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I would like to thank Volker Berghahn, Larry E. Jones, Peter H. Reill, and Christopher Notaro for their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. My special thanks go to Wilma and to the late Georg Iggers for having shared with me over the years many insights into their work, as well as many personal stories.
On November 26, 2017, Georg Iggers passed away in a retirement home on the outskirts of Buffalo, where he had taught for four decades at the State University of New York (SUNY). After starting his scholarly career with a book on French social philosophy in the early nineteenth century, Iggers turned his attention to the transformation of historical thinking in Germany since the Enlightenment, exploring the development of history as a discipline. Over the years, he distinguished himself as one of the world's leading historians of historiography. He retained his focus on the writing of history in the German-language realm, but moved increasingly toward an analysis of historiography in comparative and global perspectives.1
Iggers belonged to the generation of Jewish refugees from Central Europe who had fled the Nazi dictatorship at a young age, received their academic training in the English-speaking world, and then gone on to become historians. This remarkable cohort included Peter Gay, Raul Hilberg, Gerda Lerner, Michael A. Meyer, George L. Mosse, and Gerhard Weinberg, among others.2 As was the case for other members of this generation of young émigrés from Nazi Germany and Austria who became scholars in America, Iggers blended personal experiences of discrimination and displacement into his scholarly work. These experiences alerted him to forms of illiberalism in the contemporary world and fueled his commitment to a social activism that embraced civil rights and racial equality. Iggers cherished the heritage of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the values of civil society, and he respected the fact that these have distinctive meanings in different societies. Throughout his life, he remained a nonconformist who always questioned not only prevailing views but also, and especially, what he perceived to be authoritarian tendencies. Iggers accepted that this stance turned him into a migrant of sorts between cultural and political spheres that others viewed as separate. This was an important motivation for connecting historians across ideological...