Hamburg is both the site of Stephan Labude’s political organizing and the city where his relationship with Leda collapses. It gives his hopes for collective reform a concrete beginning, then turns into the setting of a night-long vigil that confirms his private suspicions. The city’s role is therefore double: a place where Labude imagines a new political future and where he learns that the future he had expected with Leda is already compromised.

Political organizing

Labude travels to Hamburg after Rassow invites him to speak at the university’s Auditorium Maximum, before students from different political tendencies. Rassow speaks about his journey to Russia and conversations with Russian artists and scholars; socialist students interrupt him, and a Communist speaker is in turn interrupted by bourgeois students. When Labude addresses the gathering, he argues that bourgeois youth should become more radical and help prevent Europe’s ruin. He calls for limits on private profit, capitalism, and technology, alongside stronger social provision and deeper cultural education.

The proposal meets the extreme factions’ customary amusement, but Rassow’s motion to form a radical bourgeois initiative wins support. The group drafts an appeal for universities across Europe. Labude and Rassow intend to visit German universities, give lectures, and establish similar groups, with the hope of forming a kind of alliance with socialist students. The plan is not merely a speech: a group has been formed and an organizing campaign is set in motion. Hamburg is thus the starting point for Labude’s attempt to translate political diagnosis into coordinated action.

The initiative also exposes a tension in Labude’s project. He believes the younger generation can take over from fathers who have exhausted their authority and can choose reform over the system’s eventual collapse. Yet the proposal is greeted with laughter by the most extreme political groups, and its hoped-for alliance remains prospective. The city’s political meeting offers a beginning, not proof that the cross-class front Labude imagines can succeed.

Leda and the night vigil

Labude’s trip also brings him back to Leda, who sends greetings when he later tells Jakob Fabian he has been in Hamburg. He initially defers speaking about her. In recounting the visit, however, he explains that he had been anxious before their recent meetings and believed she was lying. After repeatedly asking her by letter to explain herself and receiving no answer, he decides to confront the situation rather than continue waiting for an explanation.

On the night the initiative is founded, Labude leaves Rassow and the others early and goes to Leda’s house. The street faces the Outer Alster: one side is built up, while the other opens onto flower beds, lawns, paths, and shrubbery. Across from the house, Labude sits on a bench and smokes through the hours between midnight and three in the morning. Each approaching figure seems at first to be Leda. As he waits, he imagines the fierce conversations and painful scenes that might be coming; the political meeting’s achievement is followed by a private uncertainty he cannot settle by argument.

Shortly after three, a taxi stops outside. A tall, slender man gets out, pays the driver, and is followed into the house by a woman who unlocks the door and holds it open for him. Labude watches the car return to the city. It is Leda. Light appears in her windows, and Labude sees two shadows moving behind the curtains. The living room goes dark and the bedroom lights up; sometimes he hears her distinctive high laugh, and sometimes the street is silent except for his heartbeat.

The vigil continues into morning. Rain begins around five and stops after six. At seven, the man leaves the house, whistling and looking up. Leda appears on the balcony in a Japanese dressing gown, waves, and briefly spreads the garment to show her body again. The man blows her a kiss and walks away whistling. Labude lowers his head; above him, Leda closes the balcony door. The details of the long wait—its hours, the taxi, the illuminated rooms, the dawn rain, and the exchanged gestures—make the discovery less a sudden suspicion than a scene witnessed in stages.

The confrontation and its aftermath

After returning to the account, Labude describes visiting Leda later that day. She is pleased to see him and asks why he has not written; she has tea and cake ready. He drinks tea and speaks first of indifferent matters. When he asks what she would think about ending their relationship, she protests that they have agreed to marry once he completes his habilitation and asks whether he no longer loves her. Labude says that love is not the issue he is raising: he considers their increasing estrangement, for which he holds her responsible, reason enough to separate.

Leda answers by questioning his own role in their distance. She says that the separation between Hamburg and Berlin is difficult to bridge emotionally and describes their sexual relationship as strained by the mismatch between when she wants him and when he is present. She also reveals that she had undergone a medical procedure weeks earlier, explaining that she did not want their children to be born before she became his wife and that she had withheld the information to spare him worry. Her account complicates the encounter without undoing what Labude has seen: he approaches the conversation with the certainty of betrayal, while Leda appeals to their promised marriage and offers her own explanation of their difficulties.

Hamburg’s significance rests in this collision of scales. Labude leaves the university meeting with a new organization and a plan to carry its appeal from campus to campus; in the same city, he watches the private promise of marriage give way to evidence of another man. The story does not present political purpose as a cure for personal hurt. Instead, the city holds both: the beginning of collective action and the end of Labude’s confidence in his relationship with Leda.