Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Amherst, NY 14226-3441 USA
[…]
December 14, 1997
Dear Friends:
Season’s greetings from a wintery Buffalo. This has been a busy, perhaps too busy year. Actually it began with my formal retirement at the beginning of the year, which, however, has changed little in all my life or in Wilma’s, who retired six years ago. By a post-retirement, five-year arrangement with the university I still be teaching a graduate seminar each fall, shall continue to work with graduate students, and have most normal faculty privileges. As a matter of fact, I’ve been as busy with my graduate students this past semester as ever. In late January we went to Europe again for half a year, but this time first for two months in Leipzig, where Wilma had a two-month research appointment at the new Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the university, and where she prepared a paper and gave a public lecture on the declining religiosity of Bohemian and Moravian Jews in the first Czechoslovak Republic. Only then did we go to Göttingen for the remainder of our stay in Germany. We were very much enjoyed the two months in Leipzig. We have more friends and good acquaintances there than in any other German city except Göttingen. Our contacts with Leipzig date back to our first visit there in 1966, when it was still unusual for Westerners to go there, and included a three month stay in the fall of 1968 when Wilma had an exchange research fellowship.
The changes which have taken place since reunification have been striking. The downtown area has been thoroughly renewed and is now attractive and elegant. The rest of the city has also lost most of its drab look. With deindustrialization and the terrible air pollution characteristic of East German cities has been notably reduced. Among the people we know, ranging from those who were deeply committed to the old regime to dissidents of the protest movements, there is a broad consensus today, a sense of relief that the old GDR (East Germany) dictatorship with its restrictive policies and hypocrisy is gone and a general disappointment in the development of the past few years. There was once full employment, admittedly in a society which with its cumbersome mechanisms of bureaucratic state regulation was on the verge of bankruptcy. There is now a market economy with mass unemployment - officially 18%, almost twice the West German rate - and a sense of disorientation. The key positions in the university as well as in administration, economy, and to an extent politics have been taken over by West Germans. In honor of my seventieth birthday several of the Leipzig historians organized a small colloquium around an interesting topic, how they viewed works that I had written twenty or thirty years ago now. I was asked to reflect on my book on the German historical profession first published in 1968, which I was revising for republication, after thirty years. The conference sadly reflected the division which exists in German academic and intellectual life. Although East German guests came from Berlin, for valid or less valid reasons none of the West German Leipzig historians attended.
We again very much enjoyed the four months we spent in Göttingen. In the thirty-six years since we first began to go there, we have come to feel very much at home there, in some ways even more than in Buffalo. It has also been a very good place for our work, although I have no official connection with the Max-Planck-Institute for History, I have been a regular guest there since we first came to Göttingen, with a place to work, access to a library excellent for my research, and the possibility to discuss my work with colleagues and with the many international visitors who come to the Institute. An additional attraction for me has been the reestablishment of a Jewish community, made possible by the arrival of newcomers from the former Soviet Union. While I only occasionally attend services in Buffalo, in Göttingen I go almost weekly on Friday evenings. As yet the congregation is harmonious, unlike many Jewish congregations in Germany. Wilma in Göttingen began to work on the German edition of her Women of Prague on which she is still very hard at work. The German edition is not a translation but rather, in many ways a new version. I was busy preparing the above mentioned book on the German traditions of historical scholarship. In the United States it was essentially an academic book when it appeared, in Germany it was a book with strong political implications examining the illiberalism of German traditions of historical writing at a time when a new generation of postwar historians were first confronting these traditions. It went through several paperback editions in Germany, but has been out of print for some time. I thus needed to bring it up to date for the new edition which appeared this fall.
We do find that the quality of life has suffered in Germany in the past decade. Notwithstanding the German past, in 1989, on the eve of reunification, we regarded the Federal Republic, although by no means perfect, as a model of political democracy and social justice comparable in many ways to the Scandinavian states. I am less convinced of this today. On the positive side I do not believe that unification has led to a new nationalism. The Germans are probably more European minded than their neighbors and a broad spectrum of the population views the sordid sides of their past even more critically than they did a generation ago. Nor has the ultraright gained the support which it has attained in France, Austria, Italy, or Belgium. On the other hand, in the wake of globalization parts of the social net have been dismantled, while profits and the stock exchange his new highs. Unemployment figures continue to climb. In a country which a generation ago seemed to have virtually abolished poverty, many persons now experience hardship. Many are shifted into part-time jobs (the so-called 610 DM jobs) without social benefits. Here there are parallels to America. At the same time the major parties, including the Social Democrats, have given in to xenophobia to largely eliminate the generous provisions for refugees which the federal German constitution had provided. Children of longtime ethnic residents are still denied German citizenship while ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe or central Asia, many of whom speak little German, are given citizenship upon arrival. Nor have violent attacks against foreigners mostly from unemployed male juveniles but also from draftees ceased. Yet if I did not still have confidence in the soundness of German democracy I would not have reclaimed my German citizenship two years ago. At this point I feel very much a part of both Germany and America and want to be involved in both societies.
