Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Amherst, NY 14226-3441 USA
[…]
December 8, 1998
Dear Friends:
Both Wilma and I are now retired, Wilma already since 1991, I since last year, but we continue to be as busy as before. Wilma completed her Women of Prague two months ago. This is not a translation but a rewrite of the English version. She has also made headway on her part of our joint autobiography. In addition she gave a number of lectures and talks in Copenhagen, Prague, Oldenburg, and Göttingen. We were both in Aarhus, Denmark, during the month of February, where I had a visiting professorship, and then as always in Göttingen. In May I spent three weeks at the center for research in contemporary history in Potsdam, while I concentrated on the history of the GDR (East Germany) and where in preparation for my part of our autobiography I worked through my correspondence with historians in the GDR in the years 1966 to 1990 which is temporarily stored there. While I was in Potsdam, Wilma was in Prague where she spoke in a seminar at Charles University and discussed the status of Jews in Germany at the congress of the International Council of Jewish Women.
The high point of the year for Wilma was undoubtedly the annual reunion picnic in Mt. Hope, Ontario, of the Jewish refugees, their descendants and families who came to Canada from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and additional ones who came in 1939 and later. More than two hundred people assembled to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of their arrival in Canada. Canada had been very restrictive with regard to Jewish immigration, so that virtually no Jews fleeing the Nazis were admitted; on the other hand farmers were given preference. The members in Wilma’s group were admitted in November 1938 as farmers with the understanding that they remain in farming in Canada, as in fact many of them did very successfully. It is still not certain whether the Canadian authorities in Ottawa knew that they were Jews. Our son Daniel gave the main talk, followed by Harold Troper from the University of Toronto who had coauthored the authoritative study on Canadian policy in the 1930s in regard to Jewish immigration and who told the group that it was a miracle that they were admitted to Canada. Our nephew Ed made a very nice video. There is a possibility that parts may be shown on TV in Germany next year to document the fate of the Jewish population in the German-speaking border areas of Czechoslovakia which is generally ignored by the expellee organizations in Germany which concentrate only on what happened to them.
I unfortunately missed the reunion because I had two engagements in Germany which I could not miss but followed soon. We then spent a major part of the summer in Buffalo. In August our seven and a half year old grandson from Vienna visited us in Buffalo for the first time, accompanied by his father, Jeremy.
Several German friends visited us in September and October. In mid-September the university with generous support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) sponsored a conference in Buffalo with invited German and American scholars on the occasion of my retirement. The conference “Crossing Boundaries: German and American Experiences with the Exclusion and Inclusion of Minorities” except for one paper did not deal directly with my scholarly work in historical theory and historiography - hence none of the German friends with whom I had worked professionally on these topics were invited - but was related centrally to our lives, our experiences in prewar Europe, our emigration, our experiences in the South, and our lives between America and Central Europe since.
I am now officially retired but have an agreement with the university that I offer a graduate seminar each fall for the next several years. This fall I am offering my historiography seminar with a larger enrollment than ever and a good mix of history, classics, sociology and comparative literature students. I continue to direct dissertations. This is a good arrangement which permits me to teach and work with students but gives me more flexibility in time. By arranging for one of my seminar sessions, we were able to take off twelve days in fall November to attend a conference on “The Intellectuals in the First World War” in Trento, Italy, and combine it with a five day visit with our grandson in Vienna, his mother, and grandmother as well as to see friends. Wilma was able to discuss her book with our publisher at the Boehlau Verlag Wien, who appeared very pleased with the manuscript. Boehlau also recently republished the German edition of my German Conception of History, which had been out of print. It is on their encouragement that we are writing our memoir in German. In May and June 2000 we shall be in Vienna for two months, as a fellow at a research center which is only fifteen minutes’ walk from our grandson. We look very much forward to it.
Dividing our lives between America and Europe, or more specifically Buffalo and Göttingen, we feel very much at home in both places. Here in North America we have our children and three of our four grandchildren. I appreciate the continued contact I have with the university. On the other hand, we have many friends overseas and more persons with whom we can discuss our work in Europe than here.
There are things that worry us about America and Germany. The spectacle in Washington and the way it has been handled by the media is shameful and hard to believe for Europeans. Also disturbing is the power which giant economic interests have on the political process in the United States which, whether it is tobacco or the insurance industry, can directly buy legislators. Germany with its public financing of elections and its system of proportional representation seems to me to be more democratic in these respects. I am convinced of the solidity of German democracy and the democratic outlook of the vast majority of Germans. On the other hand, it is a scandal that persons of darker complexion are not safe, especially in many East German communities. The construction of a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin which reflect German attitudes toward the past. On the one hand there is the German writer, Martin Walser who recently received considerable approval when he urged publicly to finally put an end to the discussions of guilt for the Holocaust; on the other hand, it is our impression that particularly the younger generation is more aware than ever that the past must be faced candidly if Germany is to have a democratic sense of identity. The misguided economic and social policies of the German government regarding Eastern Germany after unification, in its haste to introduce market economy, have resulted in major dislocations and horrendous unemployment, especially among young people. This has contributed to the strength of the PDS in the East, the successor party of the old East German Communist party, which has tried to transform itself into a democratic party representing the regional interests of present day East Germany, but it has also given fuel to right wing violence from youth gangs, again particularly in the East.
We were very pleased with the outcome of the German elections. It has yet to be seen how far the new government will go in honoring its promises to create a socially more just society. One of its promises was to finally repeal the citizenship law of 1913, which defined German citizenship in terms of descent, and to replace it by one which would give citizenship to most persons born in Germany and liberalize naturalization. The new coalition has announced that it will introduce a new law which will offer citizenship at birth to children born in Germany, provided the parents have lived there since before their fourteenth birthday, thus still excluding many children of immigrants. Moreover, there are no plans to change the asylum law. While before 1993 Germany had the world’s most liberal right to asylum, anchored in its constitution, a right which admittedly was often abused, the new law makes it extremely difficult to obtain asylum even in very clear cases of persecution, but the United States, since the Republican sponsored immigration bill of 1996 was signed into law by Clinton, has not been any better. As has not been sufficiently reported in the media, asylum seekers entering the United States are routinely incarcerated, often with common criminals, until their applications are decided on, and the possibilities for judicial appeal have been largely eliminated. Since we also had to flee from persecution in an indifferent world, these concerns are very close to our hearts.
Later this month Wilma and I shall observe our fiftieth wedding anniversary with a small family gathering. On January 18 we shall leave Buffalo, this time not for Göttingen, but for Australia, where I shall be a visiting scholar for a month and a half. Since our tickets permit two stopovers, we shall on our way to Australia stay three days in Hawaii to break the long trip up and ten days in New Zealand. We shall return to Buffalo on March 15 and then on March 27 fly to Germany where we shall be until August 10. E-mail sent to the above Buffalo e-mail address will reach us in Australia as well as Germany. Our mailing address in Australia will be c/o Moses; P.O. Box U 156; University of New England, Armidale NSW 2351, Australia; our German address again Schillerstraße. 50, D-37083 Göttingen, Germany, tel. and fax: 011-49-551-74038 from North America; (0551)-74038 in Germany.
We wish you all the best,
Georg and Wilma