Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Amherst, NY 14226-3441 USA
[…]
December 1, 2000
Dear Friends:
This year passed again very quickly. A few days after I wrote last year’s letter I flew to Japan for twelve days with our son Daniel. The main purpose of the trip was to attend a conference in Koryu that my friend and colleague, Masaouki Sato, had organized in preparation for the International Historical Congress in Oslo in August. This was my third visit to Japan, thus I already had a number of good acquaintances. It was wonderful to be able to make this trip together with Dan. We met with colleagues and friends in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Osaka, including my old friend Akira Hayashimi in Nishinomiya, and yet managed to see a lot and to get a feel of the country.
In mid-February Wilma and I flew to Göttingen. Since 1990 we have spent about as much time there as in Buffalo. We enjoy having our son Jonathan in Buffalo and Dan and his family as well as the relatives in nearby Canada. We now have fewer friends in Buffalo than in earlier years. Many have faded away with age, or moved away, and the university, which was an exciting place in the mid 1960s, when we first came, has become much less interesting and more provincial as support has been shifted from the liberal arts to departments which generate money. The people who came with me to the department have now retired and have been replaced mostly by specialists in American history, leaving the modern European and specifically the German history programs which once had been a major center of strength, a mere shell. I still teach a graduate seminar in the fall, which I enjoy, and direct several dissertations, but as an emeritus am relatively isolated from my colleagues. This is even more the case with Wilma’s relations to Canisius College.
In Göttingen the situation is very different. In addition to the friends we made almost forty years ago, we have new ones, many of them younger than we. That is also the case elsewhere, to mention only Leipzig, Berlin, Darmstadt, Vienna, and in Wilma’s case Prague. We are much more integrated into the community. Although I have no formal ties to the Max Planck Institute for History I can work there and discuss my work with the research fellows and the visiting scholars. Wilma too has opportunities to discuss her work. This time we stayed only one month in Göttingen before leaving for Vienna for two months, but then returned to Göttingen.
In Vienna I had a research fellowship at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK). My one main obligation was to organize an international workshop on the impact of post-colonial thought on the cultural sciences. Otherwise I was free to work on my research. The institute provides housing which was very centrally located. The big topic in Vienna, of course, was the controversy about the coalition government of the conservative party (the OVP) with the ultra right Freedom Party (FPO) of Jorg Haider and the sanctions by the European Union against Austria. The people we know without exception opposed the coalition and some of them participated in the weekly demonstrations against Haider. However, if you looked into the mass tabloid press you got a very different picture, with articles and headlines occasionally bordering on anti-Semitism unthinkable in Germany. The strength of the Haider party in the elections in the fall of 1999 reflected the xenophobic sentiments in Austria. On the other hand one is struck by how multiethnic Vienna has become. We very much enjoyed our time there. The discussions with the historians at the institute and the university and with our friend Friedl Garscha at the Documentation Center for the Austrian Resistance were stimulating. We took frequent advantage of the theater. And we were glad to be able to spend time with our grandson, Micha, his mother, Christa, and Micha’s other grandmother, Kaethe. Micha turned ten in November and will be starting Gymnasium this coming fall. He is a very bright child with varied interests, among them music and sports. Since he has a busy schedule of activities after school, we saw him normally only once a week. He is inseparable from his friend and classmate Junus whose mother is Turkish. Over Easter Jeremy joined us and the five of us spent a very nice day together in the Prater, the great Vienna city park.
In Göttingen we pursued our normal routine interrupted by several shorter trips. I have been keeping close account on developments in the Eastern part of Germany and I went twice to Leipzig as well as to Berlin. Wilma joined me on the second trip to Leipzig, from where we went on a brief vacation with our Leipzig friends, Waldtraut and Gert Klitzke, to the Erzgebirge Mountains in Southern Saxony. This also included a day’s excursion to nearby Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) on the Czech side, on the border that is now overrun by wealthy Russians. Wilma went to the Czech Republic twice more, once to Domazlice to the sixtieth anniversary of the graduation of her Gymnasium class - she actually left in 1938, two years before the graduation but has kept in touch with her fellow students during all these years - and once to Prague for a week in connection with her research. On her return from Prague, we met at Elmau Castle, a large complex built in the Bavarian Alps in the 1920s, a few kilometers from Garmisch, as a center for conferences, concerts, theater, and relaxation. Here we participated in an international conference on Jewish historical writing in the twentieth century in retrospect. On the way back to Göttingen we stopped in Esslingen near Stuttgart, where a tenth grade middle school class, working on the Jews in Esslingen under the Nazis, wanted to meet us. I had been a pupil in 1937-38 in the Jewish school shortly before the “Kristallnacht” Pogrom. We were impressed by the seriousness with which the students confronted the German past. Then in early August we went to the International Congress of the Historical Sciences in Oslo. I had two functions there: I had been asked to organize one of the three “Major Topics” of the congress on “The Uses and Misuses of History and the Responsibility of the Historian Past and Present” and to preside as outgoing president over the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography.
