Das Leben war eine der interessantesten Beschäftigungen, trotz alledem
Fabian“Das Leben war eine der interessantesten Beschäftigungen, trotz alledem” is a momentary affirmation in Jakob Fabian’s final passage through the city. After wondering whether leaving Berlin would be an evasion of action, he returns to the thought that life remains worth attending to; the conviction is tested almost at once when he runs to rescue a boy and drowns.
The Sentence in Context
Fabian has just considered going away to the mountains, where he might wait in quiet for a signal to act. Yet, leaving the café, he questions whether this plan is simply flight and whether a person intent on acting might find a place to do so anywhere. The sentence arrives after that uncertainty, not as a resolution of it but as a brief turn back toward life.
The surrounding street offers a telling contrast. Fabian stops before shops displaying dresses, hats, and rings, but sees nothing; at a corset shop, he seems to recover his attention. The old Baroque buildings of Schloßstraße remain standing, though their builders and first tenants have long been dead. Against this image of continuity amid human disappearance, Fabian thinks that life is one of the most interesting occupations, despite everything—and is glad he did not turn back.
From Reflection to Action
The line does not announce a settled plan or a confidence that circumstances will improve. Its qualification, “despite everything,” carries the strain of the moment: Fabian has been unable to decide where or with whom he could join an effort, and has questioned whether he is made to be a spectator rather than an actor. The statement affirms life while leaving that uncertainty intact.
Fabian then crosses a bridge and sees a little boy balancing on its stone railing. He quickens his pace and runs. When he sees the child in the water, he takes off his jacket and jumps in to save him. The boy swims ashore crying; Fabian drowns because he cannot swim. The movement from the sentence’s considered attention to life to this immediate, fatal act makes its affirmation concrete without turning it into a promise of survival.
Meaning and Ending
The sentence’s force depends on the reversal that follows. Fabian has feared that he can only stand aside, unable to find a cause or allies; at the bridge, he does not wait for the larger signal he imagined. Faced with one child in danger, he acts. The rescue succeeds for the boy and ends in Fabian’s death, an outcome that sharply separates the value he places on life from any assurance that action will preserve his own.
Placed just before the novel’s final rescue, the sentence gathers Fabian’s ambivalence into a single thought: life remains absorbing even when its circumstances seem hopeless, but that interest does not resolve the question of how to live or guarantee a favorable result. The last scene makes the thought more than a detached observation, while the fatal consequence prevents it from becoming a simple moral of triumph.
