Leopold Hermann Oskar Panizza (12 November 1853 – 28 September 1921) was a German psychiatrist and avant-garde author, playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, publisher and literary journal editor.
It was only after years of struggling and several lost trials that King Maximilian II of Bavaria finally granted Mathilde permission to educate her children in the Protestant faith.
[3] Mathilde Panizza was the proprietor of the Hotel Russischer Hof, purchased in 1850, a renowned establishment that catered to Russian nobility and other distinguished guests in the popular spa town.
[6] After some months in Paris pursuing his twin interests of psychiatry and poetry, he returned to Munich to become an assistant to Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, one of Germany's leading psychiatrists.
[7] A turning point in Panizza's life came in 1883, when the thirty-year-old convinced his mother, who had profitably sold her hotel, to establish a trust that would provide him with an annual allowance of six thousands marks.
[9] Panizza's first collection of fiction, Dämmrungsstücke, appeared in 1890, received a modest amount of critical acclaim in the press and brought him to the attention of Germany's leading literary figures.
[10] By the end of 1890, the obscure psychiatrist had gotten to know most of the Munich "Moderns," as the young naturalists called themselves, including Frank Wedekind, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Max Halbe.
[12] The two Franconians became close friends, and from 1890 to 1896 Panizza published over forty articles in Die Gesellschaft on widely varied topics, ranging from theater reviews to theoretical considerations of prostitution.
[14] One of Panizza's notable presentations was a lecture in 1891 titled Genie und Wahnsinn (Genius and Madness), which drew heavily on the work of Cesare Lombroso.
In scenes alternating between heaven, hell and the Vatican, Das Liebeskonzil portrays the dreaded venereal disease as God's vengeance on his sexually hyperactive human creatures, especially those surrounding Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia).
[20] Most shocking of all was Panizza's naturalistic depiction of the entities worshipped by Catholics: God appears as a senile old fool, Christ is dimwitted and weak, while a sexually promiscuous Mary is the one firmly in control of negotiations with the devil.
[21] Even though the work appeared in Switzerland, the district attorney in Munich charged Panizza with 93 counts of blasphemy in violation of §166 of the Imperial Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code).
As a result, Panizza became an instant literary celebrity, with authors ranging from a teenaged Thomas Mann to Theodor Fontane, the 76-year-old dean of German letters, weighing in on one side or the other of the raging debate.
[28] After several months of incarceration, including extensive psychiatric examinations at the same institution where twenty years previously he had worked as a young doctor, Panizza was diagnosed with systematic paranoia.
After a suicide attempt, his failure to be admitted to the psychiatric clinic, and the refusal of his 84-year-old mother to even see him, in October 1904 he provoked his own arrest by striding down the bustling Leopoldstraße wearing only a shirt.