Letter to Max Hildebrand, October 22, 1889

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 22 October 1889


First published, in Russian, in Pod znamenem marksizma, No. 6, 1927.
A fragment from this letter was first published in English in the collection Marx K., Engels E, Lenin V. L, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, Int. Publ., New York, 1972, pl79.
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48

MECW Note : Hildebrand, Max - schoolteacher in Berlin, adherent of Max Stirner, collected biographical material about the latter.

TO MAX HILDEBRAND IN BERLIN

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


Dear Sir,

In reply to your note of the 19th,[1] I made Stirner's acquaintance around the beginning of 1842 in Berlin[2] 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[3] to his remarkably 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[4] 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. Koppen, 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[5] (not the jurist and high court counsellor[6] ) 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[7] 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[8] terms; he was a good sort, not nearly as bad as he makes himself out to be in his Einzige[9] and 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, spontaneously evolved unity of Being and Nothing and from which alone that antithesis arises. And this, according to Stirner, was 'It' (it 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.[10] When, later on in Brussels,[11] 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.,[12] 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 anarchist doctrines had not Bakunin laced it with a good measure of Stirnerian 'rebellion'.[13] 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 literally starved to death; where he got this from, I don't know.

I saw his wife[14] in this country on one occasion; while here she took up with - ah que j'aime le militaire[15] - ex-Lieutenant Techow and, if I'm not mistaken, accompanied him to Australia.

If I have time later on I might well write a sketch of that period, which was most interesting in its way.[16]

Yours most respectfully,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ On 19 October 1889, Max Hildebrand wrote to Engels that he had, for more than 15 years, been interested in Europe's democratic movement. Accordingly, he had studied a number of works, among which of particular interest to him was Max Stirner's book Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum. Hildebrand asked Engels for some information on Stirner's life and suggested that he, Engels, write historical biographies of thinkers representing different ideological trends, provided no such biographies had been written before.
  2. ↑ From the latter half of September 1841, to about 10 October 1842, Engels stayed in Berlin for his tour of duty in an artillery brigade. In his spare time he attended lectures at Berlin University and forged close contacts with leftwing Hegelians, progressive writers and scholars. It was at that time that Engels maintained close ties with East Prussian liberals (Eduard Plottwell and Johann Jacoby). Through them he might have contacted the bourgeois newspaper Konigl. Preufl. Staats-Kriegs-und-Friedenszeitung (a progressive paper in the 1840s); however, we have no evidence that Engels really cooperated with the newspaper. 'The restricted intelligence of loyal subjects' ('beschrankter Untertanenverstand') was a phrase coined by the Prussian Minister of the Interior von Rochow; it gained wide currency in Germany.
  3. ↑ Stirn - forehead in German
  4. ↑ As a student of Berlin University, Marx lived in Berlin from the latter half of October 1836 to mid April 1841.
  5. ↑ Julius Waldeck
  6. ↑ Benedikt Waldeck
  7. ↑ district in old Berlin
  8. ↑ Du or thou, the intimate form of address
  9. ↑ M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum
  10. ↑ Engels refers to his stay in Manchester in 1842-44 where he was studying commercial business at the cotton mill belonging to the firm Ermen & Engels (see note 9).
  11. ↑ Marx lived in Brussels from February 1845 to the beginning of March 1848 when he was expelled by the Belgian authorities. Engels lived in Brussels, on and off, from early April 1845 to the latter half of March 1848.
  12. ↑ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology
  13. ↑ A critique of Stirner's views was made in Volume I of The German Ideology, in Chapter III entitled 'Saint Max' (see present edition, Vol. 5, ppi 17-451).
  14. ↑ Marie Stirner-Schmidt
  15. ↑ Ooh, I do love soldiers!
  16. ↑ Engels replies to Hildebrand's suggestion to write the history of the period preceding the Revolution of 1848-49 in Germany. As Hildebrand observed in his letter, Engels was perhaps the only person capable of tackling such a work (see this volume, note 523).