Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Buffalo, NY 14226-3441 USA
[…]
December 5, 2004
Dear Friends:
We expected this to be a very quiet year, but it turned out to be a very busy one, and this coming one promises to be so too. We returned to Goettingen from Buffalo the middle of January and a few days later went to Esslingen, near Stuttgart, where I had been invited to give the address to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, a day which some years ago was declared in Germany an annual day of mourning and repentance for the Holocaust. I had spent ten months at a Jewish orphanage and reformatory in Esslingen just before our emigration in the fall of 1938, not because I was an orphan but because my parents considered me a very difficult child and did not know how to handle me. My memories of the open and progressive way in which the school dealt with the children have been positive. I was very pleased therefore when the city discovered me as a survivor and invited me and Wilma among other former pupils of the school to spend two weeks there in the summer of 1989. Since then we have known people there and are always glad to visit there. In the evening there was a solemn observance in the Old City Hall and the next morning we met with high school students as we had a few years ago. There followed a number of invitations for me in Bochum, Bremen, Berlin, Vienna, and Leipzig to discuss my present project, about which I shall say more below, and invitations to both of us to answer questions of children of different ages in a variety of school classes in Germany. In Osnabrueck in June we were able to discuss our work at our friend Klaus Bade’s institute for migration and intercultural studies and also to meet with high school classes. In March I attended a conference organized by my good friend Joern Ruesen with East Asian scholars at his Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen, where I to saw my former doctoral student Liangkai Chou and his wife Shihdeh, also a former student of mine, my friend Masayuki Sato from Japan, and Chen Qineng and Jiang Peng from Beijing, by now also friends, with whom I have been cooperating on joint projects. Chen Qineng and Jiang Peng as well as Q(ingjia) Edward Wang, formerly from Shanghai, now at Rowan University in New Jersey, with whom I have working very closely on a project, came to visit us in Goettingen before the conference, where they also had an opportunity to meet some of our Goettingen friends. But in many ways this was more Wilma’s year than mine. We both had an opportunity to discuss our joint autobiography at a special session of the European Social Science History Association in Berlin in March. During this brief visit to Berlin we saw a number of friends as we had the week before in Vienna where we visited our grandson Micha and his mother Christa. In May Wilma received an invitation from her hometown Horsovsky Tyn to a special event. The event may seem amusing. It was to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the visit of King Edward VII of England to this small town to participate in a deer hunt. Wilma had known of this hunt because her father had told her how he as a eight year old boy had been taken along on the hunt. This was an opportunity to see local friends but also our granddaughter Kelly who came from Prague where she spent several months together with her brother Adam, who was in Europe for the first time on a one-week trip to Prague. From Horsovsky Tyn we went on to Prague where we were invited to stay at an apartment of the U. S. Embassy right across the street from the Embassy. With all the security measures we felt very safe. (Some people suggested that there were reasons for the security. W.) The Embassy had nothing directly to do with our staying there. Lyell and Marki Thompson, our best friends from our Arkansas days, had decided with several of their children and grandchildren to visit Prague. (Marki is three quarters of Czech descent.) Southerners from Oklahoma, Lyell had taken a very courageous stand in Arkansas during the civil rights crisis and in his work as an agronomist at the University of Arkansas, Lyell devoted many years to working with farmers in the Third World. Their son Mark, a retired medical officer in the U.S. Army, who has none of the attitudes one would expect from an army officer, succeeded in renting a whole floor of the Embassy’s apartment building for their stay there. Since they had an extra bed room, they invited us to stay there. It was a wonderful reunion. And, of course, we also saw Wilma’s cousin Eva Duskova and her family, others of Wilma’s acquaintances, and Kelly and her friend Wolfe.
