Hans Freyer

Hans Freyer (born July 31, 1887 in Leipzig, died January 18, 1969 in Ebersteinburg near Baden-Baden) was a conservative German sociologist and philosopher.

Freyer began studying theology, national economics, history and philosophy at the University of Greifswald in 1907, with the aim of becoming a Lutheran theologian. A year later he moved to Leipzig, where he initially took the same courses, but then gave up the theological parts. He gained his doctorate in 1911. His early works on the philosophy of life had an influence on the German youth movement. In 1920 he qualified as a university lecturer, and in 1922 he became a professor at the university of Kiel.

In 1925, moving on to the University of Leipzig, Freyer founded the university's sociology department. He led the department until 1948. In Leipzig, he developed a branch of sociology with a strongly historical basis, the Leipzig School. Sympathizing with the Hitlerite movement, he forced 1933 Ferdinand Tönnies, an outspoken enemy of it, and then president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, out of office.

In 1933 Freyer signed the .

Nevertheless, being Tönnies' successor he abstained from making the Gesellschaft a Nazi tool by stopping all activities from 1934 onwards. From 1938 to 1944 Freyer was the head of the German Institute for Culture in Budapest. Together with Walter Frank he established a racist and anti-semitic völkisch historiography.

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