Emerita’s autobiography places personal history in political context

She fled the Nazis, sought refuge in Communism, helped define feminism and created the field of women’s history.

Gerda Lerner, professor emerita, discusses her life and struggles in her new memoir, “Fireweed: A Political Autobiography” (Temple University Press). The spring issue of the Wisconsin Academy Review features an interview with Lerner and a chapter from “Fireweed” detailing Lerner’s imprisonment by Nazis in her native Austria at the age of 17.

A longtime faculty member and now Robinson-Edwards Professor of History Emerita, Lerner founded the nation’s first master’s degree program in women’s history in 1972. In 1981, she established a doctoral program in women’s history at UW–Madison. In “Fireweed,” she illuminates the personal history that led her to become one of the foremost scholars in her field. Accordingly, “Fireweed” ends in 1958, when her academic career began.

Highlights from the book include a vivid and horrifying description of the Nazi thrall in Austria (“The Germans had to be educated in violent anti-Semitism; the Austrians erupted with it spontaneously,” writes Lerner) and, for the first time, the details of her involvement with the Communist Party decades ago.

“I want to be honest with my readers, my students and my colleagues, honest about who I am, who I was, and how I got to be who I am. I neither regret nor disown my past,” she writes.

In her interview, Lerner describes how she managed, despite all the hardship in her life, to remain strong and productive: “The thing I have always lived by is that you must be engaged in some way in the world in which you live. How, is for each person to choose.”

Here are a few more excerpts from the interview:
Q: You write that you are afraid, even now, to write about your involvement with the Communist Party so long ago. Why?

A: Because in America we have not really settled with what we call McCarthyism. Many people still have stereotypes and tremendous prejudices against people who identified themselves as Communists. I am aware of the fact that many people who respect me and respect my work will be shocked to hear this and may react very negatively. I would be happy if that weren’t the case, but I am afraid that that will happen.

Q: The Nazi period sensitized you enormously to any government acts to curb or curtail civil liberties. How much are we risking now in post-Sept.11 America?

A: I see many very frightening signs. I see us creating a deviant “outgroup’ once again. É It’s horrible. And I think the only reason for doing it is that the government wishes to create this terror group as the new scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with society. It is very dangerous.

Q: In your memoir it is striking how you always were politically engaged, no matter what your circumstances were, whether you were caring for young children or could barely speak the language.

A: That’s one thing I hope people will get from the book and find it applies to their lives. I am a very happy person, and have been a very happy person most of my life even though I lived through dark times. I am happy because I found the balance between adjusting, or surviving what I was put through, and acting for what I believed in. That’s the key.