Frederik Dreier

Frederik Dreier

Frederik Henrik Hennings Dreier (born December 16, 1827 in Copenhagen ; † May 9, 1853 ibid) was a Danish writer who was socially critical .

Life

Frederik Dreier was the eldest of three sons of the lawyer Vilhelm Henrik Dreier and his wife Irma Vilhelmine, b. Small. The family belonged to the upper middle class. The father was a senior judge. Frederik's youth, however, was overshadowed by his father's illness. This suffered from " melancholy ", which over time developed into a psychosis , accompanied by religious madness, so that in 1840 - Frederik Dreier was 13 years old - he had to give up his office and in 1847 was admitted to the closed Schleswig State Hospital, where he stayed until his death in 1865.

Frederik attended the Copenhagen Metropolitan School and graduated from high school there in 1844. For his subsequent studies in medicine, he moved to the renowned Valkendorf Collegium, which is affiliated to the university. In addition to his specialist studies, in just a few years he created an extensive philosophical-political work that identifies him as a thinker who was decades ahead of his time. Accordingly, he received little attention from his contemporaries and was soon completely forgotten. He finished his medical studies, which was interrupted by a deployment as a medic in the civil war of 1848/49, in the spring of 1853 with a doctorate. Shortly afterwards, at the age of 26, he very likely died of his own hands.

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Dreier had his father's fate in mind when he decided to use intellectual effort, that is, to test possibly similar tendencies in himself. H. to counteract this by developing a rational philosophy of life. The then current works of Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer , the first atheists of the German language, offered him an approach. He was more impressed, however, by Max Stirner's book The Single and His Property , published in 1844 , who trumped Feuerbach and Bauer and criticized them as basically still “pious” atheists.

Starting from Stirner's point of view, Dreier expanded his "consistently rational, atheistic and materialistic philosophy" by integrating, for example, John Stuart Mill's epistemology and ideas of the French materialists, namely Holbach's . From a socio-economic point of view, he was guided by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon , who wrote Qu'est-ce que la propriété? was the first to describe himself as an anarchist.

So intellectually armed Dreier polemicized against the "most distinguished personalities of his time, Orla Lehmann , Hans Christian Ørsted , Meïr Aron Goldschmidt , Johan Ludvig Heiberg , Søren Kierkegaard , NFS Grundtvig . He towers over them all by a head's length. ”(Georg Brandes). Dreier advocated reformist political ideas against them, which back then, in the pre- March period , were virulent “on the continent”, but not in pre-industrial Denmark. He was therefore later referred to as "Denmark's first socialist".

Fonts

• Pick up scripters . Bind 1-5. Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, CA Reitzels Forlag, 2003, ISBN 87-7876-299-5 (samlede værk)

literature

• Georg Brandes : Frederik Dreier. In: Georg Brandes: Gestalten and thoughts. Munich 1903, pp. 178-182.
• Svend Erik Stybe: Frederik Dreier. Hans Liv, hans samtid and hans sociale tænkning. Munksgaard, København 1959.
• Bernd Henningsen: Frederik Dreier - The Danish variant of early socialism. In: Scandinavica. Volume 14, Issue 2, November 1975, pp. 127-134.