Hans Wilhelm Frei - Early Life: Europe

Early Life: Europe

Hans Frei once described his early years as involving a series of 'worlds left behind'. He was born in Breslau, Germany, to secularised Jewish parents (Magda Frankfurther Frei, a pediatrician; Wilhelm Siegmund Frei, a venereologist on the medical faculty of the University of Breslau). That Jewish culture did not play a huge part in his upbringing can be seen from the fact that he was baptized into the Lutheran church along with most other members of his class, and from his memory that he was forbidden from using Yiddish phrases at home. His family was reasonably respectable and well-to-do (indeed, they had a distinguished past), and young Hans seems to have spent a good deal of time getting a solid German education and reading widely in the German classics. However, as the atmosphere in Germany soured, he was for his safety sent away from that world - away from Nazi Germany to the Quaker school in Saffron Walden, England, in January 1935.

Although he found the language problem daunting and was sometimes lonely, he found England a welcoming and courteous place, and despite his own isolation and anxiety was struck by the absence in England of the pervasive fear which he thought had been a feature of life in 1930s Germany. Young Frei believed that war was on the way, and wanted to stay where he was in safety.

It was, it seems, whilst at the Friend's school that Frei saw a picture of Jesus and suddenly 'knew that it was true' - a conversion experience of some kind which led him to a form of Christianity which at this stage had nothing to do with attendance at church. Later in his life, even when it ran against the grain of his theology, he still found Quaker meetings more deeply satisfying than his adopted Anglicanism.