Hans Wilhelm Frei (April 29, 1922–September 12, 1988) was an American biblical scholar and theologian who is best known for work on biblical hermeneutics. Frei's work played a major role in the development of postliberal theology (also called narrative theology or the Yale school of theology). His best-known and most influential work is his 1974 book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale University Press), which examined the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical hermeneutics in England and Germany. Frei spent much of his career teaching at Yale Divinity School. Early life Europe Hans Frei once described his early years as involving a series of "worlds left behind". He was born on April 29, 1922, in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany, to secularized 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 well-to-do and considered themselves to have a distinguished past. Young Hans got a solid German education and read widely in the classics. As antisemitic violence rose in Germany, he was sent away from that world – away from Nazi Germany to the Quaker school in Saffron Walden, England, in January 1935. Although he found speaking English 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 in England. It was at the Friends’ school that Frei saw a picture of Jesus and suddenly "knew that it was true" – this conversion experience 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 Quaker theology ran against the grain of his own thinking, he still found their meetings more satisfying than his adopted Anglican liturgies. America After three years, in August 1938, his parents left Germany, and Frei moved with them to the United States, where