4 ° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 41 31In fact, the final report on Marx's university career declared that he had
'several times been sued for debt', and he had changed his address at least
ten times during his five-year stay.
His family ties were further loosened by the death of his father in
May 1838. In spite of their disagreements, Marx always retained a strong
affection for his father: 'he has never tired of talking about him', wrote
Eleanor, 'and always carried an old daguerreotype photograph of him.
But he would never show the photo to strangers, because, he said, it was
so unlike the original.'^106 On Marx's death, Engels laid the photograph in
his coffin. The death of Heinrich Marx naturally reduced the income of
the Marx family quite considerably. It also led to increased difficulties
with the von Westphalen family, some of whom seem to have snubbed
Henrietta Marx completely.^107 At the same time Marx's interests began to
turn definitely from law to philosophy. Although in his letter of November
1837 he had written to his father about the possibility of his becoming
an assistant judge, he began now more and more to opt out of the formal
aspects of the university. Gans died in 1839 and during his last three
years in Berlin Marx only attended two courses: one on Isaiah given by
Bruno Bauer and another on the drama of Euripides. Marx had entirely
given up the writing of poetry and when he wished to present more
poems to Jenny in 1839 he very sensibly copied some out from two
anthologies that had recently appeared.
With the diminishing lack of support from his family, the choice of a
career became all the more pressing, and the academic world seemed to
offer the most immediate prospect of effective action. 'It would be stupid',
Bruno Bauer wrote to him, 'if you were to devote yourself to a practical
career. Theory is now the strongest practice, and we are absolutely
incapable of predicting to how large an extent it will become practical."^08
At the beginning of 1839 Marx decided to start work on a doctoral
dissertation with a view to getting a university post as lecturer in philo-
sophy - preferably at Bonn to which Bauer, increasingly under attack for
his radical views, had been moved by the Ministry of Education. Through-
out 1839 and early 1840 Marx was busy reading and making excerpts for
use in his thesis. The general heading he gave to these notes was 'Epi-
curean Philosophy'. At the same time he was reading Hegel, Aristotle,
Leibnitz, Hume and Kant, and his preliminary notes were very wide-
ranging, dealing with such subjects as the relationship between Epicurean-
ism and Stoicism, the concept of the sage in Greek philosophy, the views
of Socrates and Plato on religion and the prospects of post-Hegelian
philosophy.
Marx's choice of subject was influenced by the general interest that the
Young Hegelians (particularly Bauer and Koppen) had in post-Aristotelian