Heidelberg is the place where Jakob Fabian first met Stephan Labude, linking the city to the beginning of a friendship whose significance becomes clear only after Labude’s death.

The Recalled Meeting

The novel identifies Heidelberg in a conversation between Fabian’s parents the morning after Fabian has lost his job. His mother tells his father that Fabian’s friend Labude has killed himself and recalls that Fabian met him in Heidelberg. The brief reference supplies the friendship’s point of origin without describing the meeting itself.

Heidelberg in the Family Conversation

Fabian’s father says he did not know his son had a friend, adding that he learns nothing about him. His wife answers that he simply does not listen. When she returns to the room after the shop bell rings, her husband is reading the newspaper. Heidelberg is thus invoked within a domestic exchange that contrasts the mother’s knowledge of her son’s life with the father’s inattention; the city itself remains a recalled starting point, not a narrated setting.