In January 1997, I officially retired from the university in Buffalo, but immediately received an offer to teach a graduate seminar each fall in Buffalo for the next five years. I accepted because I valued the opportunity to work with students. I continued to have my office in the department. The arrangement continued for a sixth, seventh, and eighth year. I took on no new doctoral students but continued to work with those students who had begun their dissertations with me, and I also served on a number of dissertation committees.
Thomas Behr, a devout Catholic, wrote on an important Catholic theologian and social philosopher in nineteenth century Italy. It may seem surprising that someone would work with me on such a theme, but I had been very interested in nineteenth century social Catholicism in France in connection with my early work on the Saint-Simonians.
My three final doctoral students coincidentally worked on GDR topics: Gregory Witkowski on agricultural collectivization, Bruce Hall, a Mormon, who had come to me from Brigham Young University with an excellent M.A. thesis on the Mormons in the GDR, wrote on the small religious sects in the GDR; and Axel Fair-Schulz, an East German, worked on three intellectuals of Jewish background who after having fled from Nazi Germany returned to East Germany after the war. One of them was Jürgen Kuczynski. Fair-Schulz is now working on a history of the Kuczynski family from 1800 to the present, as a case study of a family of radical left intellectuals of Jewish background.
Two conferences were held at the time of my retirement, one in Leipzig and one in Buffalo. In early 1997, friends in Leipzig organized a small workshop for my seventieth birthday. The theme was how they would judge their earlier works after the events of recent years. Hans Schleier, Werner Berthold, Gerald Diesener, and Fritz Klein presented papers that were published as a small volume.
The following year a larger conference was held in Buffalo, which brought together German and American colleagues. Helmut Böhme, with whom I had worked for many years on the Buffalo-Darmstadt exchange, came with his wife, as did Hanns Seidler, the chancellor of the Technical University of Darmstadt and a good friend, Klaus Bade of the Institute for Migration and Multiculturalism in Osnabrück, who had encouraged us to write our joint autobiography, and his close associate, Jochen Oltmer. Bade had invited Wilma and me in 1996 to give talks about our childhood and youth before emigration and the time immediately after our arrival in North America in 1938.
The theme of the conference, supported by a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with matching funds from the university in Buffalo, was the “Integration and Exclusion of Minorities in Germany and the United States”. Manfred Berg from Berlin, who had written the first German work on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke about whites in the NAACP, and Tony Freyer from the Law School at the University of Alabama, who had written the first important scholarly book on the Little Rock desegregation crisis, spoke about my role in the crisis. Our Canisius colleague Larry Jones edited the volume that was published by Berghahn Books in 2001.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 192f