Beginning in 1980, I also had increasing contacts with East Asia. Soon after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Buffalo established an exchange program with Beijing Teachers College. In 1982, when I was chair of our department, I was asked whether we would be willing to take a historian from Beijing Teachers College for half a year as a guest, and I readily agreed. The visitor, Professor Qi Shirong, although very reserved, fitted well into the department and gave seminars on his research on British appeasement policy in the 1930s.
In the summer of 1984, Wilma and I went to China for six and a half weeks as part of the exchange. We lived at the Friendship Hotel for foreign scholars. I gave two lectures at Beijing Teachers College, two in Zhang Zhilian’s seminar at Beijing University, and two at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zhang had previously participated in my seminar in Buffalo. He was a highly cultured gentleman, educated in Paris and Oxford prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic, an expert on the Enlightenment and on the French Revolution, and not at all the kind of doctrinaire Marxist we had thought we would encounter in China. I spoke about currents in contemporary Western historiography and about Western Marxism. There was always a lively discussion, mediated by an interpreter.
After having lectured in East Berlin and Leipzig earlier that year, I was struck that with one sole exception, there were no questions couched in Marxist language. The democracy movement was already in full swing. A group of students at Beijing University asked me to spend an afternoon with them, which I did. About thirty students attended. Their main interest was in Western literature of which they knew but which was not accessible to them, including Karl Popper and Milton Friedman. Another group of students visited us in our hotel accompanied by an interpreter, which took courage because they had to register at the entrance.
I had a particularly intense conversation with a student from East China Normal University, Wang Qingjia, who had come from Shanghai to attend my lectures in Beijing and invited us to visit him in Shanghai, which we did. An active correspondence followed and I was instrumental in his obtaining a doctoral fellowship at Syracuse University. We have become very good friends and are now working on a joint project.
Wilma lectured on German literature at the Foreign Language Institute and was impressed on how well the students had been trained in both German language and culture. We interrupted our stay in Beijing for a two-week tour of the country, flying to the ancient capital of Xian, from where we also visited the nearby terra cotta soldiers. From there we took the train to Kaifong, where there had been a Jewish community from the Middle Ages until the mid-nineteenth century of which there are almost no reminders left today, and on to Nanjing where I gave a lecture at Nanjing University.
From Nanjing we proceeded to the two beautiful cities of Souchou and Hanchou and to Shanghai. Our friend Akira Hayashima, whom we had met in Germany, where he had obtained his doctorate from Theodor Schieder in Cologne, had arranged for us to spend a week in Japan on our way home, and there I met with the Japanese circle for modern German studies in Kyoto and the Japanese Annales circle in Tokyo.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 140f