This video is only available in German. Below you will find an English translation of the audio track.
Interview with Prof. Klaus J. Bade, Osnabrück 2006
“That’s actually quite an amusing story, because I already learned a lot about Georg Iggers as a student and as an assistant, and I learned combative things at first, because at that time I was an assistant to Walter Peter Fuchs and he was a Ranke editor, so he published Ranke letters and could get deliciously upset about it, that Georg Iggers had again overlooked something, because Walter Peter Fuchs, my old teacher at that time in Erlangen, was basically a historist dyed in the wool and so he fought against the critical access of this American, who was now looking at Ranke.
And then I took a closer look at this American and was increasingly fascinated by him, and then at some point I began to write to him, like many others, and sought contact with him. We then got to know him together with Wilma, sometimes here, sometimes in the United States, and what fascinated me about the whole thing was not only that they are both extremely distinctive scholarly personalities, here in the field of history, there in the field of literary studies, but the question of how both of them, as Jews, who were both decisively influenced and burdened by National Socialism in their youth, then found each other on the other side of the Atlantic, with their memories of the path they subsequently took together in life and of the consequences for their own biography, involvement with the civil rights movement and the like. We then developed the idea that we could ask them to talk about their youth in Nazi-influenced Germany and Europe, and while they were still talking, the idea arose in our minds that what they were telling us now was something they should actually work through in terms of their life histories.
We then tried to lure them into a trap and said, wouldn’t you like to do that some time, whereupon they both said, we have a lot to do, we have thought about something like that, but we don’t believe it’s possible now. Then we started to revise the texts and sent them to them and said, we would like to publish them, do you also have pictures? Then they were of what had come out, which was nothing other than what they themselves had said, (we had) changed a few punctuation marks. (They were) so impressed themselves that they said, maybe this is a way we could start, and then after some time came the request, can you send us, I don’t know, 50 or 100 copies, friends are also interested in it, and that was such a way, which we had only initiated a bit. There was so much self-motivation, critical self-distance, and joy in understanding ourselves from a critical perspective, that it resulted in this wonderful book, which is so useful to all of us and which has become so interesting and important for our contexts, which we are trying to reconcile migration, intercultural perspectives, and history.”