Kurt Pflüger

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Kurt Pflüger (born October 12, 1910 in Hanover , † 1994 in Stanmore near London ) was a German Egyptologist .

Life and activity

Pflüger studied Egyptology, history and art at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig and Heidelberg. He was expelled from the latter university in the summer of 1933, a few months after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, on charges of communist activity. Also Hermann Grapow , who belonged in Berlin with his teachers, called Tiller in a letter of 1947 as "politically left" standing in the 1930s. Franzmeier and Weber also consider Pflüger's Jewish ancestry to be possible, although this is not certain.

Pflüger left Germany in 1933 and first went to Paris. From there he went to Zurich, where he was able to continue studying Egyptology with the help of the orientalist Johann Jakob Hess in the summer semester of 1934. In 1936, he was with a thesis on Horemheb and the Amarna Period for Dr. phil. PhD.

In the autumn of 1936 Pflüger went to Great Britain, where he worked together with the Egyptologist John Bennett on a project to publish the inscriptions of private memorial steles from the Middle Kingdom (2100 to 1700 BC). The source edition was ultimately not published, instead an evaluation of the source material by Pflüger and Bennett was published, which attempted to draw social-historical conclusions from art-historical, in particular iconographic, indicators on the steles. Pflüger has also published articles for the Journal of Egyptian Archives , the Journal of Near Eastern Studies and the Journal of the American Oriental Society . After that he no longer emerged as an Egyptologist.

Pflüger had worked for the BBC since the late 1930s . During the Second World War he was an opponent of National Socialism in the counter-propaganda with which the BBC reacted to the actions of the German Reich Propaganda Ministry. He probably also belonged to the 1943 Club , for which he lectured in the 1980s.

Pflüger's anti-Nazi stance did not go unnoticed by the police forces of the Nazi state: in the spring of 1940 he was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Main Security Office , a list of people who would be killed by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

Even after the war, Pflüger remained an employee of the BBC until his retirement.

In retirement, Pflüger devoted himself to projects in the field of paper theater , motivated by interests in art history . He put on an extensive private collection on this, which was published in 1986 in an extensive work in annotated form. In Waiblingen an international reminded 1997-2007 Dr. Kurt Tiller Paper Theater Festival at him.

Fonts

  • Haremhab and the Amarna Period. Zurich 1936 (dissertation).
  • The Art of the Third and Fifth Dynasties. In: Journal of Egyptian Archives , Volume 23, 1937, pp. 7–9.
  • Proposal to Publish Egyptian Private Funerary Stelae of Middle Kingdom. 1938.
  • The Edict of King Haremhab. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies , Volume 5, 1946, pp. 260–276.
  • The Private Funerary Stelae of the Middle Kingdom and Their Importance for the Study of Ancient Egyptian History. In: Journal of the American Oriental Society , Volume 67, 1947, pp. 127-135.
  • with Helmut Herbst: Schreiber's children's theater. A monograph. 1986.

literature

  • Henning Franzmeier, Anke Weber: "On the other hand, I think that one shouldn't pretend that nothing happened". German Egyptology in 1945–1949 as reflected in the correspondence with the JC Hinrichs publishing house. In: Susanne Bickel et al. (Ed.): Egyptologists and Egyptologies between the empire and the founding of the two German states. Reflections on the history and episteme of an ancient science subject in the 150th year of the magazine for Egyptian language and ancient studies. 2013, p. 139 f.
  • Wilhelm Sternfeld, Eva Tiedemann: German exile literature 1933–1945. A bio bibliography. 2nd edition, L. Schneider, Heidelberg 1970, p. 388.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry on Pflüger on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
personal data
SURNAME Pflüger, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Egyptologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 12, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH 1994
Place of death Stanmore