Biography | Karl Marx — The Jena Diploma He Never Collected in Person

People imagine a defence in a packed hall and a handshake on the steps.

Jena granted the degree in absentia. Marx was in Berlin.

In April 1841 he sent the dissertation Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie to the Philosophical Faculty at this university, which then lay outside Prussia.

The literature professor Oskar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff forwarded the file.

On 13 April 1841 the dean, Carl Friedrich Bachmann, presented Carl Heinrich Marx of Trier to the faculty.

The doctorate was issued on 15 April 1841 with the mark vorzüglich würdig — especially worthy.

He had been warned that a Berlin faculty might block a known Young Hegelian. Jena was the workaround, and the paper was meant as an entre-billet to an academic post that never came.

The submitted manuscript itself is lost. A version prepared for print survives in later editions.

The original diploma went to Moscow with the university file after 1945.

The present main building at Fürstengraben 1 dates from 1908 and cannot be identified as the faculty's 1841 setting.

The [university's account](https://www.gw.uni-jena.de/65582/karl-marx) describes a later Marx bust installed in 1953; that commemoration is separate from the doctorate awarded in absentia.

The attached architectural photograph has not been established as a view of the 1841 faculty building.