Georg Iggers at the Municipal Archives at Esslingen, 2004
“As far as reform education is concerned, I didn’t learn the term and only learned about it much later. But later I always had a suspicion that there was something like that. And, well, the relationship of teachers to students was quite different than in the elementary school in Hamburg that I had attended, or in the Jewish Talmud Torah in Hamburg. There was no cane, there were never slaps, it was a much more friendly relationship. So the three teachers, well the two teachers and the female teacher were all young, I think they were under 30, and Mr. Jonas was 22 at the time, and Mr. Samuel was , I think, 2 years older. And the female teacher was a table tennis champion, the Jewish table tennis champion for Germany. And so that was, of course, a little bit in the spirit of reform education. So I wasn’t drilled like that, and I wasn’t disciplined like that, and yet the discipline worked out very well.”