Georg and Wilma Iggers
100 Ivyhurst Road
Amherst, NY 14226-3441 USA
[…]
December 9, 2001
Dear Friends:
This has been a very full year. It began on a very sad note. My sister, who had been diagnosed with lymphoma, died shortly after she received the first chemotherapy treatment, not of the cancer but of an infection she had contracted in the hospital. Wilma and I had visited her twice during her illness and I, together with her two sons who had come from England, were at her bed side when she died. Almost my first childhood memory was the day when she was born - I was three at the time - and now almost seventy-one years later I witnessed her die. She felt very fortunate that after leaving Los Angeles, where she had lived over forty years, she without being observant, she for the sake of her observant sons had moved seven years ago into an orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, which accepted her and cared for her when she was sick.
Early in February we returned to Göttingen. In March we celebrated Wilma’s eightieth birthday. All day long friends came to congratulate her and made us realize how much we are part of the community there. It was a very nice day. All three of our sons came. Our neighbor and good friend Dagmar Friedrich had made the local newspaper aware of Wilma’s birthday and a very nice article with photo appeared that day and the mayor of Göttingen appeared with a huge bouquet of flowers from the city. During the six months in Göttingen and since our return to Buffalo we have been busy with a joint project and each of us with a project of our own. We completed writing our autobiography that will appear sometime next year in German. The English version will have to wait, although we have already had an expression of interest from a publisher, because it will require rewriting to make it understandable to a different public. We long struggled with the publisher for a title and finally chose “Zu Hause in zwei Welten” (At Home in two Worlds), although this is not final. Particularly Wilma’s sections are a personal story, but we are trying to embed our lives in the broader setting of the times from our childhood under the shadow of Nazism until the present. At this late point, we still welcome suggestions for a better title. We completed the manuscript in October and are now enjoying selecting photographs for the illustrations.
Wilma in the meantime is putting a lot more time than required into her project with the German Historical Museum in Berlin in preparation for a project on how various nations have remembered the years 1938 to 1945 since 1945 and is reading immense amounts of material and enjoying it. Her responsibility for the exhibit which will open in 2003 are the Czechs. In this connection she went to Berlin and to Prague and will go to both places soon after we return to Germany in January. In Berlin we also plan to see the Jewish Museum which just opened. I have returned to a project that I began seven years ago, a critical examination of historical thought and writing since the eighteenth century, but have given it a new focus. Originally it was restricted to the West; now I am interested in the interaction of Western and non-Western historical thought from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial period. For the past several years I have participated in an international “Chinese and Comparative Historiography” project and in connection with this project traveled twice to East Asia this past year, in March as guest of the Academia Sinica by myself to Taiwan, where I also visited our friends Liangai and Shihden Chou, who had studied with me in Buffalo - and in May with Wilma to the People’s Republic.
The trip to Mainland China was both pleasant - as was also my stay in Taiwan - and highly interesting. We had been in China in 1984 for six and a half weeks as part of a University at Buffalo exchange program. In the meantime China has changed remarkably in the direction of modernization. While automobiles were virtually absent then, the streets were jammed with them now - although the many bicycles remained and contributed to an unimaginable traffic chaos. There was new construction everywhere and many signs of Western joint ventures including a large number of American fast food restaurants. Kentucky Fried Chicken has virtually disappeared from Buffalo, but you will have no difficult finding it and Starbucks in all larger Chinese cities. At least on the surface, the standard of living has gone up noticeably. Instead of the anti-Americanism one might have expected after the plane incident that occurred a few weeks before our trip, one saw American influence everywhere and we even encountered a teenager with a T-shirt with an American flag. China was moving rapidly from a state-controlled to a market economy. During the two and a half weeks we were in China, we spent several days at Nankai University in Tianjin, at Beijing University, where Jürgen Habermas had preceded us a few weeks earlier, the institute of World History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and East China Normal University and Fudan University in Shanghai, and in between an international colloquium in Nanjing. On most of the trip we were accompanied by our good friend Gengjia (Edward) Wang - who acted as our interpretator - and also our German friends Jörn Rüsen and Achim Mittag. I have been in close scholarly contact with Wang since he came to my lectures in 1984, and we are now collaborating on my book on historical thought. It is reflective of the new openness that he has close contacts with his alma mater, East China Normal University, and with Chinese colleagues generally although he is now an American citizen and frequently lectures in Taiwan. The discussions that followed Wilma’s and my lectures were remarkably open, as they had also been in 1984, free of any dogmatism, as were our conversations with colleagues and students. Yet many of the discussions reflected worries about China’s future. The turn to a capitalist economy not only meant sharp increases in production and consumption but also serious dislocations as millions of workers, particularly in the countryside, stream into the cities in search of employment, in many cases without legal status or health and unemployment insurance. One had the feeling that a two class society was evolving. One example of this is that universities, which formerly had charged no tuition, now have fees which many can not afford and are thus barred from educational opportunities. Compared with the former East Germany, which we knew well, expression is less hampered, which was already the case in 1984. Books critical of communism like Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies could be published, but a Marxist journal critical of the government was closed down and the Falung Gong movement and any attempts to form independent labor unions or independent political groups are draconically suppressed.
Almost everyone remarked about the serious problems of corruption in the judiciary and the police. We found no one satisfied with the status quo - or afraid to express their opinion in conversation with us. Opinions were divided on the future with some hopeful that modernization on the economic plane, including China’s entry into WTO, would lead to political liberalization and others pessimistic.
