“Died of sorrow”

“Died of sorrow” is Hans Leube’s explanation for his wife’s death and, eventually, the phrase he reveals as a lie concealing her murder. First repeated as a settled village account, it returns in a private confession to Benno von Archimboldi: Leube says he pushed his wife into a ravine, brought her body home, and reported that she had died of sorrow. The expression’s significance lies in that reversal. What sounds like a conventional cause of death becomes the language through which Leube has disguised violence and, years later, disclosed it.

The Public Explanation

Leube’s account of his wife’s death has become familiar enough to be repeated without explanation. When Ingeborg asks how his wife died, he answers, as he always does, that she died of sorrow. The phrase is short and definitive; it offers a cause that appears to settle the matter while leaving no account of what happened. Its habitual use gives the story the air of a fixed fact, even as a different version circulates beyond the village.

Ingeborg brings that other version into their conversation. She tells Leube that she has heard people in town say he killed his wife. He does not act surprised, but denies the accusation by appealing to the expected consequence of murder: if he had killed her, he says, he would be in prison. His claim that killers eventually go to prison makes the absence of punishment sound like proof of innocence. Ingeborg counters that men who kill their wives often escape prison. The exchange reveals that the phrase “died of sorrow” sits beside a suspicion Leube already knows about, not outside it.

A Novelistic Alibi

Leube laughs at Ingeborg’s objection and says that such impunity happens only in novels. The remark turns their disagreement into a pointed irony. In the story he tells, a killer would inevitably face justice; in the life he has lived, he can conceal a killing behind an official death and continue residing in the village. His dismissal of Ingeborg’s claim therefore sounds less like a reliable rule than a defense of the narrative that has protected him.

When Ingeborg asks whether he reads novels, Leube says that he did when he was younger, when his parents were alive and he had time to waste. Then, after a long silence, he asks how he could have killed his wife. The question does not resolve the accusation. Instead, the conversation leaves the public explanation intact while making its fragility increasingly apparent: the account of sorrow is repeated, the counterstory is spoken aloud, and Leube remains unpunished.

The Confession and Its Aftermath

Leube’s explanation changes meaning when he later tells Archimboldi that Ingeborg was right. He confesses that he pushed his wife into a ravine, though he hesitates over its name, recalling either the Virgin’s ravine or the Flower ravine. He describes bringing her back to the house, washing and dressing her, and laying her on the bed. He then explains the phrase he had used: he said she died of sorrow, and compares sorrow to the broken bones and bruising that, in his account, characterized her body. The euphemism is thus not merely a false label; it is the language with which he made the consequences of violence pass as an ordinary death.

The concealment extended beyond speech. Leube says that he made the coffin in one night, buried his wife the next day, and handled the papers in Kempten. Some clerks, he admits, appeared suspicious, but they registered the death. He returned to the village and kept living alone. The phrase “died of sorrow” belongs to this chain of actions: an explanation, a burial, and an administrative account that allowed the killing to remain hidden.

Leube gives the confession to Archimboldi to pass on to Ingeborg. He says he wants her to know because she was right, making the earlier exchange the immediate context for his disclosure. His long-maintained story is not corrected publicly in the evidence presented; instead, its truth is entrusted to another person for delivery. “Died of sorrow” consequently marks both the success of the cover story and the belated breach in it. The words once used to close inquiry become the means by which Leube acknowledges what the phrase had concealed.