In the late 1970s, the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS) was founded by Gerald Kleinfeld at Arizona State University. Its goal was to bring together scholars in various fields who studied German history, literature, and culture. At first conceived as a regional organization of the western United States and western Canada, it rapidly attracted persons from all of North America as well as from West Germany and Austria. Soon the name of the organization was changed to the German Studies Association (GSA). In 1981, I suggested to Kleinfeld that the association also invite scholars from the GDR and he agreed and asked me to arrange for the participation of East Germans. The Central Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic accepted our invitation and agreed to pay for the trans-Atlantic flights provided the GSA would assume the expenses in the United States. The first visitor to attend the GSA meeting in El Paso in October 1982 would be Hans Schleier.
In the spring of 1982, I attended a conference on current trends in historical theory that the Italian historian Pietro Rossi had organized in Turin. Virtually all the important theorists were there, including historians and philosophers from the Soviet bloc, as well as Wolfgang Küttler from the Central Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin where he headed a work circle for the history and theory of historiography. The most outspoken and controversial theorist at the Turin conference was Hayden White from the United States, who in Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (1973), viewed history merely as a form of imaginative literature, poetry if you will, and denied the possibility of any objective knowledge of the past.
Küttler and I had an opportunity to talk about the conference and particularly about White on the train from Turin to Milan. Küttler assumed that someone who held White’s anti-rational and anti-scientific positions, which Küttler identified with Nietzsche and Heidegger, must be politically on the far right. He was surprised that White considered himself an outspoken leftist and had played an active role in the opposition to the Vietnam War. In fact, White liked to say that he was a Marxist, which made little sense in view of his emphatic rejection of the sort of scientific explanation of the historical process that is associated with orthodox Marxism. For him it meant a critique of market capitalism as a repressive social and economic system which had created an inhumane culture in which scientific rationality served as an instrument of exploitive control. Küttler turned out to be anything but an orthodox Marxist. His goal was to make certain that Max Weber was taken seriously in the GDR as an addition and even a corrective to Marx.
Shortly after I returned to Buffalo from Turin, the Central Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin informed me that Küttler would accompany Schleier to the GSA. They planned to talk about the status of historical theory in the GDR. I asked Jörn Rüsen, the most promising of the younger West German theorists of historiography, to deal with the status of the discussions in West Germany. I would moderate. The three first came to Buffalo, where I arranged an evening at a colleagues house to which about forty colleagues and students came. Schleier and Küttler read their papers, which they had prepared in East Berlin, and that appeared rather schematic. But then the discussion became lively. My colleague, William Sheridan Allen, a specialist on the Third Reich, began by asking what would happen if an historian in the GDR would be confronted by the same sources as the Yale historian Henry Turner had been, which forced Turner to conclude that the Nazi Party received most of its money from its rank-and-file members and much less from high finance, which was directly contrary to GDR doctrine. Now Schleier and Küttler talked very frankly about what was possible and what was proscribed in GDR scholarship. From there we proceeded to the GSA meeting in El Paso, which provided an opportunity for further discussions. From then on the meeting of East and West German historians first in Buffalo and then at the GDR became an annual event.
In 1983, the historians Willibald Gutsche, Kleins coauthor, and Dietrich Eichholtz, came to Buffalo and to the GSA meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. Gutsche’s topic was “German Imperialism and the Pre-History of the First World War”, and Eichholtz’s topic was “Monopoly and the State in the Time of Fascism”. The formal presentations were disappointingly doctrinaire. Even more disappointing was the extent to which they felt they needed to defend the official GDR party line. We talked until three in the morning at our house along with Jörn Rüsen and my former chair at Roosevelt University, Jack Roth, and then had a similar discussion at the home of Erwin Knoll in Madison. Knoll was a refugee from Nazi occupied Vienna, a pacifist, Quaker, and editor of the Progressive magazine. The Soviets had just shot down a Korean commercial airliner with over three hundred passengers. While Wilma and I, Rüsen, Roth, and Knoll were critical of the way in which the Cold War was pursued by both sides, Gutsche and Eichholtz blindly defended Soviet and GDR policy.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 152ff