The controversy regarding his work is still alive today.
Stirner was born Johann Kaspar Schmidt on 25 October 1806 in Bayreuth, Bavaria, to a fairly well-to-do lower-middle-class Lutheran family. His father, Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt, was a craftsman who made musical instruments; he died when Johann Kaspar was eighteen months old. A few years later his mother, Sophia Eleonora, married Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Ballerstedt, a pharmacist.
The parents left Bayreuth in 1809 and settled in Culm on the Vistula; the boy was left behind with relatives, then joined his parents in 1810. In 1818 he was sent back to Bayreuth to stay with his father's elder sister, Anna Marie, and her husband, Johann Casper Martin Sticht. He attended the Altsprachliche Gymnasium, a high school specializing in classical Greek and Latin. There he acquired a nickname that he liked so much that he discarded his commonplace given name, which would be equivalent in English to "John Smith." Because of his unusually high forehead--in German, Stirn--his fellow students called him Stirner. After graduating in 1826 as number three in a class of twenty-five, he attended the University of Berlin for two years; his teachers included the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
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