Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Amherst, NY 14226-3441 USA
[…]
November 27, 1999
Dear Friends:
This has been another busy but also satisfying year. Shortly after we wrote you last year, we celebrated our golden anniversary with a dinner at a restaurant on the Canadian side. It was a nice family gathering with Jeremy, Daniel, and Jonathan, Dan’s wife Janet, and their three children and Wilma’s two cousins, Hanna and Minna, and my sister Lena. Winter came late to Buffalo, but it came with a fury, with a blizzard around January 10. A few days later we left for down under. Our first stop consisted of three days in Honolulu, followed by nine very restful days in New Zealand. We took a beautiful all day train ride from Auckland through the North Island to Wellington, passing few humans but thousands of sheep on the way. Wellington is beautifully located on hills along the bay. We admired the new National Museum which includes extensive Maori exhibits. In Wellington we were warmly welcomed by two families of relatives, Diana, the granddaughter of Wilma’s cousin, Hugo, who with her husband John Morrow who had come there from Canada newly married nearly twenty years ago; the second a relative Ernie Rosenthal and family, born in New Zealand, whose parents had fled there from Salzburg in 1939. We then spent a very relaxing week in a small motel along the coast, enjoying the mild summer weather (in January) walking along the beach, swimming and taking a few hours every day working on our autobiography. Again we were struck how quiet and empty of people the area was.
On February 2 we flew to Sydney where we spent four wonderful days with my favorite cousin Sid, his family, and my aunt, Claire. Sid and his parents came there from Hamburg in early 1939, where his parents had a difficult beginning. Sid was able to build up a comfortable existence, remain intellectually alive, and maintain a social conscience. My aunt, now ninety-two years old is mentally still fully alert and physically in relatively good shape. She was able to help me fill in the part of my autobiography about Hamburg and the world in which she and my mother grew up.
On February 6 Wilma and I made the nine and a half hour bus trip to Armidale, a small university town in the highlands, where we spent the next five weeks. I had been invited by our friend John Moses to give the keynote address at an international conference on Australia and New Zealand and the world crisis 1870-1918 and by the history department as a visiting scholar. I gave a public lecture and once the academic year had begun conducted the first four sessions of the historiography seminar for the honors students. I found the atmosphere in the department very congenial and had stimulating discussions. This turned out to be a wonderful summer vacation, although it was a working vacation for me, which nevertheless left me time to work on the autobiography, and during which Wilma, who also gave a public lecture, was able to read extensively. We decided not to do any traveling in Australia this time, unlike 1987, but to stay in Armidale, to catch something of the atmosphere of a small Australian town. Armidale, with its only 22,000 inhabitants and an economy which rests on the university, the University of New England, is undoubtedly not typical of small Australian towns; it is more prosperous, more sophisticated, and more cosmopolitan. Although we were struck by Australia in less than three decades has emerged from a predominantly WASP culture to a multiethnic society not unlike Canada and the United States. We were housed in what had been the caretaker’s cottage next to the president’s mansion - the present president is John Moses’s wife Ingrid - in a marvelous park at the edge of the campus from where we could observe the quiet countryside with its cattle and many sheep and occasional kangaroos.
On March 15 we returned briefly to Buffalo, still in time to have an early seder with Dan and family before proceeding to Göttingen. Göttingen, as you know, has become a second home to us. Some of our friends there date back to our first stay in 1961-62 to which we have been added. And we have friends in other parts of Germany, in Leipzig, in Berlin, Darmstadt, and elsewhere. We are aware that in part because of our work and our background we have more people in Europe with whom we can exchange ideas and feel at home than after almost thirty-five years in Buffalo. We enjoy our apartment in Göttingen, which is so close to the center of town that we can reach almost everything on foot. We appreciate having our friend Dagmar Friedrich in our next door neighbor. For me the Max Planck Institute for History is important, which, although I have no official connection with it, has always received me as a guest. Not only the excellent library in my field has been very useful, but even more the members of the research staff and the international visitors have given me opportunities to discuss my work.
I still very regularly go to the Sabbath evening services in the revived Göttingen Jewish congregation, in part out of a sense of solidarity. Wilma attends less often. It has provided an opportunity for the increasing number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who have long been isolated from Jewish religion and culture, to gain an identification with Judaism. There are also Germans without a Jewish background who have participated in the congregation and some even joined.
