rucksack, a doll with one arm, and a sentence her mother repeated all the way to Bavaria: 'We keep our hands for work.' She never forgot it, and she made it the shape of a life.
Her family reached a village near Kempten in the Allgäu, where a farmer gave them the attic and her mother took in sewing. Ingrid walked four kilometres to school each day and read everything she could borrow, including, to the farmer's astonishment, his veterinary manual. In 1957 she began medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, one of nine women in a year of two hundred, and qualified in 1963. She trained in paediatrics at the Dr. von Haunersches Kinderspital, specialised in kidney disease in children, and in 1983 became professor of paediatric nephrology at LMU, where she worked until 2006.
Students feared and adored her for the same habit: she insisted on speaking to the child first, kneeling to eye level, before she read a single chart. 'The patient is the smallest person in the room,' she said. 'Start there.' She built the first dialysis programme for children in southern Bavaria, wrote a textbook chapter that a generation of residents learned by heart, and trained more than forty doctors, several of them refugees themselves.
In 1966 she married Wolfgang Sommer, a physicist, who died in 2015. They raised Matthias and Katharina in a flat in Schwabing where the piano lid was never closed. She hiked in the Alps every summer until she was eighty-three, made the finest Marillenknödel in Munich, and after retirement volunteered at the Malteser clinic for people without health insurance, treating the uninsured and the frightened. 'I know what it is to arrive with nothing,' she said, 'and I know what a kind doctor costs. Nothing.'
Ingrid died on 13 January 2026 at home in Munich, in her own bed, with her children beside her and snow on the roofs outside. She leaves Matthias, Katharina, three grandchildren and generations of grown-up patients who still send her postcards.
“The patient is the smallest person in the room. Start there.”