Fritz Moritz Heichelheim

Fritz Moritz Heichelheim (born May 6, 1901 in Gießen ; † April 22, 1968 in Toronto , Canada ) was a German-Canadian ancient historian . His main focus was on the economic history of antiquity .

Life

Fritz Moritz Heichelheim, the son of the banker Albert Heichelheim and his wife Berta (née Simonsfeld), studied Ancient History at the Universities of Giessen , Berlin and Munich . In Giessen he particularly joined the ancient historian Richard Laqueur , with whom he received his doctorate in 1925 with the dissertation The Foreign Population in the Ptolemaic Empire . Joseph Vogt later described Heichelheim as the continuation of Laqueur's work. After completing his studies, he worked as a high school teacher and did his habilitation in Giessen, which he achieved in 1929 with the text Economic fluctuations in the period from Alexander to Augustus .

After completing his habilitation, Heichelheim taught as a private lecturer in ancient history at the University of Giessen. His academic career in Germany found with the transfer of power to the Nazis is over: Heichelheim was a Jew from his place chased . He decided to emigrate to England. He lived for many years without a permanent job as a private scholar in Cambridge . He received British citizenship in 1940. Two years later he was hired as an assistant lecturer at the University of Nottingham . After the end of the Second World War , he tried to establish contacts with German universities. In 1948 he went for a short time as an honorary professor for economic history at the University of Giessen. But in the same year he went to Canada to the University of Toronto , where he initially worked as a lecturer and from 1962 as Professor of Ancient History . A visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin brought him back to Germany for a short time in 1963. The Royal Society of Canada made him a member in 1966.

In his comparatively short career, which was also delayed by his exile, Heichelheim developed a remarkable publication activity. His list of publications contains over 600 titles. This productivity can be explained by the way he works, as he had reduced his sleep to four hours a night since he was a student.

Fonts (selection)

• Economic fluctuations from Alexander to Augustus. Jena 1930 (reprint: Arno Press, New York 1979)
• Economic history of antiquity from the Palaeolithic to the migration of the Germans, Slavs and Arabs. 2 volumes, Sijthoff, Leiden 1938 (reprint in 3 volumes: Leiden 1969).

literature

• Hans Georg Gundel : Fritz M. Heichelheim †. In: Gnomon. Critical journal for all of Classical Classical Studies , 41, 1969, pp. 221–224
• Mortimer Chambers : Heichelheim, Fritz Moritz. In: Ward W. Briggs (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Greenwood, Westport (Connecticut) 1994 ISBN 978-0-313245-60-2 pp. 272-274
• Kay Ehling : Heichelheim, Fritz Moritz. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 542 f.

Web links

• Entry on Fritz Moritz Heichelheim in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)
• Literature by and about Fritz Moritz Heichelheim in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Joseph Vogt: Richard Laqueur . In: Historical magazine . Volume 197, 1963, p. 790.
2. ^ Mortimer Chambers: Heichelheim, Fritz Moritz. In: Ward W. Briggs (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. London 1994, p. 272