“All my scientific work, if you want to call it that, is based on my love for and curiosity about the world I come from. It is mainly rural, gently rolling, with mountains on the horizon. More German was spoken in Bischofteinitz, Czech in Taus, and in Blisowa, about five kilometers from Bischofteinitz, where Uncle Leo and Aunt Ida lived, half and half. There were problems between the nationalities, but they didn’t seem to be threatening and wouldn’t be without the Nazis either. To this day I prick up my ears when I hear Czech spoken anywhere in the world, and I’m happy when I hear people speak German and guess that they came from Cheb 55 years ago. I can expect angry reactions from the other nationality to both: “Don’t you know that they expelled us?” - “Yes, yes, I was expelled too.”
For many years I have collected texts that tell about the Jews in the Czech lands: how they lived, how they thought and how others reacted to them. I know little Hebrew, so I started with the eighteenth century, when only religious documents were written in Hebrew. For a long time I didn’t know what would become of it. Very gradually the plan for a social and cultural history of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia crystallized, not in the usual sense, but in the form of a collection of contemporary texts of various kinds, to which I only had to add introductions, notes and a glossary. The hardest part was shortening texts or leaving them out entirely. Unlike real historians, I didn’t have a thesis to prove at the beginning, but eventually the book got one: the Jews in the Czech lands had no way of making it all right with the Czechs and the Germans. If they lived modestly they were called stingy, if they - those who could afford it - allowed themselves a high standard of living - then they were ostentatious. And so forth.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 289 (translation)