I am less comfortable with the development of German society since unification than before. Before 1989, I considered the Federal Republic, despite the German past, one of the most stable democracies in the world with considerably more social justice than the United States. I also was convinced that East Germany would be integrated into this society in a reasonable time. I have been disappointed, as have many others, by how the process of unification was carried out with major economic and social dislocations, including large scale unemployment. I follow the German news on the Internet every evening and almost every day and read about attacks by skinheads against foreigners in East German towns. Even more shocking is that in many cases those responsible are at most briefly detained and then let go. In West Germany these incidents are rarer, although not totally absent. And here I am shocked how the Social Democratic government has dismantled the right of asylum, which until 1993 was anchored in the constitution, is maltreating asylum seekers in detention, and deporting them to countries where they face imprisonment and torture. Here in the United States the situation is only slightly better, since the immigration law sponsored by the Republicans and signed by Clinton in 1996 strips asylum seekers of most rights to appeal and imprisons many under dreadful conditions.
Wilma was busy during our stay in Göttingen with her work on the German version of her Women of Prague, published in English in 1995. The German version is not a translation but a rewritten book. It will come out next year with Boehlau in Vienna who received a very generous grant from the Austrian research council for its publication. In Göttingen we finished the first half of our autobiography, including our time in Little Rock and New Orleans. Next come not only our years in Buffalo but also our many contacts after 1961 in West Germany and after 1966 in East Germany and in Czechoslovakia.
I have been busy with the preparations for the world historical congress in Oslo next August as organizer of one of the three plenary sessions, on “The Uses and Misuses of History and the Responsibility of the Historian Past and Present,” and as president of the Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography. In connection with these preparations I was at preparatory conferences in Uppsala and Oslo this summer and shall be going to Japan for twelve days on December 2. Wilma has decided to sit the trip to Japan out, since we were in Japan in 1993, so Dan is accompanying me.
We spent several very nice days with our grandson Micha, Jeremy’s son, in Vienna - he just turned nine - and phone with him and his mother frequently.
We returned to Buffalo in time for the fall semester - I still teach a seminar in the fall and direct dissertations. In mid-September we spent a week in Little Rock, where we had spent six years in the 1950s at predominant African-American Philander Smith college. It was a real homecoming with former colleagues and students and newer faculty. We first stopped in Memphis to visit my former doctoral student, Supriya Mukherjee and her husband, The Thompsons, our close friends for over forty years, drove the three hundred miles from Fayetteville to Memphis to take us to Little Rock where we spent three days together visiting old friends. This was the only time that we had not been able to visit Daisy Bates with whom we had worked together closely in the civil rights movement in Little Rock in the 1950s.
She was too sick to be visited and died shortly after. In 1957 she had been the most maligned woman in Arkansas, now her body lay in state in the state capitol, only a few steps from the office from which Orval Faubus, then the governor of Arkansas, had sought to prevent desegregation with armed force. Now at the time of the funeral President Clinton awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to the nine students whom Daisy Bates had accompanied to Little Rock Central High School in September 1957 in the face of a hostile mob.
In fall a month or two was taken up with German houseguests who blended very nicely into our routine. Irene and Uli Justus even spent a few days with us in Letchworth State Park, our annual hideout for more than thirty years. There is little new to report about our children. Jeremy combines his journalistic work with his interests in philosophy. He manages to see Micha in Europe for a vacation together several times a year. Jonathan, who has been somewhat of a loner, now has a steady woman friend. We are concerned about Daniel’s oldest daughter Sarah, just turned 22, who has dropped out of university and is trying to find herself. Kelly, who is 15, is doing very well in her school and socially. Adam, 13, after having been a top student, is taking it a little easier to the dismay of his proud parents.
Until now we have had no serious health problems. Wilma has managed well with her angina, which was diagnosed fifteen years ago, but which has caused her few problems since. I had never been in the hospital since I was a small boy, but last month had a fairly complicated operation for an aneurysm in my right leg which has to be followed by a second operation on my left leg later in December when I return from Japan.
We shall be returning to Germany the end of January, again to Schillerstraße. 50, D-37083 Göttingen, Germany, phone and fax: (0551)-74038 from Germany 011-49-551-74038 from North America; from March 15 to May 15 I shall be a fellow at the Internationalen Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, Dan has expressed a wish to see a lot of Micha. This will give us an opportunity to see a lot of Micha. From then until about August 20, we can best be reached in Göttingen, but shall be in Taiwan the last ten days in May and in Beijing and Shanghai in early June for conferences and lectures. Our Buffalo e-mail address will reach us anywhere.
This is the fortieth year that we have been sending out annual letters, we would like to put all of them together, but are missing the letters for the years 1979 and 1982. If you have them, we would be very thankful if you would send them to us.
With best wishes,
Georg and Wilma
(Notiz: die Fassung, die an Klaus Bade gesendet wurde, enthält handschriftlichen Text mit einer persönlichen Nachricht an Klaus Bade. Dieser Text wurde nicht transkribiert.)