Since 1960, Georg and Wilma Iggers have been sending off annual letters to members of their own family, friends and scientific colleagues. These are written in English. In these letters they let pass revue the bygone year by writing about the family, professional activities, and journeys they made. Furthermore, they comment on actual developments and events on national and international level.
In this sub-chapter “annual letters”, these documents are made public as they are available for us. The included annual letters (1960 – 1969) were provided by the Iggers family, in particular Mr. Jeremy Iggers (Toronto, CN). In addition, we would like to thank Prof. Dr. Klaus J. Bade (Osnabrück/Berlin, Germany) for providing us with further annual letters sent off after the turn of the millennium. Also, some letters are possessed by members of the non-profit society Brücken Bauen e.V. (Building Bridges).
Unfortunately, our collection of the annual letters is not yet complete and missing the letters from the years 1990 to 2009. We would be grateful for any hints on further available annual letters. Please contact us via the contact information available on our imprint.
The present annual letters were transformed into text documents through usage of OCR software and edited afterwards in order to correct obvious spelling mistakes and to allow better understanding of the text. Special terms were linked to external websites in order to provide additional information. Both versions can, of course, be printed.
We assume that the annual letters reflect the contemporary and social developments in the US and Asia as well as in Europe, especially in Germany, from the Sixties of the Twentieths Century until the year 2013. We are convinced that these primary sources provide a meaningful addition to the already existing content and documents of this website. Moreover, these contemporary historical documents are made accessible to the general public and furthermore archived in a digital format.
Prospect: The available annual letters will be published on our website step by step. Until the complete revision and even after that, the unedited annual letters are available for access in the PDF format:
Herford / Germany – June 2025