 Between 1839 and 1844 Stirner maintained something of a double life in Berlin. He obtained a position at a well-regarded private girls’ school, and spent the next five years teaching history and literature, establishing a reputation as a polite and reliable teacher in the process. Away from his teaching post, however, Stirner began to frequent the more avant-garde of Berlin’s intellectual haunts. He used the reading room of the novelist Willibald Alexis (1798–1871), spent afternoons at the Café Stehely, and from 1841 onwards was a regular visitor to Hippel’s wine bar on the Friedrichstrasse. The last of these was the main meeting place of “the free”, an increasingly bohemian group of teachers, students, officers, and journalists, under the loose intellectual leadership of the left-Hegelian Bruno Bauer (1809-1882). The latter had recently been dismissed from his teaching post at the University of Bonn, following an official inquiry into the orthodoxy of his writings on the New Testament. This group included Marie Dähnhardt (1818–1902) who became Stirner’s second wife (and the dedicatee of The Ego and Its Own). In this unconventional environment, and despite his calm and unassuming personal appearance, Stirner gained a reputation for his hostility to religion, intolerance of moderation, and ability to provoke fierce argument.