Jakob Fabian and Stephan Labude’s friendship

Jakob Fabian and Stephan Labude’s friendship gives the novel a sustained argument between action and observation. Labude wants his friend to commit himself to a purpose; Fabian doubts that any available social system gives action meaning. Yet their exchanges are not merely philosophical. They share private spaces and public excursions, confide personal defeats, and move together toward danger. Labude’s insistence that Fabian can do more than watch meets a tenderness Fabian rarely turns into a program, but repeatedly demonstrates through attention and loyalty.

Private refuge and an argument about purpose

Labude keeps a second apartment in the center, known to few, as a retreat from the West, his respectable relatives, society ladies, and the telephone. There he pursues his scholarly and social interests. The apartment’s privacy suggests a side of his life apart from the circles that otherwise press upon him, while its use as a place of withdrawal parallels the pair’s need to escape the demands of the city.

Their friendship also gives Labude a close view of Fabian’s unsettled working life. At Haupt’s halls, amid a nightly spectacle in which two dozen street girls descend from the gallery in bathing costumes to dance for free admission and a complimentary schnapps, the friends sit together at the ramp. The table telephone keeps glowing with calls; Labude silences it by lifting the receiver and putting it under the table. Against the music, laughter, and performance, Fabian tells him of the night editorial office, the cigarette factory, the Fischer family, and Cologne Cathedral. Labude responds with a direct challenge: Fabian ought finally to make progress.

Fabian answers that he can do many things but wants to do nothing. He cannot see the system in which he is meant to function, and therefore finds no point in advancing. Labude proposes earning money; Fabian refuses the identity of a capitalist and distrusts the claim that power can be used for others. He sees people using it for themselves, their families, or narrow constituencies, and dismisses both money and power. His blow against the padded, plush-covered railing makes no sound—a small physical counterpoint to his anger, as if even protest were muffled by the setting.

Labude does not treat Fabian’s refusal as a settled intellectual position. Seriously troubled, he lays a hand on his friend’s arm and imagines taking him, bound hand and foot, to a nursery where a life purpose could be planted in him. Fabian replies that he watches, and asks whether that is nothing; Labude asks who is helped by it. Their disagreement is intimate precisely because neither reduces the other to an opponent: Labude tries to make concern effective, while Fabian insists that observation is itself a way of inhabiting a senseless world.

Shared spectatorship and the waiting generation

Walking beside the Spree, Fabian tells Labude that a director’s post, a million dollars, or a decent woman he could love—or all three—would not make him happier than his age. He explains that his roaming has another cause besides curiosity about whether the world can become decent: he is waiting. He recalls the years before military conscription, when schoolwork seemed irrelevant because the war was coming regardless. The image he gives Labude is of sitting beneath a glass bell jar as the air is slowly pumped out. Their restlessness, he says, came not from exuberance but from losing breath; their hunger for life felt dangerous because they believed it might be a last meal.

Fabian connects that adolescent waiting to his present drift through the image of Europe as a waiting room. During an eight-day leave, he went to Graal because he had visited as a child. In autumn he walked through the swaying alder woods and found the Baltic coast nearly empty; he recalls sleeping with six of the ten women he considered passable. The future, he says, had already decided to turn him into blood sausage, and he could not know where the train would take him or what he would become. The recollection makes their friendship a place where Fabian can articulate the historical dread beneath his idleness. Labude listens, but does not accept waiting as an answer: after Fabian says the sensible will not come to power, and the just even less likely, Labude closes the distance, seizes him by the coat collar, and asks whether they should not try anyway.

Loyalty amid political violence

Their argument is interrupted by a shot, a cry, and three more shots from another direction. Labude runs along the bridge toward the Märkisches Museum. Fabian follows despite his aching heart, joking to himself as he runs. The contrast is telling: Fabian’s language retains its irony, but his body goes after his friend.

At the foot of the Märkischer Roland, they find a wounded young man crouching with a revolver and firing toward an unseen opponent. Labude takes the weapon from him, then kneels to examine the wound in his leg and tries to make a makeshift bandage with a handkerchief. The injured man explains that a fight began in a tavern after someone drew a swastika on the tablecloth; a quarrel followed, he struck the other man, and after the landlord threw them out, the opponent chased and shot him. The private friendship has brought both men into the physical aftermath of political antagonism: Labude’s immediate response is medical care, while Fabian demands to know whether the experience has persuaded the wounded man of anything.

When a shop assistant reaches for a revolver in the same confrontation, Labude grips his wrist and orders him to hand it over; Fabian removes the weapon and keeps it. Fabian then addresses the opposing men, arguing that shooting each other in the body’s most remote parts will not repair Germany or overturn intolerable conditions. A worker calls him a bourgeois; Fabian accepts the label of petty bourgeois while challenging both sides’ certainty about what they fight against. The scene extends the friends’ private disagreement into a public question: whether action can mean more than another gesture of factional power. Labude acts first to stop the immediate violence; Fabian turns the confrontation into an argument against its futility.

Care, confidence, and romantic disappointment

The friendship is also the space in which Labude brings Fabian difficult news. After Fabian has spoken bleakly about the economic risks of marriage and the danger of involving a wife and child in an insecure life, Labude says that economic circumstances are not the only obstacle. He asks Fabian not to be offended that he wants to be alone, then asks whether Fabian can collect him from his parents the next day because there is something he needs to explain. Before leaving in a taxi, he presses something into Fabian’s hand. Fabian discovers it is a fifty-mark note. The small practical gesture accompanies a confidence not yet fully disclosed; when Fabian asks if it concerns Leda, Labude nods and lowers his head.

The next day, after describing his discovery of Leda’s infidelity and his decision to leave her, Labude says he will get over the experience but remains wounded by the deception. Fabian comes up behind him and places his hands on his shoulders, asking why he did not tell him the previous day. He does not simply endorse Labude’s anger. When Labude focuses on having been lied to, Fabian asks what Leda could have done instead—tell the truth? His response complicates consolation: he offers physical closeness and attention, while refusing to make the moral judgment easy. The friendship can hold Labude’s hurt without pretending that either truth or deception supplies a clean solution.

A bond between action and observation

Their exchanges repeatedly turn private distress into a test of what responsibility means. Labude wants Fabian to use his capacities and is troubled by a life spent watching; Fabian resists the promise that career, money, marriage, or political authority could resolve the larger failures of his time. Yet Fabian’s detachment is not simple indifference. He follows Labude toward gunfire, notices the significance of his friend’s silence, comes to meet him at his parents’ home, and places his hands on his shoulders when the story of Leda finally emerges. Labude, for his part, continues to press Fabian toward action while offering him the kind of closeness that argument alone cannot provide.

The novel makes the friendship a human-scale version of its broader conflict between spectatorship and intervention. In their conversation on the bridge, Labude’s question about whether the just should nevertheless dare to act is followed by an actual outbreak of violence; in the street, his care for a wounded stranger and Fabian’s disarmament of another man supply immediate, limited answers rather than a political solution. Their friendship does not overcome the historical deadlock they describe. It shows instead how concern persists inside it—in a hand on an arm, a handkerchief pressed to a wound, a money note passed before a confession, and the decision to run after one another into the dark.