Wilma Iggers

Although probably not a book for most general readers, this book has much to offer because of its authors' envolvement in the events of their times. Wilma Iggers grew up in a family of well-to-do Jewish German-speaking farmers in the Egerland of Czechoslovakia. She and her family managed to get to Canada in 1938. A decade later at the University of Chicago, she met and married Georg Eggers, a German Jew whose family had come from Hamburg to Richmond, Virginia in 1938. In 1950 they went to Little Rock, Arkansas where Georg taught at Philander Smith, a Methodist college for Blacks. Seven years later, he moved to another Black college--Dillard in New Orleans. At both colleges, the Iggers were quite active civil rights workers. Due to the quality of his scholarship in historiography, especially German historiography, Georg Iggers became a professor at SUNY--Buffalo. Starting in 1961, the family made many trips to both western and eastern Europe. Georg became an important link between historians in East Germany, West Germany, and the United States. For many years, Wilma and Georg lived half the year in Buffalo and half in Goettingen, in the west German state of Lower Saxony. They became more comfortable in Germany, but in the end, retired to Buffalo. A great story about courage and perseverance despite adversity, about attempts to reconcile conflicting groups of people and about European and American historians in the twentieth century.… (meer)