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Book Review
Crossing Boundaries: The Exclusion and Inclusion of Minorities in Germany and the United States. Ed. by Larry Eugene Jones. (New York: Berghahn, 2001. vi, 266 pp. Cloth, $69.95, ISBN 1-57181-285-7. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 1-57181-306-3.)
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This collection of essays resulted from a University of Buffalo conference honoring the historian Georg Iggers. Widely admired for both civil rights activism and innovative scholarship, Iggers symbolizes the personal and intellectual "crossing of boundaries"national, racial, and disciplinary. Focusing on the fate of German Jews and African Americans, participants addressed "migration, multi-ethnicity, discrimination, and integration" (p. 1), as well as historiography, another subject intimately associated with Iggers's name. In his keynote speech, Konrad Jarausch shows how, in contrast to this immigrant German Jew's stance on race in America, most German academics had earlier collaborated with or acquiesced in the Nazi purge of Jews from universities. The cherished German academic tradition of expertise and objectivity proved grossly inadequate when the neohumanist ethical commitment inherent in that legacy was abandoned out of fear or opportunism. Scholars in crisis situations, Jarausch argues, must eschew the neutrality of the detached specialist and resist ideological forces oppressing personal and academic freedom. |
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