1. Engels to Marx, November 19, 1844; cf. Karl Marx — Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1961 ff.), XXVII, 12 (Henceforth abbreviated MEW, followed by volume and page). It should be noticed that this passage (in which Engels also writes that “each word that one has to waste on ‘the Man’ and each line that one has to write or read against theology or abstraction as well as against crass materialism makes me angry”) follows Engels’ discussion of Stirner’s book.
2. For the text of the contract see MEW, XXVII, 669.
3. Cf. Marx’s letter to the publisher K. W. Leske, MEW, XXVII, 447, and the foot notes 6 and 364 in the same volume.
4. Engels to Marx, March 17, 1845; cf. MEW, XXVII, 26. Engels of course was wrong. Within a few months after the publication of The Holy Family, Bauer published a reply entitled “Characteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs” in Wigands Vierteljahresschrift, 1845 (3), 86–146, in which, like Stirner, he argued that Feuerbach’s humanism embraced by Marx and Engels in The Holy Family was ultimately only a variation of the Christian or “theological” position.
5. MEW, XIII, 10. Later Engels referred to The Holy Family as the book which best shows how much he and Marx were “temporarily Feuerbachians,” even though he correctly emphasizes that already in The Holy Family they had begun to overcome “the cult of abstract man, which was the kernel of Feuerbach’s new religion,” MEW, XXI, 272 and 290. However, then he wrote these lines (in 1886), he had already forgotten that the first to overcome this “cult of abstract man” had been Moses Hess, who in an article entitled “On the socialist movement in Germany,” written in the early summer of 1844, pointed out that Feuerbach’s notion of “species essence” was “rather mystical.” Cf. Moses Hess, Politische und sozialistische Schriften, 1837–1850, ed. by A. Cornu and W. Mönke, ((East) Berlin, 1961), 292 ff.