Stern, Karl

Karl Stern (1906–1975) was born in Bavaria to an assimilated Jewish family and received little formal religious education. After a profoundly alienating experience at his Bar Mitzvah, he repudiated belief in God and became a Marxist and a Zionist. Stern studied medicine and neuropsychiatry in Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt and underwent a somewhat unorthodox analytic training with a practitioner who blended Freudian and Jungian perspectives but leaned strongly toward a belief in “Spirit.” During this period, he briefly immersed himself in Orthodox Jewish observance but meanwhile cultivated close friendships with ardent Christians, who seemed to understand his religious longings even better than his own relatives. In 1936, Stern and his family fled from Germany to London, where he continued his neuropsychiatric work. Two years later, he arrived in Montreal (via New York). After much study and reflection, in 1943, he finally converted to Roman Catholicism (Stern 1951).

Stern’s first book,