Hans-Georg Pflaum

Pflaum, who came from a Jewish family of industrialists, at first studied law in Breslau and Heidelberg, afterwards taking a position in his father's company. He was promoted in 1925 in Breslau. When the company fell victim to the global economic crisis in 1929, Pflaum turned to a career as an academic studying Ancient History and Classical Philology in Berlin, where he studied under Ulrich Wilcken, Wilhelm Weber, Eugen Täubler and Ernst Stein. After the National Socialist German Workers Party took control of the country, he left Germany in 1933 and continued his studies in Paris with Jérôme Carcopino at the Sorbonne. He also studied under the epigraphist Louis Robert. In 1937, Pflaum wrote a dissertation on the Cursus publicus during the Roman Empire and was to become a member of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).

After the French defeat in 1940, he had to give up his position at the CNRS; his thesis could only appear anonymously. In 1942, before the persecution, he fled to the South of France, where he could continue his research on the Roman procurators, which he submitted as a thesis after the end of the war in 1947. He worked again at the CNRS in Paris and was there in 1956 as Directeur de recherche. Since the 1960s, he also taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he repeatedly took guest professorships in various European countries as well as at Princeton University. In 1966 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. From 1966 to 1978, Pflaum was co-editor of L'Année épigraphique.

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