Bruno Frei

Bruno Frei (real name Benedikt Freistadt; 11 June 1897 – 21 May 1988) was a political (Marxist) writer and journalist. He was born in Preßburg, and the family moved to Vienna in 1909. Following the frontier changes mandated in 1919, he spent much of his adult life and career in that city, although he spent six of the Hitler years exiled in Mexico.

Sources most frequently name him as Bruno Frei, but he is also sometimes identified as Karl Franz, a pseudonym under which some of his work was published.

Life Early years Benedikt Freistadt was born in Preßburg, Austria-Hungary (today Bratislava, Slovakia). His father, Michael Freistadt, was in business. He was much influenced by the newspaper's thoughtfully Communist proprietor, Karl Colbert. for a dissertation entitled "The Ethics of Pirkei Avot as a Paradigm for Ethics of Judaism" ("Die Ethik des Pirque Aboth als Paradigma einer Ethik des Judentums"). The magazine, which first appeared in September 1933 and continued to appear, with Bruno Frei its editor in chief, till 1936, Bruno Frei succeeded in obtaining release and a passage to Mexico,

Bruno Frei died at Klosterneuburg, a short distance upstream from Vienna, on 21 May 1988.

Family Bruno Freistadt was married to Maria Muellauer (1890–1940). Their son, Hans Freistadt, was born in Vienna on 6 September 1925. There was also a daughter, Lisa Freistadt.

Maria Freistadt was killed in an air raid on Paris in June 1940. The children both crossed to the USA in 1940, though it is not clear from sources whether they crossed to North America on the same ship as their father.

Once in the USA, Hans Freistadt was supported by Jewish refugee organizations as he worked through high school and Chicago University. He subsequently earned a doctorate in physics from North Carolina, acquired US citizenship in 1944, and appeared all set for a distinguished career as a nuclear physicist. He then fell foul of McCarthyism, however, and after robustly refusing to recant his socialist beliefs, was stripped of his university fellowship following a (briefly) high-profile hearing before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. He now trained successfully for an alternative career, as a physician. Hans Freistadt died in 2015.

Unlike her brother, Lisa Friestadt was able to join her father in Mexico, like him later returning to Vienna after the war.