Labude’s suicide

Labude’s suicide is disclosed through its aftermath: Fabian arrives at a wrecked apartment to find his friend dead, then learns from Labude’s farewell letter how academic rejection, romantic loss, and political disillusionment converged in his decision to die. The letter makes the death more than a private catastrophe. Labude sees himself expelled from every world that might have offered him a place, while the scene leaves Fabian to confront the finality that his friend’s arguments could not overcome.

The Scene and Its Discovery

Fabian reaches the apartment after a slow, jolting drive across Berlin, delayed by traffic lights and repeated stops. The urgency of his journey meets a room already turned into a police scene: five young women are being held there, a police officer stands among them, and glasses and bottles lie scattered across the floor. Fabian recognizes Fräulein Selow and the sculptress. In the next room, a police assistant rises from a desk, and Fabian sees Labude on the sofa, pale and motionless, with a bullet wound in his temple and dried blood in his hair.

Fabian sits beside the body and takes Labude’s cold hands. His first response is not an explanation but a subdued protest: he tells his dead friend that one simply does not do this. The intimate gesture makes the death immediate, while the police presence around it insists that it must also be investigated. The commissioner believes it is suicide, but says that the circumstances are not entirely clear. The adjoining room has been demolished, and the women claim that Labude was elsewhere writing a letter when the shot was fired.

The commissioner asks Fabian to read the letter Labude left for him and to report anything relevant to the inquiry. As Fabian opens the envelope, a bundle of banknotes falls out; the assistant picks it up and places it on the sofa. The women’s account of a private quarrel, the damaged room, and the money in the envelope frame the death as a scene with unresolved details. The commissioner and his assistant withdraw, leaving Fabian alone with the body and the letter that gives the act its personal and intellectual context.

The Rejections Behind the Letter

Labude writes that he had gone to the institute to ask again about his habilitation thesis. The literary scholar was absent, but his assistant, Weckherlin, told Labude that the thesis had been rejected. According to the message, the scholar had called it wholly inadequate and said passing it on to the faculty would be an imposition; there was no point, he added, in making Labude’s humiliation public. The work had cost Labude five years. In the letter, that sustained labor becomes five years spent producing a failure that others would bury out of pity.

Labude calls the rejection his ruin, above all psychologically. He describes a pattern of refusal: Leda has rejected him, the university has rejected his work, and from every direction he receives an unsatisfactory verdict. His ambition, he says, cannot bear it. He specifically rejects the consolation that historical statistics might offer, noting that examples of eminent men who were poor students or unhappy lovers do not help him. The letter therefore presents the academic rebuff not as one setback among many, but as the blow that makes his accumulated disappointments feel final.

The letter also explains why Labude did not call Fabian. He was ashamed and says he has no talent for being comforted. Their recent conversation about Leda had convinced him that a comforting exchange would amount to mutual deception: Fabian might explain the supposedly microscopic importance of his scholarly disaster, and Labude might pretend to agree. His refusal of consolation is bound up with the letter’s insistence on truth as he experiences it. He would rather state the scale of his despair than accept reassurance that would make the two friends lie to one another.

Love, Politics, and a Sense of Exile

Labude connects the academic rejection to his romantic defeat and to his feeling that there is nowhere he can belong. He tells Fabian that Leda’s betrayal struck him more deeply than he would want her to know. If Fabian ever meets her, he asks him not to tell her how much it hurt; she may believe he was merely offended. Even in a farewell written at the edge of death, Labude tries to control what others will know of his vulnerability.

His account of recent events at home adds a disorderly, humiliating setting to the letter. After returning from Frankfurt, where his political excursion had ended in a fight, he found Fräulein Selow in his bed with the sculptress, while other women assisted them. As he writes, he says, they are throwing glasses and flower vases in the adjoining room. He draws from these experiences a sense of exclusion in opposite directions: he has been driven out of the circles to which he belongs, yet does not want to enter the places willing to accept him. His declaration that the whole direction does not suit him expresses not a successful escape from those worlds, but a refusal that leaves him without an alternative.

Labude’s political disillusionment broadens the private letter into a judgment on the historical moment. He dismisses his Frankfurt venture as repellent and argues that economic bargaining will not change the crisis, only hasten or enlarge a collapse. He believes a rare historical turning point demands a new worldview, but says he no longer has the courage to endure ridicule from political specialists whose remedies, in his view, are killing the continent. He still believes himself right; what has changed is that being right no longer feels sufficient. He describes himself as a ridiculous figure, a candidate for humanity who has failed in both love and profession.

The contrast between his political convictions and his decision is stark. Labude condemns the limited remedies offered by political experts and imagines that children, not adults, remain ready for ideals; yet he cannot find a way to live within the world whose direction he rejects. He writes that Europe will continue without him or perish, as if his absence were immaterial to either outcome. The letter does not resolve this contradiction. It shows how a vision of large-scale historical failure and the intimate conviction of personal failure have become inseparable in his account of himself.

The Farewell and Its Aftermath

Labude identifies the revolver as one he had taken from a Communist near the Märkisches Museum, intending to prevent an accident. He now says it will serve a new purpose. This detail joins the death to an earlier political confrontation and gives the weapon a history that reverses its stated purpose: what Labude had taken to avert harm becomes the means of his suicide. He adds that he should have become a teacher, since only children are ready for ideals, but the thought remains part of a farewell rather than a plan for another life.

The letter leaves practical matters in sparse instructions. Labude asks his parents to clear his second apartment and says they may do what they wish with its furniture. He leaves his books to Fabian and tells him to take the two thousand marks he has found in his desk, enough, Labude suggests, for a small journey. The banknotes that fell from the envelope when Fabian opened it make the money present in the room as well as in the letter: a last provision for the friend who survives him, offered alongside instructions that anticipate no affairs needing much attention.

His farewell to Fabian is unusually direct. Labude calls him the only person he loved despite knowing him, asks him to live better, and tells him not to blame himself for their disappointment. He also asks Fabian to greet his parents and Fabian’s mother. The letter’s closing tenderness complicates its earlier claim that he cannot receive comfort: Labude cannot accept consolation as an argument against despair, but he can still name the friendship and affection he is leaving behind.

After reading, Fabian gently strokes Labude’s forehead. The dead man’s jaw has fallen farther open, and Fabian whispers, “Daß man lebt, ist Zufall; daß man stirbt, ist gewiß,” smiling as though he could still comfort his friend. The commissioner returns, reads the letter, and concludes that he can send the women home. The police inquiry ends with the letter’s account accepted as sufficient to settle the immediate question, but for Fabian the document cannot make the death ordinary or undo it. It turns Labude’s suicide into both an intimate loss and a record of how a gifted, ambitious man understood himself to have been refused by love, work, and the political world alike.