Only three weeks later we were in Prague again, where Wilma received a special award from the Czech Foreign Ministry. Every year since 1997, the Foreign Ministry has given this award, gratias agit, as a token of thanks to individuals living outside the Czech Republic who have made significant contributions to making Czech culture, society, and history known. Two years ago Wilma had already received an honorary citizenship from her hometown Horsovsky Tyn, only the second such citizenship that had been awarded since the end of the Communist regime in 1989. We again spent three wonderful days in Prague, an evening when the various awardees were introduced, the ceremony the next day in the Cernin Palace, were the Czech foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda, personally handed Wilma the award, and a third day, an all afternoon excursion on the Moldau with the honorees and their families and officials of the foreign office. The day we arrived in Prague we were met by our son Jeremy and his wife Carol. Jeremy and Carol went on to Vienna to see Micha. Unfortunately Micha’s grandmother, Kathe, whom we liked very much, was very sick and had just died In July I went to St. Andrews University in Scotland, to the meeting of the bureau (executive committee) of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography. I had been a member of the Commission and its bureau since its founding in Bucharest in 1980, active in the 1980s in establishing contacts beyond ideological borders, and since the 1980s also cooperation with historians in East Asia. The meeting in St. Andrews was the last bureau session I shall have attended. After 25 years I felt it was time to resign, although I shall continue to cooperate closely with the Commission. On my way to and from Scotland I visited friends and relatives in England. In London I spent two nights with Richard Vann, the present president of the Commission on Historiography and the editor of History and Theory, with whom I have cooperated for many years, and his wife Patricia. That afternoon I went to visit Ralph Emanuel. Ralph, a distant relative who discovered us some years ago. He and his wife, Muriel, who had just died, had become very dear friends Muriel had edited books, including recently one on Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport, the evacuation of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to England in the face of the Nazis. Ralph was born in England of German Jewish parents. A very successful retired businessman, he is steeped in German, and particularly German Jewish culture, and has been a patron of the Center of German Jewish Studies in Brighton. From London I proceeded to Manchester to visit one of my ultra-orthodox nephews and his family and then on the return trip his brother who lives in an ultra-orthodox community in Gateshead outside of Newcastle. I am glad I visited them and enjoyed their adorable children, but was also aware how different our conceptions of Judaism are. From my perspective they are clinging to a seventeenth-, eighteenth-century Eastem European ethnic form of Judaism, which neglects the richness and diversity of Jewish traditions over the centuries. From there on my way back to Goettingen, I stopped in Amsterdam to visit friends and spent the night with Gaby Kolko, a colleague and friend in Buffalo in the late sixties, at the time one of the leading New Left historians who has continued to be a prolific critic of American world policy, and his wife Joyce. Kolko was very pessimistic about the future and foresaw a decisive victory for Bush.
In the middle of August we returned to Buffalo. I again taught a graduate seminar at the university, the eighth year after my retirement. This time I taught a research seminar with a number of very good students. I should consider whether I ought finally at my age - I shall be 78 day after tomorrow - stop teaching, but I enjoy the contact with the students and have the illusion that I am not really retired. Wilma, who has been retired for thirteen years now, does nor act as if she were retired either. In the middle of October we went to Rejkyavik. A book of mine was about to be published in Icelandic and in connection with this I was invited to give the annual memorial lecture at the University of Iceland Wilma too was invited to give a talk. We were overwhelmed by the warmth with which we were received. Wilma flew back to Buffalo, while I proceeded to an international conference on historiography at the Central European University in Budapest, to which not only Wester scholars, but also a number of very promising younger historians from Easter Europe, from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia were invited. Before returning to Buffalo, I took the train to Vienna and spent two very nice evenings with our grandson Micha and his mother and also saw friends All this travel must seem insane to you, and the point will come very soon when we will seriously have to reduce our trips. But we enjoy keeping alive the contacts and friendships. Wilma had been invited by our friend Rudolf von Thadden to a conference originally scheduled for June in a Franco-German institute for international understanding in a castle in Genshagen near Berlin. She was to talk from her perspective as a Jew who grew up between Czechs and Germans in prewar Czechoslovakia about what had been lost and destroyed in the subsequent years. When the conference was moved to November, she told the organizers that she would not be able to come from Buffalo and promptly received a prepaid airplane ticket from Buffalo to Berlin. She did fly to the conference and found it very worthwhile. She was able to see the exhibition at the German Historical Museum on the ways in which various European nations as well as the United States and Israel remembered the crucial war years and the aftermath. She had contributed an extensive essay on the Czechs for the two volume catalog. Since she could not go to Goettingen, Goettingen came to her. Three friends, Dagmar Friedrich, Ilse Planert, and Elisabeth Hellmann traveled from Goettingen to Genshagen to see her, bringing large quantities of Marzipan for her to take back to Buffalo.
We constantly talk about where we shall stay ultimately and ultimately we shall have to make a decision unless a medical catastrophe makes the decision for us. Right now we are both in good health - except for an emergency operation for a detached retina in early October, from which I have now recovered completely. But we know that at our age we are living on borrowed time. I shall turn 78 day after tomorrow, Wilma will be 84 in March although persons who do not know her age always consider her much younger. We still largely work as usual but we do tire more easily and have both given up night driving. Once we have to give up driving altogether, it will be difficult to manage in Buffalo. We would hate to give up Goettingen. We feel very much integrated into the community, have a host of friends, and three very close friends on whom we can always count, our neighbor Dagmar Friedrich and the Justuses whom we have known since they were students over forty years ago. We have ho such friends in Buffalo. Ás a matter we feel relatively isolated in Buffalo as old friends have either moved away, died, or become very old. At this point we also have many more scholarly contacts in Europe than in America, and not only in Germany but also elsewhere, and in recent years also in East Asia, and in Wilma’s case, of course in the Czech Republic and circles of friends in Berlin, Leipzig, and Darmstadt and for Wilma also in her region of Bohemia and in Prague. For me an additional recent factor is the Jewish community in Goettingen which was revitalized a few years ago after having been dormant since it had been destroyed by the Nazis and although it is still small has grown as refugees from the former Soviet Union arrived. I attend services almost every Friday evening not only out of a sense of solidarity with a struggling congregation, many of whose members are on social assistance, but also because I enjoy the services and the sociability. In Buffalo I do not feel at home in any of the affluent suburban congregations; Wilma says that I have quit more shuls than I have joined. But we do not want to give up Buffalo either. Here our son Jonathan joins us almost every evening for supper and we miss him in Goettingen. Dan comes almost every two weeks from Toronto, sometimes with Janet. And he phones almost every day, also when we are in Germany, as Jonathan does too. Jeremy and Carol will come this weekend for my birthday. And Wilma has three cousins nearby on the Canadian side of whom we are very fond.
