Song Du-yul

Song Du-yul
Hangul	송두율
Hanja	宋斗律
Revised Romanization	Song Du-yul
McCune–Reischauer	Song Tu-yul

Song Du-yul (born 12 October 1944) is a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Münster in Münster, Germany. He has been a political exile in Germany from his native South Korea for over 40 years. Educated in South Korea, he left that nation for Germany in 1967 to pursue higher education. He visited North Korea a total of 18 times while living in Germany, but did not return to the South until 2003. During his visit to the South that year, he was arrested, charged, and convicted of spying for the North under the South's National Security Act in a controversial court case; in the end, he was given a suspended sentence, and returned to Germany in August 2004.

Song was born in Tokyo, Japan, to Korean parents. He underwent primary and secondary education in Gwangju before moving to Seoul to enter Seoul National University's Department of Philosophy. In 1967, he moved to West Germany, where he entered into a graduate programme at Heidelberg University. He later studied at Frankfurt University, where he wrote his thesis on "The Understanding of Asia in Hegel, Marx, and Weber." Jürgen Habermas acted as his thesis advisor; he was also heavily influenced by the ideas of Peter Christian Ludz. He completed his doctoral studies in 1972, following which he took up a teaching post at the Free University of Berlin.

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