126 Nietzscheyears before his collapse, however, a major debate flared up on the ques-
tion of whether Nietzsche had known Stirner and was inspired by him.
The most extreme position in this debate—in which Peter Gast,
Nietzsche's sister, Nietzsche's longtime friend Franz Overbeck, and
Eduard von Hartmann were embroiled—was adopted by those who
accused him of plagiarism. Hartmann, for example, argued that
Nietzsche had known Stirner's works, since the second Untimely
Meditation criticized the very passages of Hartmann's work that dealt
with an explicit rejection of Stirner's philosophy. Nietzsche had to have
known about Stirner in at least this way. Hartmann also pointed up par-
allel lines of thought and posed the question as to why, if Nietzsche had
been inspired by Stirner, he had systematically failed to mention him.
The answer, obvious in his day, was formulated by one contemporary as
follows: "[Nietzsche] would have been permanendy discredited in any
educated milieu if he had demonstrated even the least bit of sympathy
for Stirner, a coarse and ruthless man who insisted on naked egoism and
anarchism; the censorship in Berlin, which was a general source of
embarrassment, allowed the publication of Stirner's book for one rea-
son alone: the thoughts it presented were so exaggerated that no one
would concur with them" (Rahden 485).
Given the unfavorable reputation of Stirner, one could easily imagine
that Nietzsche had no desire to be mentioned in the same breath as this
philosophical outcast. Franz Overbeck's inquiries revealed that
Nietzsche had sent his student Adolf Baumgartner to borrow Stirner's
works from the Basel library in 1874. Was it perhaps a precautionary
measure to have the student bring them? In any case, that is how the
news was received by the public, an interpretation that was supported by
the memoirs of Ida Overbeck, a close friend of Nietzsche's in the 1870s.
She reported: "On one occasion, when my husband had gone out, he
[Nietzsche] talked with me for a litde while and named two particular
eccentric characters who were on his mind and in whose works he saw
an affinity with his own. He was quite elated and happy, as he always was
when he became aware of inner associations. A bit later he saw a copy