I
In 1888 John Henry Mackay, the Scottish-German poet, while at the
British Museum reading Lange's History of Materialism, encountered
the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of his forgotten book,
Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Only One and His Property; in
French translated L'Unique et sa Propriété, and in the first English
translation more aptly and euphoniously entitled The Ego and His Own).
His curiosity excited, Mackay, who is an anarchist, procured after
some difficulty a copy of the work, and so greatly was he stirred
that for ten years he gave himself up to the study of Stirner and his
teachings, and after incredible painstaking published in 1898 the
story of his life. (Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk: John Henry
Mackay.) To Mackay's labours we owe all we know of a man who was as
absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. But
some advanced spirits had read Stirner's book, the most revolutionary
ever written, and had felt its influence. Let us name two: Henrik
Ibsen and Frederick Nietzsche. Though the name of Stirner is not quoted
by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favourite pupil
of his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. This was in 1874.
One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at Bayreuth, I was standing
in the Marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theatre pointed out to me
a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilianstrasse, and said: "Do
you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose
name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten."
It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name.
"Max Stirner," he replied. "The crazy Hegelian," I retorted. "You have
read him, then?" "No; but you haven't read Nordau." It was true. All
fire and flame at that time for Nietzsche, I did not realise that the
poet and rhapsodist had forerunners. My friend sniffed at Nietzsche's
name; Nietzsche for him was an aristocrat, not an Individualist--in
reality, a lyric expounder of Bismarck's gospel of blood and iron.
Wagner's adversary would, with Renan, place mankind under the yoke of
a more exacting tyranny than Socialism, the tyranny of Culture, of the
Superman. Ibsen, who had studied both Kierkegaard and Stirner--witness
Brand and Peer Gynt--Ibsen was much nearer to the champion of the Ego
than Nietzsche. Yet it is the dithyrambic author of Zarathustra who is
responsible, with Mackay, for the recrudescence of Stirner's teachings.
Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner its prophet, or, if
you will, its philosopher. Later I secured the book, which had been
reprinted in the cheap edition of Reclam (1882). It seemed colourless,
or rather gray, set against the glory and gorgeous rhetoric of
Nietzsche. I could not see then what I saw a decade later--that
Nietzsche had used Stirner as a springboard, as a point of departure,
and that the Individual had vastly different meanings to those diverse
temperaments. But Stirner displayed the courage of an explorer in
search of the north pole of the Ego.
The man whose theories would make a _tabula rasa_ of civilisation, was
born at Bayreuth, October 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856.
His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, Max Stirner being a nickname
bestowed upon him by his lively comrades in Berlin because of his very
high and massive forehead. His father was a maker of wind instruments,
who died six months after his son's birth. His mother remarried, and
his stepfather proved a kind protector. Nothing of external importance
occurred in the life of Max Stirner that might place him apart from his
fellow-students. He was very industrious over his books at Bayreuth,
and when he became a student at the Berlin University he attended the
lectures regularly, preparing himself for a teacher's profession. He
mastered the classics, modern philosophy, and modern languages. But
he did not win a doctor's degree; just before examinations his mother
became ill with a mental malady (a fact his critics have noted) and
the son dutifully gave up everything so as to be near her. After her
death he married a girl who died within a short time. Later, in 1843,
his second wife was Marie Dähnhardt, a very "advanced" young woman, who
came from Schwerin to Berlin to lead a "free" life. She met Stirner
in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in the Friedrichstrasse, where
radical young thinkers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl Marx,
Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and other stormy insurgents. She
had, it is said, about 10,000 thalers. She was married with the ring
wrenched from a witness's purse--her bridegroom had forgotten to
provide one. He was not a practical man; if he had been he would hardly
have written The Ego and His Own.
It was finished between the years 1843 and 1845; the latter date it
was published. It created a stir, though the censor did not seriously
interfere with it; its attacks on the prevailing government were
veiled. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane expresses itself in
metaphysics; in Poland and Russia music is the safer medium. Feuerbach,
Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner's terrible arraignment of society,
but men's thoughts were interested elsewhere, and with the revolt
of 1848 Stirner was quite effaced. He had taught for five years in
a fashionable school for young ladies; he had written for several
periodicals, and translated extracts from the works of Say and Adam
Smith.
After his book appeared, his relations with his wife became uneasy.
Late in 1846 or early in 1847 she left him and went to London, where
she supported herself by writing; later she inherited a small sum from
a sister, visited Australia, married a labourer there, and became a
washerwoman. In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking her for
some facts in the life of her husband. She replied tartly that she was
not willing to revive her past; that her husband had been too much of
an egotist to keep friends, and was "very sly." This was all he could
extort from the woman, who evidently had never understood her husband
and execrated his memory, probably because her little fortune was
swallowed up by their mutual improvidence. Another appeal only elicited
the answer that "Mary Smith is preparing for death"--she had become a
Roman Catholic. It is the irony of things in general that his book is
dedicated to "My Sweetheart, Marie Dähnhardt."
Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious existence. The old
jolly crowd at Hippel's seldom saw him. He was in prison twice for
debt--free Prussia--and often lacked bread. He, the exponent of
Egoism, of philosophic anarchy, starved because of his pride. He was
in all matters save his theories a moderate man, eating and drinking
temperately, living frugally. Unassuming in manners, he could hold his
own in debate--and Hippel's appears to have been a rude, debating
society--yet one who avoided life rather than mastered it. He was of
medium height, ruddy, and his eyes deep-blue. His hands were white,
slender, "aristocratic," writes Mackay. Certainly not the figure of
a stalwart shatterer of conventions, not the ideal iconoclast; above
all, without a touch of the melodrama of communistic anarchy, with its
black flags, its propaganda by force, its idolatry of assassinations,
bomb-throwing, killing of fat, harmless policemen, and its sentimental
gabble about Fraternity. Stirner hated the word Equality; he knew it
was a lie, knew that all men are born unequal, as no two grains of sand
on earth ever are or ever will be alike. He was a solitary. And thus he
died at the age of fifty. A few of his former companions heard of his
neglected condition and buried him. Nearly a half century later Mackay,
with the co-operation of Hans von Bülow, affixed a commemorative tablet
on the house where he last lived, Phillipstrasse 19, Berlin, and alone
Mackay placed a slab to mark his grave in the Sophienkirchhof.
It is to the poet of the Letzte Erkentniss, with its stirring line,
"Doch bin ich mein," that I owe the above scanty details of the most
thorough-going Nihilist who ever penned his disbelief in religion,
humanity, society, the family. He rejects them all. We have no genuine
portrait of this insurrectionist--he preferred personal insurrection
to general revolution; the latter, he asserted, brought in its train
either Socialism or a tyrant--except a sketch hastily made by
Friedrich Engels, the revolutionist, for Mackay. It is not reassuring.
Stirner looks like an old-fashioned German and timid pedagogue, high
coat-collar, spectacles, clean-shaven face, and all. This valiant enemy
of the State, of socialism, was, perhaps, only brave on paper. But his
icy, relentless, epigrammatic style is in the end more gripping than
the spectacular, volcanic, whirling utterances of Nietzsche. Nietzsche
lives in an ivory tower and is an aristocrat. Into Stirner's land
all are welcome. That is, if men have the will to rebel, and if they
despise the sentimentality of mob rule. The Ego and His Own is the most
drastic criticism of socialism thus far presented.