As for our current writing: Wilma is quite involved in several Czech projects. My long range project is a history of modern historiography from a comparative intercultural perspective. I am working closely together with a Chinese colleague, Q(ingjia) Edward Wang, originally from Shanghai, now in the United States. There have been a number of histories of historical thought and writing which have dealt exclusively with the West. We are including the non-West and are dealing not only with Western influences in a colonial period but also with autonomous traditions and currents of historical thought in these countries which predated the impact of the West and conditioned the reactions to these influences. Both Wilma and I are now engaged in preparing the English version of our autobiography which hopefully will appear later next year with Berghahn Books. This will not be a literal translation from the original German publication but we are rewriting some sections. A Czech translation has already been completed and checked by Wilma and will appear soon in Prague. A Chinese translation is in preparation. A friend of ours in Herford - he and his future wife were in Buffalo as exchange students twenty some years ago - together with colleagues is working on a dvd of our autobiography as are members of the historically Black Phi Beta Sigma fraternity on this side of the ocean. I joined the fraternity when we were in Little Rock over fifty years ago, dropped out after we left the South, and was recently rediscovered by them and persuaded again to become an active member. I am also still a member of the board of directors of the Buffalo chapter of the Nationa Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest civil rights organization in America Now briefly to our children and grandchildren: Little has changed in the lives of our children. Jeremy continues as a journalist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but also teaches philosophy as an adjunct, this fall for several weeks in France for the overseas program of a consortium of American colleges. Daniel continues as legal counsel for the Canadian Bankers’ Association in Toronto, Jonathan is now in his twenty-third year at the Division of Social Services of Erie County here in Buffalo, where he works with Medicaid clients - Medicaid, for those of you outside the United States, is the medical insurance program for the lowest income classes. Sarah, Dan’s daughter from his first marriage, just turned 27. After giving up her university studies several years ago, she started working in the restaurant department of the Casino in Niagara Falls, Canada, rose rapidly to becoming manager of the cafeteria of the five thousand or so employees of the Casino, work which she enjoys. Her marriage dissolved after a year, and she has a new relationship. Kelly, Dan and Janet’s daughter, who spent her twentieth birthday with us in Goettingen, accompanied us to Vienna, and then settled down for several months in Prague. She just started her undergraduate work at McGill University in Montreal and is particularly interested in East Central European studies, following with her love for Bohemia in Wilma’s footsteps. We phone and exchange e-mail frequently. Her brother Adam, who will be nineteen this month, was an indifferent high school student until he woke up and is spending this year in a Canadian program similar to the American Peace Corps before beginning his university studies in the fall. He just finished several months of teaching children in a small town in Newfoundland and has just arrived in Jamaica, where he will participate in a literacy program in the countryside. Micha in Vienna just turned fourteen, is very bright with a good sense of humor, does well in his Gymnasium (high school) when he applies himself and not very well when he is not interested. His main leisure time activity consists of playing with magic cards - he is the Austrian champion for players under fifteen. Jeremy manages to see him several times a year, and he spent his summer vacation this year as well as last year with Jeremy and Carol in Minneapolis.
And now to the dismal subject of politics. We are very pessimistic about the future. Fifteen years ago, when the cold war ended, we were very hopeful that the world was finally moving in the direction of peace and stability. I too was very much confident at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993 that there would finally be a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Things have turned out very differently. We were deeply shocked by the outcome of the U. S. presidential election in November and feel that we somehow do not understand this country anymore. How could Americans reelect Bush after he had consistently lied to them on Iraq and domestically pushed through policies which are not in the interest of the vast majority of Americans? We also believe that the U.S., Russian, and Israeli governments are following a very dangerous policy, when in Iraq, Chechenia, on the West Bank and in Gaza they think they can end terrorism by military force and their own terrorism and do not seriously consider the political, social, economic, and cultural factors which make for terror. With very best wishes for the holiday season and the New Year,
Georg and Wilma
P.S. From January 11 until late July or early August, we shall again be in Goettingen. Our address there: […]