Es lebe der kleine Unterschied!

“Es lebe der kleine Unterschied!” is a slogan of sexual difference first shouted by Selow as she breaks away from the sculptor and leaves with Labude, then repeated by Cornelia in bed with Fabian. The phrase’s return shifts it from a public declaration into intimate play, preserving the scene’s irreverent charge while giving the words a new, personal setting.

The Outburst

At a dance, Selow—drunk and scarcely listening as the sculptor presses her to dance—suddenly frees herself, crosses the floor unsteadily, and slams the piano lid shut. After demanding a man and insulting the sculptor, she pulls Labude from his stool, kisses him, puts on her hat, and drags him toward the door before he can properly take his coat. She shouts the slogan as they disappear. The line caps a sudden, physical break: Selow turns a blunt declaration of desire into an action, leaving the sculptor alone on the dance floor with her hands clenched.

A Private Refrain

Fabian and Cornelia leave soon afterward. In a later scene, they have spent the evening together in Fabian’s room; they arrange to meet again the next day and devise a discreet way to signal who has arrived first, hoping Frau Hohlfeld will not notice. As the light goes out, Cornelia settles beside Fabian, draws his head into her hands, and whispers the slogan while recalling Selow’s earlier cry. The words now belong to the couple’s intimacy: Cornelia invokes the public spectacle as a teasing prompt in a private encounter.

Repetition and Change

The repeated exclamation links two scenes through a phrase rather than through a shared event. Selow’s shout accompanies a decisive departure and a conspicuous rejection of the sculptor; Cornelia’s whisper recalls that defiance in a quieter, intimate register. The recurrence makes the line both a comic refrain and a marker of contrast between public performance and private desire, without dissolving the difference between the two women’s circumstances.