Die Liebe krepiert an der Geographie
Fabian“Die Liebe krepiert an der Geographie” is Stephan Labude’s stark expression of a relationship worn down by distance. In his account, the problem is not simply that Leda lives in Hamburg while he lives in Berlin: separation has kept them from knowing one another’s changing lives, until intimacy itself becomes a repeated appointment rather than a shared life.
The phrase and its setting
Labude explains the expression to Jakob Fabian while recounting his suspicion that Leda has changed. For years, he says, they have been together for only two days and one night each month. In that arrangement, he argues, the relationship’s deterioration is almost inevitable and has little to do with either partner’s inherent worth.
The distance has made them strangers to the ordinary pressures and transformations of one another’s lives. Labude cannot know what worries Leda, whom she has come to know, or why she is changing; letters, he says, cannot bridge that gap. Their brief reunions repeat the same sequence: he travels to her, they kiss, go to the theater, exchange news, spend one night together, and part again until the next visit.
Intimacy reduced to a timetable
The phrase’s force comes from the contrast between emotional closeness and mechanical repetition. Labude describes the meetings as scheduled encounters in which affection is followed by sex “nach dem Kalender, mit der Uhr in der Hand.” Even their apparent tenderness has become difficult for him to trust: the welcome at the station, affectionate conversation, and passion in bed seem to him like performances.
The calendar that organizes their meetings cannot restore what the calendar leaves out. Labude has missed the continuous, informal knowledge through which partners recognize each other’s concerns and changes. Each reunion therefore begins with a gap the brief visit cannot close, and ends by reopening it.
Suspicion and the limits of the expression
Labude says he had begun to dread each meeting and wanted to tear away the mask he imagined on Leda’s face. Because she avoided explanations despite his repeated letters, he decided to observe her secretly. On the night the student initiative group was founded, he left Rassow and the others early, went to the house where Leda lived, found its windows dark, and waited.
The expression names the pressure of geographical separation, but Labude’s account also turns toward mistrust and concealment. He presents distance as the condition that undermined their knowledge of each other; the secret surveillance and his suspicion show how that estrangement has entered the relationship itself. The phrase is thus both a diagnosis of their recurring separation and the bitter threshold to Labude’s discovery of what their visits and letters no longer allowed him to know.
