I always complained that my lectures in the GDR were restricted to an invited audience. Finally, in 1986, I gave a lecture in a public auditorium in Leipzig. In the discussion, the question of American foreign policy came up. I commented that both the United States and the Soviet Union had pursued, and were pursuing, imperialist aims. Afterwards Berthold told me that he was very embarrassed by my remarks and that he might not be able to invite me again to be a guest lecturer. In the fall of 1985, I spoke, with Berthold and Zwahr, before a large student gathering about the World Historical Congress that had taken place in Stuttgart, West Germany along. One of the students asked me whether students at Buffalo had free access to Marxist literature, which of course I was, of course, able to answer in the affirmative.
Shortly afterwards Peter Schäfer, the specialist for America at the University of Jena, asked me to deliver a public lecture to a student audience. Schäfer was an independent thinker and always had a subordinate position in the department. He was never permitted to go to West Berlin to use the American collection at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University, perhaps because his two daughters had escaped from the GDR to West Germany. Only after the fall of the GDR did he become a full professor. The lecture hall was full with perhaps a hundred fifty students and some faculty. Schäfer had asked me to speak about current American historiography. I decided not to talk about what was being written, but how it was being written. I spoke how the American historical profession was organized, the relative independence of the individual historians, the diversity of historical interpretations from the consensus historians on the conservative side of the spectrum to the New Left on the other side, and the new trends in social and cultural history including the rise of ethnic and womens history. After I finished, a student stood up and condemned my talk as a “kleinbürgerlich” distortion of reality, “kleinbürgerlich” (petty bourgeois) being a standard term in the GDR vocabulary to discredit divergent political opinions. According to this student, history is written in the United States in the service of the imperialist aims of the government and high finance. I pressed him to define the term “kleinbürgerlich” and to back up his portrayal of American historians as lackeys of the establishment. He stuttered and the students applauded me.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 158