London, 22 October 1889 
122 Regent’s Park Road, N.W. 

Dear Sir, 

In reply to your note of the 19th,5*? I made Stirner’s acquaintance 
around the beginning of 1842 in Berlin’?! when he was hobnobbing with 
E. Meyen, Buhl, Edgar and subsequently Bruno Bauer, etc. It is true that 
his name was Schmidt; he owed the nickname of Stirner* to his remark- 
ably high forehead. He cannot have been hobnobbing with this circle for 
very long, since he didn’t know Marx, who had left Berlin, if my 
memory is correct, less than a year previously°** and was much 
respected by the others. He was, I think, no longer a grammar school 
master or at any rate ceased to be one shortly afterwards. Apart from the 
above named, others who used to meet together at that time were a 
certain von Leitner, an Austrian, K. F Köppen, who taught at a grammar 
school and was a special friend of Marx’s, Mussak, his colleague, 
Cornelius, the bookseller who appears in Fritz Reuter’s Festungstid, 
Miigge, Dr J. Klein, the dramatist and dramaturgist, a certain 
Wachenhusen, Dr Zabel, subsequently editor of the National-Zeitung, 
Rutenberg who, however, left for Cologne shortly afterwards to join the 
first Rheinische Zeitung, a certain Waldeck (not the jurist and high 
court counsellor‘) and others whose names escape me; there were in fact 
several groups which would meet and mingle depending on the time and 
the opportunity. Jungnitz, Szeliga and Faucher did not arrive until after 
November 1842, the month in which I completed my year of military 
service and left Berlin. We would meet at Stehely’s and, in the evenings, 
at this or that Bavarian ale-house in Friedrichsstadt‘ or, if we were in 
funds, at a wineshop in the Poststrasse, which was Köppen’s favourite 
haunt. I knew Stirner well and we were on Du* terms; he was a good 
sort, not nearly as bad as he makes himself out to be in his Einzige;' and 

4 Stirn — forehead in German — Julius Waldeck — * Benedikt Waldeck — ¢ district 
in old Berlin — * Dz or thou, the intimate form of address ~ ‘ M. Stirner, Der 
Einzige und sein Eigenthum 

with a slight suggestion of pedantry that had clung to him since his 
teaching days. We discussed Hegelian philosophy a great deal; at that 
time he had made the discovery that Hegel’s logic begins with an 
error. Being, which proves to be Nothing and thus becomes the 
antithesis of itself, cannot be the beginning; the beginning must 
consist in something which is itself already the immediate, sponta- 
neously evolved unity of Being and Nothing and from which alone 
that antithesis arises. And this, according to Stirner, was ‘It’ (zt 
snows, it rains), something which is and which, at the same time, is 
Nothing. Later on he seems to have come round to the realisation 
that there was, after all, nothing in It, any more than in Being and 
Nothing. 

I saw less of Stirner during the latter part of my time in Berlin; no 
doubt he was even then pursuing the lines of reasoning that resulted in 
his magnum opus. By the time it came out, our views had already 
diverged a great deal; the two years I had spent in Manchester had left 
their mark on me.52> When, later on in Brussels,°26 Marx and I felt it 
necessary to join issue with the offshoots of the Hegelian school, we 
criticised Stirner amongst others—the critique is as bulky as the book 
itself. The ms.,? which has never been published, is still here in my house 
in so far as it hasn’t been eaten by mice. 

Stirner enjoyed a revival thanks to Bakunin who, by the way, was also 
in Berlin at the time and, during Werder’s course of lectures on logic 
(1841-42), sat on the bench in front of me along with four or five other 
Russians. Proudhon’s harmless, purely etymological anarchy (i.e. 
absence of government) would never have resulted in the present anar- 
chist doctrines had not Bakunin laced it with a good measure of 
Stirnerian ‘rebellion’.**” As a result the anarchists have themselves 
become nothing but a collection of ‘Unique Ones’, so much so that no 
two of them can abide one another’s company. 

For the rest I know nothing about Stirner; I never found out what 
subsequently befell him, except that Marx told me he had almost liter- 
ally starved to death; where he got this from, I don’t know. 

I saw his wife? in this country on one occasion; while here she took 
up with ~ ah que j’aime le militaire!* — ex-Lieutenant Techow and, if I’m 
not mistaken, accompanied him to Australia. 

* K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology — » Marie Stirner-Schmidt — 
© Ooh, I do love soldiers! 

If I have time later on I might well write a sketch of that period, which 
was most interesting in its way.°28 

Yours most respectfully, 
F. Engels