Labudes Abschiedsbrief

Labudes Abschiedsbrief is Stephan Labude’s final message to Jakob Fabian, written shortly before Labude shoots himself. It explains how the rejection of his five-year academic work, Leda’s betrayal, and political disillusionment have converged into what he calls his ruin; its intimate account of defeat stands beside precise instructions for what should happen after his death. Fabian reads it in the room with Labude’s body, so the letter becomes both the dead man’s testimony and the living friend’s last encounter with him.

Composition and Immediate Discovery

A police commissioner tells Fabian that Labude left him a letter and asks him to read it, since the circumstances of the apparent suicide remain incompletely explained. The officers also want to know why the adjoining room has been demolished. Five young women detained in the apartment claim they were in that room when the shot was fired and attribute the disorder to a private quarrel. The commissioner suspects a jealousy scene among them, but notes that they called the police and waited rather than fleeing. Their account places the letter amid a chaotic domestic aftermath that the written farewell itself only partly addresses.

The assistant hands Fabian an envelope. As Fabian opens it, a bundle of banknotes falls to the floor; the assistant picks it up and places it on the sofa. The police withdraw into the next room, leaving Fabian alone to read. He turns on the light and sits again, with Labude’s yellow, exhausted face under the lamp. The letter is therefore read not at a later remove but beside the body whose death it explains. Its written voice unfolds in the stillness of the apartment while the officers wait nearby for information that may settle their inquiry.

Academic and Personal Rejection

Labude begins with the immediate blow: when he went to the institute that afternoon to inquire about his Habilitationsschrift, the senior academic was absent, and the assistant Weckherlin told him the work had been rejected. According to Weckherlin, the professor considered it wholly inadequate and thought forwarding it to the faculty would be an imposition; he also said there was no point in making Labude’s humiliation public. Labude measures the loss against the five years spent writing the thesis, describing that labor as five years devoted to a disgrace that would be buried in the narrowest circle out of pity. The institutional judgment is not merely an unfavorable result: as Labude reports it, it denies both the work’s merit and its right to public consideration.

Labude says he thought of telephoning Fabian but felt ashamed. He cannot accept consolation, and recalls that their recent conversation about Leda confirmed his inability to receive it. He imagines that Fabian would have explained the microscopic significance of the academic disaster; Labude would have pretended to agree, and the two friends would have lied to one another. His refusal of that imagined exchange is important to the letter’s form: rather than ask Fabian to repair his despair, Labude writes a candid account after deciding that ordinary reassurance would only disguise the depth of the injury.

He calls the thesis’s rejection his ruin both factually and psychologically, while stressing that its psychological effect is the more devastating. Leda has rejected him, the university rejects him, and he feels censured from every side as inadequate. His ambition cannot withstand these judgments. He dismisses historical examples of distinguished men who were poor students or unhappy lovers as no help to him now. The letter thus brings romantic and professional rejection together, not as separate misfortunes that can be balanced against one another, but as repeated verdicts on his worth.

Political Disillusionment and the Decision to Die

Labude also looks back on a political excursion to Frankfurt, which ended in a beating. After returning the previous day, he found Selow in bed with a sculptor while several other women assisted them; as he writes, the women are now throwing glasses and flower vases in the adjoining room. That noisy disorder makes the setting of the letter concrete: the private turmoil outside his room continues while he tries to describe his own decision. He concludes that the whole political direction he has pursued no longer suits him. He has been expelled from the circles to which he belongs, yet does not want to join the circles willing to receive him.

His account widens from personal exclusion to a diagnosis of the historical moment. Europe, he says, will continue or collapse without him; economic bargaining will change nothing and will only accelerate or enlarge the collapse. He believes that history has reached a rare turning point requiring a new worldview, and that small remedies offered by political experts cannot cure a continent to death. Yet conviction no longer sustains him: although he believes himself right, he feels unable to face further ridicule from political specialists. He describes himself as a ridiculous figure, a candidate for humanity who has failed in both love and profession. The political argument does not resolve his private crisis; in the letter, its scale intensifies the sense that no available direction can offer him a place.

Labude states his intention to kill himself and identifies the weapon: the revolver he took from a Communist near the Märkisches Museum. He says he had taken it to prevent an accident, but now expects it to serve a new purpose. In the same passage he says that he should have become a teacher, because only children are ready for ideals. The contrast connects his political despair to a remaining belief in the young, even as he declares himself unable to continue. The weapon’s earlier purpose of preventing harm is reversed in the farewell: the object he kept as a safeguard becomes the means of his suicide.

Instructions, Friendship, and the Letter’s Afterlife

The farewell turns from explanation to practical matters. Labude asks Fabian to convey his goodbye to his parents and especially to Fabian’s mother. If Fabian happens to meet Leda, he should not tell her how deeply her betrayal hurt him; Labude prefers that she think he was merely offended, since not everyone needs to know everything. Even in his final message, he controls what different people are to be told, withholding the full measure of his pain from Leda while entrusting it to Fabian.

He says there is little to arrange. His parents should clear apartment number two and may do as they wish with the furniture; his books belong to Fabian. He also tells Fabian to take the two thousand marks he found in his desk, saying the sum is not much but will suffice for a short trip. This specific bequest gives the fallen academic’s farewell a practical consequence: the letter leaves Fabian not only an explanation but books and money, an intended provision for the friend who survives him.

Labude closes by calling Fabian the only person he loved despite knowing him, and asks him not to hold the death against him for disappointing them. His sign-off returns to the intimate address with which he began, making the letter’s movement from failure to friendship unmistakable. When Fabian finishes, he gently strokes Labude’s forehead. The commissioner later reads the letter and, accepting its account, says the young women can go home and that the matter is settled. Labude’s private explanation thus also ends the immediate police uncertainty, while leaving Fabian to face the irreversible fact the letter has named.