Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Amherst, NY 14226-3441
[…]
December 12, 1996
Dear Friends:
It is quiet here again after a very lively weekend during which our children and grandchildren and my sister were here to celebrate my seventieth birthday together with Buffalo friends and relatives from Canada. It was indeed a happy occasion and I want to thank all those of you who sent me your greetings which the children gathered into a nice scrap book.
A few days before my birthday I returned from ten days in Israel with a brief interruption in Darmstadt on the way back to see friends and our Buffalo exchange students. The occasion of the trip to Israel was an international conference on Anti-Semitism in Germany prior to the Holocaust held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. On the minds of all the participants was the controversial book by Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and while all the panelists disagreed with Goldhagen’s thesis of a uniquely German anti-Semitism which he asserted permeated German political culture since the eighteenth century and inevitably led to the Holocaust, they wrestled with the question how and why the Holocaust occurred.
My visit to Israel this time was very different from my only previous one in 1968 when I was there as a tourist in a country which I thought I knew but which seemed surprisingly strange to me. This time all of my time was spent with Israeli colleagues and with friends and relatives, including a first cousin whom I had not seen since we emigrated in 1938 and his family, as well as a number of immigrants from Czechoslovakia whom Wilma wanted me to interview for her present project. So this time I felt very much at home in a world which still preserves remnants of a central European Jewish heritage. At the same time I found the political situation very disturbing, the deep polarization on the Israeli-Arab question, everywhere, the lack of progress towards Jewish-Palestinian coexistence and towards a normalization of relations with the Arab world. There were disturbing items in the paper every day: about police brutality against Palestinians, Supreme Court approval of torture, violence by ultraorthodox against those of their women who do not conform, and an opinion poll that 37% of Jewish adolescents in Israel hate Arabs. On the other hand, many of the people I talked to, including two Palestinians, reflected a more conciliatory attitude.
This was again a busy year. Like last year Wilma and I left Buffalo in mid-January for six months in Göttingen. In my case, and to a slightly lesser extent in Wilma’s, research facilities there have proven to be excellent. As always I spent a good deal of time as an unofficial guest at the Max Planck Institute for History which not only has a library well suited to my research, but also provides an unusual opportunity to discuss my work with the research associates there as well as the many international visitors. I know no other center for historical studies in the world which equals this Institute as a meeting place for the exchange of ideas. We are quite concerned therefore about the recent announcement by the Max Planck Society that it plans to phase this Institute out over the next eight years for fiscal reasons, a decision which we hope is not irreversible.
One recent development in Göttingen about which we reported in our last annual letter has been the revival of a Jewish community, which had not existed since the deportation of the last Göttingen Jews. With the influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, a woman, the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants who came to Göttingen from her native Chile, succeeded in forming a congregation of now well over a hundred persons. There are services every Friday evening followed by a kiddush and a potluck supper. Germans or partly Jewish or no Jewish descent are also attracted to these gatherings. The congregation is conservative, not orthodox, with women fully participating in the services, which is still uncommon in Germany. While I attend services in Buffalo perhaps once every two or three months, I try to go in Göttingen every Friday evening, sometimes accompanied by Wilma.
Wilma turned seventy-five in March, but there is no evidence of her slowing down. On the contrary, she has been busier than ever. Her book on Prague women, which appeared last year, has resulted in a number of invitations to Germany and the Czech Republic. Twice after our return to Buffalo in late July she returned to Europe, once for three weeks in September to conferences in Berlin and Usti nad Labem, and once more in October to a conference in Leipzig. She is now preparing a project on religiosity or lack thereof among Jews in Bohemia in the interwar period 1918-1939 on which she will work when she is a guest at the new Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig early in this coming year.
My own work in Göttingen consisted first of the completion of my manuscript for a small book on historical studies today and the challenge of postmodernism to appear later this month, an extended and revised version of a book which first appeared in German three years ago. I was then involved in the preparations of a conference, a sort of postmodern on East German historiography, which took place at the Max-Planck-Institut in late spring and now has to be edited for publication. My larger project on forms of historical thought and writing since the eighteenth century is making slow progress as our autobiographies which an Austrian publisher is urging us to write and to which we hope to turn energetically in this coming year. Some time was occupied in preparing papers for conferences in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden and talks in Germany, an occasion to visit friends, including a former teacher of mine from the Jewish school in Germany I attended prior to our emigration in 1938 who since his release from Dachau in 1939 has been living in Sweden, and relatives in England.
Briefly some family highlights. On Wilma’s birthday we were at a conference in Bamberg when to her utter surprise the three boys knocked at the hotel room door. They had met at the Frankfurt airport, rented a car, and driven to Bamberg to celebrate her birthday. After the conference we all drove to Göttingen whence Jeremy and Dan drove on to Vienna to visit Jeremy’s son Micha while Jonathan stayed with us for a few days. We keep in close touch with Micha, who just turned six last month, and with his mother, and visited him in April. Wilma saw him once more in September. Jeremy manages to make the trip across the ocean to Vienna at least twice a year and went on a camping trip with Micha in October. He just published The Garden of Eating (Basic Books), a fun book with a serious theme, an interesting sociological and philosophical critique of the culture of food in the postmodern age which combines his interests in journalism and philosophy as does his book on journal-istic ethics about to appear. One of the great bonuses of being here in Buffalo is the proximity to Jonathan, whom we see almost daily, and Daniel and family in Toronto, whom we see very frequently. Sarah, Dan’s oldest daughter, just entered a program in theater at York University with a great deal of enthusiasm. Kelly, twelve, and Adam, who will be eleven this month, are excellent students and enthusiastic about sports, we enjoy them immensely.
I shall be retiring officially the middle of January, but shall be teaching a graduate seminar each fall for the next five years and directing students, so this little will change except for my teaching load. We expect while our health keeps up to continue dividing our time between Buffalo and Göttingen.
From January 22 to approximately March 22, mail will reach us c/o the Simon Dubnow Institut, Universität Leipzig, Augustusplatz 9, D-04109 Leipzig, Germany; Fax: +49-341-9732359 (in the US and Canada prefix 011). We do not know our e-mail address yet, but assume that e-mail sent to our Buffalo or Göttingen addresses will be forwarded. From March 22 to July 20 mail will reach us again at Schillerstr. 50, D-37083 Göttingen, Germany, phone and fax: +49-551-74038; e-mail: giggers@gwdg.de.
Best wishes for the holiday season and the New Year
Georg & Wilma