I am afraid that this letter seems too much like a travelogue. But we kept quite busy between trips. Wilma completed the rewriting for the German language edition of her book on the Prague women that appeared with the Böhlau Verlag in Vienna last week. She is now very much involved in a new project. The German Historical Museum in Berlin is planning an exhibition on how people in thirty-some countries since 1945 have remembered the catastrophic aspects of their history in the twentieth century. Wilma has been asked to prepare the texts and images for the part dealing with the Czechs. I have been sidetracked by a number of articles I agreed to write on historiography and historical thought for various journals, books, and encyclopedias, but hope to return next year to my larger comparative study of historical thought since the eighteenth century that tries to transcend a traditional Western centered orientation. We now have completed more than two thirds of the manuscript of our autobiography. I am confident that we shall have a complete draft by the middle of this coming year and can submit it to our German publisher before the end of 2001.
Briefly to our family. Jeremy is combining his journalistic activities at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune with a visiting appointment in journalistic ethics at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis’s twin city, St. Paul. He spent three months this spring on a fellowship in Oxford where Micha, flying by himself from Vienna to London, joined him for a week. Jeremy manages to spend some time with Micha several times a year. Dan lost his position after twelve years with the Ontario Securities Commission after it was privatized, but fortunately found an equivalent position with the Canadian Bankers Association, which we hope will be permanent. Sarah, who turned twenty-three, just announced her engagement to Shano, whom we have not yet met, but whom Dan and Janet like. Kelly, now sixteen, is preparing for university year after next. Adam’s lack of enthusiasm for school, of which we wrote last year, has not changed - he will be fifteen in December and this may well be an adolescent phenomenon similar to Dan’s at that age. Jonathan has just completed his eighteenth year at the Division of Social Work and is much more content with his work now in the Medicaid section than he was in earlier years.
Our health continues to be good. The recovery from the aneurysm operation on my right leg last fall was much slower than I had anticipated. My left leg was operated early in November and the recovery seems much smoother this time.
Although we feel comfortable in Göttingen and in Germany generally, there are more things that worry us today than ten years ago at the time of unification and even more than when we first mentioned these worries in our annual letter last year. On the positive side, there has not been a renascence of nationalism since reunification as many had predicted. Identification with Europe is probably greater in Germany today than in any other European country. On the other hand there has been a sharp increase of violence against foreigners and anti-Semitic incidents in the past year. The night before we arrived in Göttingen in February, the local Jewish cemetery was vandalized. The reaction of the people of Göttingen was reassuring, with a massive demonstration the following day and many volunteering to care for individual graves. I am still convinced that the masses of Germans today are neither racists nor xenophobic, but are committed democrats. But one cannot brush off the acts of violence that occur nightly, mostly in East Germany, as the deeds of small groups of right-wing fanatics. The bomb thrown this summer in Düsseldorf seriously injuring ten immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most of them Jewish, as they came from a German language class, showed that such violence also occurs in West Germany. In the meantime a teenage Neo-Nazi culture has emerged in the East. Persons of color are no longer safe in many communities there. Undoubtedly the breakdown of a social infrastructure in the course of the rapid introduction of a free market economy has a good deal to do with the loss of perspective and hope of many young people. But the fact that they can terrorize towns in the East is possible because too many parents, teachers, police and even courts look aside or in some cases even sympathize with them.
What worries me more than the skinheads is the poisoning of the political atmosphere by respectable citizens. Waging a populist anti-foreigner campaign, the Christian Democratic Union, one of the two major German parties, surprisingly unseated the governing Social Democratic party in the Hesse state election in 1999 and is now planning to use foreigners and asylum as an election issue against the Social Democratic-Green coalition on the national level. But even the Social Democrats with the acquiescence of the Greens have severely restricted the movement of refugees, so that many find themselves trapped in hostile small towns in the East, dependent on minimal social assistance while prevented from obtaining work. Germany until the laws were changed in 1993 had the most generous asylum policy in the world. Today many refugees are being sent back to their home countries even if it is likely that they face imprisonment or torture and are treated like criminals while they await deportation All this sends the wrong kind of a signal to the German population.
As for the US elections - the US Supreme Court met today - the less said the better. And what is happening in the Middle East breaks my heart. Israeli policy since the 1970s of deliberately placing Jewish settlements in the midst of Palestinian territory and annexing Arab East Jerusalem created problems that are now proving to be almost insoluble.
Last year we asked for help in locating two of the annual letters we were missing. Two friends sent them to us so that we now have a complete set from 1960 until now.
We expect to leave for Göttingen in late January, but have not set a date yet. Our Göttingen address will again be Schillerstr. 50, D-37083 Göttingen, Germany, phone from North America and fax 011-49-551-74038. Most likely we shall also spend some time in Vienna, but mail from Göttingen will be sent on to us. The surest way to reach us anywhere is the Buffalo e-mail address above which will be automatically forwarded to us wherever we are.
Best wishes,
Georg and Wilma