“Their lives took them across many borders: Georg Iggers, a Jewish merchant’s son from Hamburg, Wilma Abeles, daughter of a Jewish landowner from Bohemia. Both fled with their parents from Nazi persecution to North America in 1938, where they met. Since then, they have led a life together as internationally recognized scientists, university lecturers and civil rights activists. To this day, they travel tirelessly between America, Europe and Asia: teaching, researching, fighting for a just world.”
Based on the double biography of Wilma and Georg Iggers published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttingen, 2002), this website www.zweiseitendergeschichte.de aims to develop a portrait that will give the younger generation in particular access to the history of the 20th century. The aim is therefore to provide a pedagogically and didactically prepared, interactive learning opportunity about the lives of the two contemporary witnesses against the background of general historical and political developments.
This present English version of the project (published in 2025) is essentially based on the former German project version, but also contains a large number of English texts taken from the book Wilma Iggers and George Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times. Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens (New York, 2006) with the kind permission of the publisher Berghahn. (https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/IggersTwo)
The central leitmotifs of this Internet project are tolerance, civil courage, active involvement in social processes, Jewish identity, breaking down prejudices, openness to the world and ‘building bridges’.
Wilma Abeles: Jewish childhood in Czechoslovakia and emigration - from Bohemia to Canada Georg Iggers: Jewish childhood in Germany and emigration - from Hamburg to the USA Civil courage in troubled times: Active in the black civil rights movement in the southern states of the USA Building bridges: early contacts in Europe and around the world: West Germany, East Germany, Czech Republic, Korea, Japan and China Returning home to Germany and the Czech Republic - as Jewish contemporary witnesses in schools, universities and adult education
This website combines texts from the above-mentioned double biography, historical photos, video files and contemporary documents into a multimedia and interactive self-learning arrangement. Interviews were conducted with the two protagonists and other contemporary witnesses in Germany (Hamburg, Esslingen, Göttingen, Osnabrück, Bielefeld), the Czech Republic (Horsovsky Tyn, Domazlize, Pilsen, Prague), the USA (Buffalo, N. Y., Little Rock, AR.) and Canada (Hamilton, Ont.) between 2003 and 2006.
The website is intended for the following target groups:
Depending on the respective interests of the users, different ways of accessing the available information are offered, e.g. in the form of an introduction or initial overview with the help of the approx. three-minute multimedia intro on the homepage. There is also thematic access in the form of the five chapters (topics) or according to different types of media (materials - images, text, video). In addition, the search window on each page allows detailed research.
From a didactic point of view, the bookmark function allows users to save and list the texts, photos or video sequences they have selected themselves. Suggestions for incorporating the website into school lessons are provided in the Didactics button, also located in the lower command line of the start page.