Founding a radical bourgeois student initiative group

The founding of a radical bourgeois student initiative group is Stephan Labude’s practical answer to what he sees as Europe’s impending collapse: a university-based movement that would unite politically minded young people across class lines and pursue reform before crisis turns into catastrophe. Its creation gives institutional form to Labude’s reformist convictions, even as Jakob Fabian doubts that reason can ever secure power and the surrounding streets display politics collapsing into armed conflict.

Hamburg: From Debate to Organization

Labude recounts the group’s origins to Fabian after returning from Hamburg. He had been invited by Rassow to attend a debate at the university’s Auditorium Maximum on “Tradition and Socialism,” where Rassow spoke about his journey to Russia and conversations with Russian artists and scholars. Socialist students repeatedly interrupted Rassow; a Communist speaker who followed was in turn interrupted by bourgeois students. The meeting made visible the divisions the proposed initiative would have to cross.

When Labude spoke, he sketched Europe’s capitalist situation and argued that bourgeois youth should become radicalized and try to arrest a continental ruin being prepared, passively or actively, from every direction. He expected the younger generation soon to inherit leadership in politics, industry, landholding, and commerce, since the fathers had exhausted their authority. Reform, in his account, meant voluntarily reducing private profit, restraining capitalism and technology to reasonable proportions, increasing social provision, and deepening cultural education and teaching.

Labude proposed a new front linking classes. He believed that at least the elite among the young rejected unrestrained egoism and could recognize that a return to more organic social conditions was preferable to the system’s inevitable collapse. If class rule could not be avoided, he argued, the regime should belong to his generation. Representatives of the most extreme factions greeted his address with the customary laughter, but Rassow’s motion to establish a radical bourgeois initiative nevertheless won applause. The proposal became an actual group: the decisive step from a speech about reform to an organized political undertaking.

Program and Expansion

The group drafted an appeal intended for distribution to universities throughout Europe. Labude, Rassow, and several others planned to visit German universities, lecture, and establish similar local groups. They hoped to form a kind of alliance with socialist students; once networks existed at all the universities, those groups would approach other intellectual bodies as well. The initiative thus began not as a single campus association but as a projected chain of organizing, intended to connect students across institutions and political divisions.

Labude tells Fabian that the project is already getting under way. He had withheld the news the previous day because he knew his friend’s skepticism. Fabian responds with sincere pleasure that Labude can begin realizing his plan, while suggesting contact with a group of independent democrats and mentioning a “Club Europa” formed in Copenhagen. His encouragement is real, but it does not erase their disagreement: he says he cannot believe that reason and power will ever marry, and describes human political life as trapped between violent attempts to improve an unsatisfactory condition and despairing self-destruction in a supposedly satisfactory one.

Political Violence as Counterpoint

The initiative’s hope for organized reform is set beside street-level violence. In an earlier encounter, Fabian and Labude hear gunshots and a cry near the museum; Labude runs toward the disturbance, and Fabian follows despite his aching heart. They find a wounded young man who says a tavern quarrel began when another man drew a swastika on a tablecloth. After the wounded man objected and struck him, the tavern keeper threw them out; the other man followed, denounced the International, and shot him. Labude takes the gun from the wounded man and attempts to bandage his leg.

When another man reaches for a revolver, Labude restrains his wrist and Fabian removes the weapon. Fabian then addresses the men on both sides, condemning a cold dictatorship that preserves untenable conditions while also rejecting reciprocal gunfire as futile. The injured worker calls Fabian a bourgeois; Fabian accepts the label, specifying that he is a petty bourgeois, now a major insult. The scene gives the initiative’s proposed cross-class politics a concrete, difficult setting: opposed factions meet not in a lecture hall but amid wounded bodies, seized weapons, and mutual accusation.

The later clashes at Wedding deepen that contrast. As Fabian passes through the district, police seal off Reinickendorfer Street while workers approach. Mounted police wait behind the barrier; uniformed proletarians face proletarian civilians, and the workers’ songs give way to furious shouting as the opposing lines close. The police advance, then strike; horses charge into the opened space, shots are heard, windows break, stones fly, and a police sergeant is stabbed. Reinforcements arrive in three lorries, and workers retreat before gathering again at the edges of the square and adjoining streets. Fabian pushes through the crowd and leaves. Set against Labude’s project of lectures, appeals, and alliances, the confrontation makes the costs and limits of political organization palpable: the social divisions the initiative hopes to bridge are already being enforced through police lines and street violence.

Significance and Limits

The initiative marks a genuine change in Labude’s role: he is no longer only a thinker describing reform but one of the organizers trying to build it. Its program is specific—curbing private profit and unchecked technical and capitalist development, expanding social services, and improving education—and its method is cumulative, moving from a Hamburg meeting to a European appeal, university visits, local groups, and alliances with socialists and intellectual organizations.

Yet the founding scene refuses a simple triumphal reading. Applause for Rassow’s motion establishes that the group has begun, not that it has overcome the political forces arrayed against its aims. Fabian welcomes Labude’s action while questioning whether reason can command power; the armed quarrel and Wedding confrontation dramatize that doubt in escalating forms. The initiative therefore stands between possibility and foreboding: a deliberate attempt to organize reform in a society where debate is interrupted, class language hardens into accusation, and political conflict repeatedly becomes physical.