The New International Encyclopædia/Dulk, Albert Frederick Benno

DULK, do͞olk, Albert Frederick Benno (1819-84). A German author. He was born in Königsberg and studied medicine and the natural sciences in that city and in Leipzig and Breslau. He took an active part in the popular uprising of 1848, at which time his revolutionary drama Lea appeared. After traveling in the Orient, he settled in Geneva in 1850, and subsequently in Stuttgart, where he wrote the dramas Jesus der Christ (1865) and Simson (1859), in which play the conflict between Judaism and paganism is depicted. One of his later dramas, König Enzio, was set to music by Abert. As an adherent of socialism he became conspicuous, in 1871, through his opposition to the war with France, and his publications Patriotismus and Frömmigkeit obtained a wide circulation. In 1882 he founded in Stuttgart the first society of freethinkers in Germany, and during the last years of his life devoted his pen principally to the discussion of the radical side of religio-philosophical subjects.