Karl Stern (medic, 1906)

Karl Stern (born April 8, 1906 in Cham / Upper Palatinate , † November 7, 1975 in Montreal ) was a German-Canadian psychiatrist and neurologist .

Life

Karl Stern was born in Cham in 1906 into a Jewish textile merchant family and spent his childhood there. At the age of ten, Stern went to the humanistic grammar school in Weiden for a year , where he lived in the house of a Jewish teacher. He spent the rest of the school years in Munich, where he passed the Abitur examination in 1925. Stern then studied medicine in Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt. As an assistant doctor he worked from 1931 to 1932 with Professor Franz Volhard at the University Clinic in Frankfurt. He then completed a postgraduate course in psychiatry and neurology with Walther Spielmeyer at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. This was interrupted by miliary tuberculosis. In 1936 he emigrated to England and in 1939 to Canada, where he became professor and clinic director in Ottawa.

In his autobiographical book “Die Feuerwolke”, Stern describes, among other things, how the Nazi ideology at the Munich institute spread more and more from 1933 and showed itself in Cham. Likewise his religious-philosophical considerations, which led to conversion to Catholicism in 1943.

In Cham, the "Dr.-Karl-Stern-Straße" near the district office reminds of him.

Karl Stern was married to Liselotte von Baeyer, a daughter of Hans Ritter von Baeyer .

Major works

• The Cloud of Fire , 1954 (autobiography; original English 1951)
• The third revolution , 1956 (original English, 1954)
• The escape from the woman , Salzburg 1968 (Original English, 1965)

Web links

• TV interview with Karl Stern, June 3, 1968 (French)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bernhard M. Baron, Karl Stern , in: Literaturportal Bayern .
2. ^ Karl Stern: Die Feuerwolke , 1954, p. 74.