Wilma as usual went to Prague, a trip which combined research with seeing friends and relatives, and to her old home area in Western Bohemia. My trips involved conferences. In May we went to Florence for a week, our first time there, where a Swedish friend at the European University Institute had arranged an exchange between myself and Hayden White, a principal theoretical proponent of the postmodern position which sees history primarily as a form of literature basically indistinguishable from fiction, a position which I with my belief in the possibility of rational discourse oppose. Then we spent several days with a former student of mine in Rome, an Italian woman and her husband, our first opportunity to see Rome. Our friend, who is also a tour guide, gave us a marvelous six-hour personal tour of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Cathedral. On the way there and back we visited old friends in Northern Italy. Later in May Wilma went to the reunion of her former German compatriots from her home town in Czechoslovakia in Furth in Wald not because of any love for their politics but to learn more about how they view the world now and they came from. In October we went to Finland for eleven days, our first time there, to attend an interesting conference in Turku on current perspectives on historical interpretation. On the Day of Atonement which followed the conference we attended services at the small Jewish synagogue in Turku where we were very well received and learned something about the precarious existence of this miniscule community during World War II. The next five days we spent in Helsinki as guests of the South Korean ambassador in the embassy residence. The ambassador, the first Korean woman to be appointed to such a post, is a distinguished historian and a marvelous person whom we met twelve years ago on our first visit to Korea and with whom we had been in loose contact. During the last week in November I went to Korea, accompanied by my Korean graduate student, to participate in a conference on a similar topic. I very much enjoyed this, my second visit to Korea, and am only sorry that Wilma decided to stay home. We have had a lot of contacts with Korea over the years, through Korean students and colleagues we have known in Buffalo and Germany, including one of my doctoral students who is now a professor in Seoul. The hospitality was overwhelming. Despite the daily headlines about the economic crisis, Seoul made a very normal and elegant impression.
Now our stay in Buffalo is almost over. We came back on July 20 and shall return to Europe on January 23, this time for a a twentieth year reunion of the group with which she and her family arrived in Canada in 1948 and their descendants. I unfortunately will have to miss it because of a commitment I have in Berlin and shall return two weeks later.
This has been a very nice half year, a chance to see a lot of our children and our Toronto grandchildren, one reason why we do not want to move to Göttingen permanently despite its personal and intellectual attractions but would like to divide our time between Buffalo and Göttingen while we can do so healthwise. Jonathan who continues in his job working with the elderly in the Division of Social Services in Buffalo we see daily. Dan remains with the Ontario Securities Commission and daily feeds us a wide variety of items from the internet, from the state of the world to jokes and news about his children. His oldest daughter Sarah is already in her second year in drama studies at York University in Toronto. Jeremy, who lives farther away in Minneapolis, but as a journalist and philosopher travels quite a bit, we see as often in Europe as here. He manages to visit his son Micha, now seven, in Vienna two or three times a year and spend vacations with him. We too keep close contact with Micha and his mother and other grandmother by phone and visits.
During the entire month of February I shall be a visiting professor at the University of Arhus in Denmark, after which we shall again be in Göttingen, except for three weeks in Potsdam and Berlin in the second week of April and early May. I hope to make substantive progress on my book of critical reflections on historical thought and dialogue since the eighteenth century. Both of us will continue to work on the autobiography which an Austrian publisher has been urging us to write. In connection with the portions of the autobiography dealing with my childhood, we spent a week in Hamburg as guests of the city trying to find out something about the public school I attended in the early Nazi years as well as the Jewish youth culture of the time. We did not attend the observances of the fortieth anniversary this September of the desecration of Central High School in Little Rock in which we were involved, but expect to go there next fall. In Potsdam I expect to work on my correspondence with GDR historians which is at the center for contemporary Historical Research there.
E-mail will be forwarded to us after January 23. Our address in Göttingen will again be our apartment: Schillerstraße. 50, D-37083 Göttingen, Germany; telephone and fax: (0551)-74038, from North America 011-49-551-74038; our Danish address from February 1 to 28 will be Historisk Institut, Arhus Universitet, Moesgard-svej, DK-8000 Arhus, Denmark, fax: +45-89-422047, from North America prefix 011.
With our best wishes for the coming year,
Georg und Wilma