We spent a pleasant summer in Göttingen. We are aware how many more friends and good acquaintances we have today there than in Buffalo. This was different once, but many of our Buffalo friends moved away, died, or simply faded away as they grew old. Unlike Wilma I have been regularly attending the Friday evening services at the Jewish community in Göttingen. After the relatively brief service, there is a kiddush and then a common meal, with everyone bringing food not containing meat. The congregation was revived seven years ago, after having been dormant since the deportations of the last Jews in 1942. The founder of the new congregation was a woman, born in Chile of German-Jewish parents, who with a great deal of energy succeeded in bringing the congregation back to life, but in her refusal to share responsibilities alienated many of the most committed members who resigned. This spring there was a showdown during which she was replaced as head of the congregation. The split which I had feared between the German and Russian speaking members fortunately did not occur and I am confident about the future under the new leadership. Moreover the congregation enjoys moral and financial support in the non-Jewish community in Göttingen.
As every year we also went to Leipzig and Berlin to combine seeing friends with scholarship. With the Klitzkes from Leipzig, whom we have known since GDR days, we spent several very nice days in Marianské Lazné (Marienbad), close to the Bohemian Forest area from which Wilma came. On August 10 we returned to Buffalo. A month and a day later the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. We were, of course, horrified by the attack but also by American reactions to it. What took place on September 11 was a criminal act and action against the perpetrators, although we are still not clear who they were, was called for. But the war against the Taliban, which was a limited military action, was sold to the American public and the world as a full-scale war in protection of “American freedom.” Under the guise of this proclamation of “war,” the Bush administration has been able to issue emergency measures that have seriously eroded civil liberties, most recently the decision which gives the government the power to try any non-citizen suspect before military tribunals which will not be bound by due process. According to the New York Times, many Muslims in this country are being kept incommunicado in prisons without access to lawyers or contact with their families. This seems more like Pinochet’s Chile or the old Soviet Union than the beacon of democracy. We are deeply worried about the stability of American democracy. I still think that the legitimacy of Bush’s election was suspect. If we consider that many African Americans were kept from voting and confusing ballots were installed, it is highly probable that Bush did not carry Florida and thus was not legitimately elected.. The degree of legitimacy he lacked in the eyes of many Americans, he overcame after September 11 as the leader in a “crusade” against “evil”. With the proclamation of war, the Bush administration succeeded in mobilizing support for its domestic programs favoring corporate interests and restricting civil liberties. We find particularly frightening the way the TV media have responded, seeking to mobilize public opinion behind the administration. There is little room for any critical evaluation of American policies that fostered international terrorism. National Public Radio and the New York Times are among the very few media that still attempt balanced news reporting.
In the spring I learned that my alma mater, the University of Richmond, had decided to award me an honorary Doctor of Letters. This was very much of a surprise. I had attended the university only a few years after I arrived with my parents in Richmond from Germany. The University of Richmond at the time was a conservative college affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church that still in the late 1960s refused to admit Black students. I went there because we were living in Richmond and it was the only college I could afford to attend but I was well received and enjoyed a good liberal arts education. At the time I was active in an intercollegiate, interracial student organization. In the past several decades the school has changed very much; it has severed its ties with the Southern Baptist Church, is generally regarded as a fine liberal arts, college and has made a serious and successful effort in recruiting students from all over the world. The reasons I was given now for the award were my scholarly achievements, my work for international understanding, but also my involvement in the struggle for racial justice.
The ceremony in Richmond on October 3 was very nice. Wilma, Daniel, and Jonathan were there as well as Richmond friends from long ago. We very much enjoyed getting to know Ulyana Gabara, who with her husband had fled from Polish anti-Semitism in 1968. As dean for international education she has recruited students from all over the world and originated the idea to give me the award. After the ceremony I gave a talk, “Expectations Fulfilled and Disappointed,” how I as a seventeen-year old alumnus in 1944 expected the future to develop and how it looked in retrospect from the perspective of the fall of 2001.
As was to be expected, I also touched on September 11 and expressed my belief that there must be a political settlement in the Middle East if terrorism is to be prevented in the long run. Unfortunately some persons in the audience saw this as a one sided critique of Israel, which it was not.
The weekend before we went to Minneapolis for Jeremy’s fiftieth birthday.
It was a very nice weekend during which we also met his friend Carol whom we like very much. Jeremy had just convinced his newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to send him to the Middle East. We admired his courage but were also apprehensive. He actually went in early November together with a photographer and interviewed a variety of people, some of whom he met on the streets, in markets, and in restaurants in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Azerbaijan, and wrote a number of very interesting articles. He never felt in danger, although he identified himself in the interviews as an American and, where he was asked, as Jewish.
This past weekend we celebrated my seventy fifth birthday, a very nice family gathering. Jeremy came with Carol from Minneapolis, Dan and Janet brought all of our three Canadian grandchildren, and Jonathan, of course, was here.
We shall be returning to Göttingen on January 21. I have been invited to come to Vienna as a visiting professor for the months of May and June. There are still some minor bureaucratic hurdles, but it is most likely that we shall be in Vienna during those two months. We look forward to it, not only because we like the city, have friends there, but most of all will be able to spend time with our grandson, Micha, who just turned eleven, and his mother and grandmother.
After January 21 you can best reach us at
Georg G. & Wilma A. Iggers Schillerstrasse 50 D-37083 Göttingen, Germany […]
We expect to return to Buffalo from Göttingen the middle of August, I shall again be teaching a seminar in Buffalo next fall.
Best wishes,
Georg and Wilma