In the summer of 1966 we were in Göttingen with our children and a new Mercedes that was very inexpensive because of the favorable exchange rate. We wanted to drive to the area from which Wilma came in Western Bohemia, to see her old friends. This was her first trip to Czechoslovakia since her emigration in 1938. We thought that we would not be able to take the shortest route through the German Democratic Republic, and would have to take the longer route through Bavaria. Nevertheless, I applied for a transit visa through the GDR and to my surprise we were allowed to stay overnight in Halle. We knew no one in the GDR, although some names were familiar to me from their publications. The only name in Halle that rang a bell was Leo Stern, who occupied a leading position at the university, interestingly still called Martin Luther University, and was one of the most influential historians in the GDR. Stern, who was born in Bessarabia and grew up in Vienna, fought in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and spent the war years in Moscow. I wrote him that I would be staying overnight in Halle and would like to meet him and his colleagues. I received a telegram that he would unfortunately be out of town, but two of his colleagues would meet me.
It was a strange feeling when we turned off from the busy autobahn to Berlin, passed the border controls, and entered the GDR. There was little traffic and the towns through which we passed were remarkably empty and dark. We reached Halle about midnight and with the help of a hitchhiker we had picked up, found our hotel, zum Weltfrieden (World Peace). The hotel had a sign outside: “Weltfrieden zur Reparatur geschlossen” (World Peace closed for repairs). We had no choice but to look for the expensive Interhotel, which we had hoped to avoid—at that time foreign tourists were not compelled to stay in the Interhotels. The people at the Interhotel already knew about us and directed us to the modest but comfortable Hotel Zum Roten Ross (Red Horse). The next morning, two of the Halle historians appeared at the hotel, Professor Tillmann, the chair of the history department, an expert on German policies in the Near East before and during the Nazi period, and Professor Hübner, who wrote on the political role of the Prussian Junkers (landed nobility). They were accompanied by a chauffeur who took Wilma and the children on a tour of the city. Tillmann, Hübner, and I walked the short distance to the university. The only American historian who had preceded me in Halle was Herbert Aptheker of the American Communist Party. I was thus the first non-Communist American historian to visit the history department in many years. I was received very cordially.
When I expressed a desire to become acquainted with historians in the GDR, my hosts invited me to come again the following summer for the ceremonies commemorating the hundred fiftieth anniversary of the merger of the Universities of Halle and Wittenberg. They told me that two historians in nearby Leipzig, Hans Schleier and Werner Berthold, who had both worked extensively on German, and particularly West German, historiography, had expressed an interest in meeting me. I was well acquainted with their work. They could not have known about me except for a few articles that I had written. The one that had made the greatest impression on them was my article, “The Idea of Progress. A Critical Reconsideration,” which appeared in The American Historical Review in 1965.
Travel to Leipzig required a special permit. We were taken to the police station where we immediately received the stamp for Leipzig. I am convinced that there had been prior communication between Halle, Leipzig and Berlin, and that the Stasi (secret police) had files about me. However, my attempts to obtain them have been futile until very recently.
In Leipzig we were met by Schleier and Berthold and his young assistant, Günter Katsch. This was the beginning of a friendship with Schleier and Berthold that lasts until today. Berthold was, and still is, a convinced Communist from a working class background, who was grateful to the GDR for having made possible his university education and career. Schleier was quite non-ideological, and it was only after 1989 that he could express his true democratic convictions.
Berthold had just published a critique of Gerhard Ritter, the doyen of the West German historians, which differed from my own critique in its harsh, dogmatic language. Schleier was working on a book on the democratic historians in the Weimar Republic. We talked with Berthold and Schleier all afternoon about a variety of topics, while Katsch entertained our children. The differences between Berthold’s Marxism and my frank critique of its GDR form became obvious. However, we also found common ground in our critical assessment of the nationalistic conception of historical thought that had dominated the German historical profession since the early nineteenth century. Berthold invited me to Leipzig the following summer, to give two lectures there, one based on my yet unpublished book on the German tradition of historical thought, the other on my assessment of contemporary currents in historical writing in the United States. I was surprised that the Halle and Leipzig historians, who hardly knew me, invited us to visit the following summer. It undoubtedly had something to do with the isolation of historians in the GDR from the West. Invitations to and even communications with West German historians would have been very difficult or even impossible for GDR historians. Despite the criticism I expressed of the authoritarianism of the GDR regime, they invited me because of what they knew about my involvement in the civil rights movement, my opposition to the Vietnam War, and my willingness to talk with them. This became apparent in three documents I received after 1989, not from the Stasi files, but from the Ministry of Higher Education. One from the Karl Marx University mentioned my criticism of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, but nevertheless also said that it was important to invite me for discussions because I took them (the GDR historians) seriously. They also could justify the invitations because, in their view, I was a victim of fascism who had to flee from Nazi Germany. The fact that I spoke German also helped.
We then proceeded to Bohemia. On the way we made a detour to Merseburg to see the cathedral. While we were parked at the central square, a small crowd of teenagers assembled, astonished by our Mercedes with West German plates. A young man told us that he just completed his apprenticeship. In forty-seven years when he would turn sixty-five, he said, he could travel to the West.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 143f