Fabian takes in the inventor Korrepp

Fabian takes in the inventor Korrepp, offering shelter to a man who has abandoned both his fortune and faith in his own machines after seeing workers suffer from their effects. Their encounter turns Fabian’s modest hospitality into a practical act of protection: he offers his sofa, hides Korrepp in a wardrobe, and keeps the inventor’s plans when Korrepp is taken away to a sanatorium. The episode sets the destructive consequences of technological progress against an improvised, personal response to hardship.

Korrepp and the Cost of Invention

Korrepp introduces himself as an inventor and honorary member of five scientific academies. His machines helped the textile industry produce five times as much cloth per day as before, and the resulting industrial profits enriched many people, including himself. Yet he has come to see the machines not as peaceful instruments but as weapons against workers: as productivity increased, the number of people employed fell. He describes their effect as putting whole armies of workers out of action and destroying the claims of hundreds of thousands to a livelihood.

His judgment rests on a particular memory from Manchester. He witnessed police charge at locked-out workers and strike their heads with sabres; a little girl was trampled by a horse. Korrepp says he was responsible. The scene makes his remorse more than an abstract objection to technology: he connects his inventions to specific violence and to the people who bore its cost. His decision to give away money and refuse further involvement with machines follows from that recognition.

Korrepp’s family responded to his break with his former life by placing him under legal guardianship. He left, and for six months he has been missing while his family continues to live in his house on Lake Starnberg. A newspaper report that his daughter had given birth has made him a grandfather, but the news finds him living as a wanderer in Berlin. He tells Fabian that he is carrying sketches and calculations for a new loom design, worth millions, in his patched coat pocket. He would rather starve than return to the use or ownership of his inventions, and he has considered going to Russia to offer his services, though he cannot travel without a passport and fears his name would prevent him from crossing the border.

A Life on the Margins

Korrepp describes a daily existence organized around finding somewhere to stay without being recognized or turned away. On the night he meets Fabian, he plans to enter a building at Yorckstrasse 93 shortly before its gate closes, claim to be visiting the Grünbergs, and climb past their fourth-floor flat toward the attic. He hopes the door will be open and that there may be an old mattress in a corner. The Grünbergs are not acquaintances: he found their name in a directory so he would have an answer if the porter questioned him. He changes his address every day, and when the deception is discovered, he moves on.

His attempts at work have also failed. During the winter he taught physics at a private school, but his lessons became a course against the wonders of technology, displeasing both pupils and the director. He then spent a quarter of a year warming himself in post offices. In warmer weather, he no longer needs them; instead, he sits for hours in railway stations watching people depart, arrive, and remain behind. He says he is glad to be alive. The station, with its traffic of departures and returns, becomes a place from which he observes movement without belonging to it.

When Korrepp asks Fabian what he does, Fabian answers that he is unemployed. Their circumstances are not identical: Korrepp has moved from wealth to poverty, while Fabian has just lost his job. But both are exposed to material uncertainty, and Fabian does not treat his own insecurity as a reason to withhold help. He writes down his address and tells Korrepp to come if a porter removes him from a stairwell; the sofa is available. Korrepp worries about the landlady’s reaction, while Fabian shrugs off the concern. The offer is concrete, made before Fabian knows how long the guest may need shelter.

The Sofa, the Wardrobe, and the Sanatorium

Korrepp takes Fabian up on the offer after hearing about the sofa. He avoids the lodging he had planned at Yorckstrasse and comes instead to Fabian’s building, apologizing for troubling someone who is himself out of work. Fabian’s unemployment becomes impossible to keep from Cornelia: she asks whether it is true, and he tells her that he was dismissed that morning. He received 270 marks; after paying the rent in advance, only 190 remain for the two of them. The disclosure arrives as Fabian is considering how to tell her, and the unexpected visitor interrupts their planned walk.

They settle Korrepp on the sofa with a standing lamp because he wants to work on calculations for his secret machine. Fabian returns later with sandwiches. Korrepp promises not to cough, and Fabian tells him he may cough there; the immediate difficulty is not the sound but the landlady, Frau Hohlfeld, who would be angered to find a stranger camping on her furniture. The next morning, when Fabian goes to wake him, Korrepp is already washed, dressed, seated at the table, and calculating. He praises the sofa as a natural sleeping couch and asks whether he must leave.

Fabian devises a temporary solution for the landlady’s visit. While he bathes and Frau Hohlfeld brings breakfast, Korrepp is to hide in the wardrobe; afterward he can stay for several more hours while Fabian goes out to look for work. Fabian presents the arrangement as a break with the wardrobe’s familiar association with bedroom farce. Korrepp looks skeptically into the cupboard and asks whether Fabian bathes for long. Fabian moves aside his only other suit, tells his guest to climb in, and Korrepp enters in his cape and hat, carrying his umbrella. The wardrobe creaks at every seam. When Korrepp asks what will happen if he is discovered, Fabian jokes that he will move out on the first of the month.

The concealment lasts only until the morning’s visitors arrive. Korrepp gives Fabian an envelope containing his machine plans, saying that his family is after him and wants to put him in an asylum, probably to get the notes and turn them into money. He is not frightened of the institution itself: he has been there before, likes its park, and considers the director tolerable, though somewhat mad and an excellent chess player. If he tires of the place, he says, he can escape again. He insists that he is not mad but too sensible for his relatives, and asks Fabian to write to him at the sanatorium in Bergendorf.

A doctor arrives with an attendant and explains that, acting under authorization Korrepp may inspect, he is to remove Professor Korrepp from Fabian’s company. A car is waiting below. Korrepp recognizes the doctor, remarks that he had already realized the family was following him, and goes without resisting. Before leaving, he opens the wardrobe and looks inside. He then takes Fabian’s hand, thanks him, and tells Fabian’s mother that she has a good son. Fabian and his mother watch from the window as the doctor and attendant accompany him outside; the chauffeur helps him into a dust coat, and Korrepp’s cape is put away.

Hospitality and the Limits of Rescue

The episode gives Fabian’s kindness a material form but not the power to solve Korrepp’s situation. Fabian can offer a couch, food, a hiding place, and a promise to write; he cannot prevent the family’s representatives from taking the inventor away. Korrepp, for his part, entrusts Fabian with the plans that embody both his remaining intellectual work and the wealth his family may seek. Shelter briefly makes the inventor less exposed, but the envelope extends Fabian’s responsibility beyond the room.

The wardrobe gives that hospitality a comic, precarious shape. Korrepp’s desperate housing arrangements lead from a stairwell and attic to a sofa and then, while Frau Hohlfeld is nearby, to a cramped cupboard. The scene’s humor does not erase the underlying vulnerability: a celebrated inventor carrying a million-mark design in a patched pocket must hide in borrowed furniture, while Fabian, newly dismissed and counting the rent money left for himself and Cornelia, makes room for him. The distinction between a great industrial achievement and a person’s immediate need is sharply reduced to a sofa, a few sandwiches, and a place to stay.

Korrepp’s departure closes the visit without resolving his conflict with his family or the fate of his plans. His calm acceptance of the sanatorium contrasts with the urgency of the relatives who want control of his papers. The episode leaves Fabian with the envelope and with a promise to write to Bergendorf, while the inventor’s brief stay has also exposed Fabian’s unemployment to Cornelia. Hospitality here is neither a cure nor a rescue; it is a small refusal to let another person face the night alone.