SEPTEMBER 10, 1998-vol30n3:Historians to honor an uncommon man

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 3 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1998

Historians to honor an uncommon man
Influential international scholar Georg Iggers is historian, ethicist, social activist

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

The retirement of a well-loved and enormously respected faculty member offers colleagues, academic peers, students and former students the opportunity to reflect upon a professional life well-lived and to applaud its accomplishments.

In the case of SUNY Distinguished Professor Georg G. Iggers, such reflection inspires nothing short of awe. Iggers left full-time academic life this year after three outstanding decades as a member of the Department of History.

He is well-known to colleagues as a modest man and an uncommonly decent one. They also know him as an influential international scholar in the field of German intellectual history.

Few, however, realize that in his roles as intellectual and "pragmatic social idealist," Georg Iggers had a profound influence on two of the most important political movements of the 20th century: the American civil-rights movement and the 1989 political revolution in East Germany.

David Gerber, professor of history and a longtime friend and colleague, compares Iggers to the influential 19th-century German immigrants whose fervor in pursuit of racial justice helped end slavery in the United States, also a fact of which few are aware outside of historical circles.

Gerber has written that like them, Iggers always has pursued social justice with "commitment... unswerving... his vision at once practical and political (and) respectful of principle over ideology and dogma, ethical and idealistic."

Iggers' accomplishments as a historian, ethicist and social activist will continue to color intellectual, cultural and political lives far into the 21st century. To mark the uncommon contributions of an uncommon man, the history department next week will host an international gathering of historians at UB. They will participate in a colloquium, "Crossing Boundaries: German and American Experiences with the Exclusion and Inclusion of Minorities," from Sept. 17-19 in Room 350 of the Student Union on the North Campus.

Typically, Iggers has requested that the presentations of dozens of international scholars who will be in attendance not be in praise of his work. Instead, he has asked them to address the issues and concerns to which he has devoted his life and his career, issues that reflect what Gerber calls Iggers' "intense moral passion toward intellectual work that clarifies the unities of human existence."

The colloquium will open at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 17 with remarks by President William R. Greiner; Stephen C. Dunnett, vice provost for international education; Kerry Grant, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Gerber, and Helmut Boehme and Heiko Koeerner, both of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, which has a longtime cooperative relationship with Iggers and UB.

The keynote address by Konrad Jarausch of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany, will be at 8:15 p.m.

On Sept. 18 and 19, a series of presentations will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Presenters will include Iggers' colleagues from UB, Darmstadt and other German universities, and by historians from universities throughout the country.

A banquet in Iggers' honor will be held at 7 p.m. Sept. 19 in The Little White House, Williamsville. Reservations are required and seating is limited. For information on reservations call Song-ho Ha at 645-2181, ext. 562.

An updated colloquium program and list of participants can be found at <http://wings.buffalo .edu/history/events.html>. An exhibit on Iggers' career recently opened in Lockwood Library.

Georg Iggers has been so influential in areas of his political concerns, perhaps because they are deeply imbedded in the energy, intellect and courage that inform his scholarly work. An intellectual, international scholar, historian, teacher, pacifist and influential civil-rights activist, Iggers also is notably an "outsider" and has repeatedly married his outlander's perspective to his examination of the larger world.

He is a German in America, an American in Germany, a cultural cosmopolitan in a parochial setting, a rebel in the family. He also is a Jew or perhaps, many--German Jew, secular Jew, orthodox Jew. He came to consider his Judaism, he says, "less in ethnic terms than as a cultural heritage which (exists) not apart from modern culture but as a part of it." He says he "came to recognize the possible role of the cultural outsider as a bridge between exclusive groups."

He and his wife, Wilma, emeritus professor of history at Canisius College, are lifelong human-rights activists. As young faculty members at a Southern all-black college, they played a significant role in the American civil-rights movement. In the 1950s, they spearheaded the precedent-setting legal challenge to the Board of Education of Little Rock, Ark., beginning a grass-roots resistance to racism that marked a milepost in the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. An internationalist, but not an ideologue, Iggers was an early skeptic of American and Soviet claims about the origins of and stakes involved in the Cold War.

Gerber points out that he worked with enormous dedication and patience in the 1970s and '80s to open up the former German Democratic Republic to Western historical scholarship. Through his writings, lectures, teaching and the promotion of German-American university exchange programs, Iggers encouraged East Germany's young historians in the realization of historiographical alternatives to their country's Stalinist orthodoxy.

"There can be no doubt," Gerber has written, "that this intellectual opening in the west that Georg helped to prompt was a factor in the 1989 democratic revolution in the G.D.R." Gerber calls Georg and Wilma Iggers "the last of a breed-Central European academics rooted in a pre-1914 liberal and secular cosmopolitanism that has just about run its course culturally and intellectually. Almost any of us on the faculty could leave or retire and be replaced by someone more or less just like us," Gerber said, "But not Georg and his unique early 20th-century refugee intellectual cohort. When the last of these people retire, no one will ever be able to replace them."