This video is only available in German. Below you will find an English translation of the audio track.
Interview with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kocka, Darmstadt 2006
“Yes, I am a historian, born in 41, mainly social history of modern times. In the meantime, I have taken on many other tasks, most recently the presidency of the center of the WZB, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, and I met Georg Iggers in 1971, when I was still a research assistant and he was already famous. And I invited him to give a lecture in Münster in the castle that year. And since that time we, the two Iggers and my wife and I have met very often.
Professor Kocka, could you say something again about the person, about the scientific importance of Georg Iggers as a historian?
Well, perhaps three very brief points: Georg Iggers embodies a rare unity of person, historian and political being. He is shaped by his history as a Jew, an emigrant, first as a German, then as an American, now both, and he combines this ability to process his own experience with a special critical and at the same time optimistic view of human history.
Second, he is a major historian of historiography, and has produced very effective writings on our tradition as historians, and has thereby powerfully influenced our self-understanding as historians, and third, he has become an international intellectual by biography and by inclination.
He has always mediated between U.S.-North American history and intellectuality on the one hand and European. But he also has many, many working contacts outside the West, and he’s now on the way to working on the history of historical consciousness, of historical thought on a global scale. He is a critic, and a mediator at the same time. He began as a critic, a critic of the German tradition of thinking about history. He became more and more a mediator. but he never stopped being a critic.”