Karlheinz Deschner

Karlheinz Deschner (Bamberg, 1924 - Haßfurt, 2014) was a German historian and essayist who devoted much of his career to a sharply critical examination of Christianity, and of the Catholic Church in particular. He wrote in German, but his work drew attention across Europe, and his name became closely linked with atheist criticism of religion in the second half of the twentieth century.

He grew up in a Catholic household, the son of a forester and a mother who had converted from Protestantism. He was educated in church schools and a Franciscan seminary before volunteering for military service during the Second World War. After the war he studied law, theology, philosophy and history, and in 1951 he earned his doctorate at Würzburg with a dissertation on the poetry of Lenau.

His first book was a novel, Night Surrounds My House (1956), which was well received, but he soon turned away from fiction to focus on the critical study of religion. His writing combines dense documentation with polemical irony. He gave more than two thousand public lectures. His largest project, Christianity's Criminal History, occupied him from 1970 until the tenth volume appeared in 2013. In 1971 he was brought before a court in Nuremberg for allegedly insulting the Church, and he was acquitted.

His books were largely unavailable outside Germany until the 1980s, when translations appeared in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. His legacy is that of an author who assembled a large body of evidence to challenge the official history of the Church, and his work is still cited in debates about Christianity's historical role.