Oskar Panizza

Leopold Hermann Oskar Panizza (Bad Kissingen, 1853 – Bayreuth, 1921) was a German physician, poet and writer whose provocative work made him one of the most controversial literary figures of late nineteenth-century Germany. He is remembered mainly for his satire against the Church, but his thought, inspired by Max Stirner, deserves attention for its distrust of ideas presented as absolute truths.

He studied medicine in Munich, graduating in 1880, and worked as an assistant physician at a major Bavarian psychiatric hospital. After a personal crisis he left medicine and devoted himself to literature, supported financially by his mother. He published poetry, short fiction and essays, and took part in the circles of Munich's so-called modern life.

In 1893 he published The Immaculate Conception of the Popes and, the following year, The Love Council, a grotesque play about Christian mythology that led to a conviction for blasphemy and a year in prison. He then lived in Zurich, where he ran the journal Zürcher Diskußionen, and later in Paris. His mental health deteriorated and he ended his days in an asylum in Bayreuth. His only substantial philosophical work, The Illusionism and the Rescue of Personality (1895), holds that thought, unless examined, ends up destroying the one who holds it. His influence was slight for decades, until Kurt Tucholsky wrote an essay on him and, later, André Breton helped bring some of his works back into print.