It’s mostly a meme, copy/pasting from an old thread on :reddit-logo: :

I am honestly a bit at a loss of how to respond to that claim. It is not like the only source for Stirner's existence is German Ideology and his own works. Contemporaries wrote about him, Bruno Bauer for example. And just from a timing standpoint, Marx and Engels only began to collaborate closely in 1845, which is a year after Stirner finished his most famous work , The Ego and its Own, to say nothing of all the other works he wrote before then.

Stirner (real name Johann Kaspar Schmidt) himself died young and was not as influential as Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin or some of the other more famous radical thinkers in his own day, and even when he came into some prominence at the end of the nineteenth century it was among fairly narrow groups (the budding individualist tradition, maybe Nietzche, existentialists, etc), it never had the all encompassing reach of Marx, so it makes sense that there was not the fervent collecting and compiling of his works that there was with Marx (Armand notes that the first real biography of him was published in 1897). This makes it more difficult to do casual research on him, but to go from that to "he did not exist" is just bizarre.

Biographical details are from Guerrin's anthology No Gods, No Masters, which includes a brief biographical sketch by turn of the century anarchist thinker Emile Armand.

It is also simply wrong that we know about him mostly through Engels, since there is a 200+ page book by John Henry Mackay, Max Stirner: His Life and His Work, published in 1897 and which can be freely found online.

idk though, believing he’s a character Engels came up with is much funnier