Lubud's thesis on the professorship of Lessing

Labude’s habilitation thesis on Lessing is both a five-year intellectual undertaking and a test of whether academic convention can accommodate a psychological reading of a canonical writer. Its ambition—to recover a mind from its works—makes the project meaningful to Labude and, in his view, precisely the reason it may provoke the scholars judging it.

Project and Method

Labude describes the thesis as an attempt to reconstruct Lessing’s brain and thought processes from the collected works. Rather than treating the dead writer’s reasoning as a sacred, self-contained logic, he proposes to examine it psychologically: to identify errors and understand them as individual, intelligible processes. Lessing becomes a case through which to demonstrate the type of brilliant person suspended between two historical eras.

The method is deliberately revisionary. Fabian praises Labude for having reconstructed the writer’s mind in a way that challenges scholars who had represented Lessing as a kind of autonomous embodiment of reason without truly understanding him. Labude, however, does not take that praise as reassurance. He expects the committee to be less impressed by the thesis’s originality than angered by its departure from established interpretation.

Five Years of Work and Academic Judgment

Labude says he has spent five years dissecting Lessing, taking him apart and putting him back together. The metaphor suggests labor that is at once analytical and reconstructive: the thesis breaks down the received image of the classic author in order to assemble a more psychologically particular one. Labude’s wry remark that rummaging in the eighteenth century’s refuse heap is an occupation for an adult conveys his awareness of the project’s distance from ordinary practical life, without diminishing the commitment invested in it.

The work’s academic reception remains uncertain. When Fabian asks whether the literary historian and Geheimrat has read it, Labude answers that the man has had no time amid promotions, examinations, lectures, seminars, and senate meetings. He jokes that by the time his thesis is read he will have grown a knee-length beard. The image turns institutional delay into a grotesque measure of waiting: the work is complete enough to be judged, yet the routines of academic administration keep judgment out of reach.

Labude’s Doubt and the Thesis’s Significance

Labude fears that the thesis’s most distinctive claims will count against it. Psychologically interpreting the logic of a dead writer, finding errors in it, and treating them as meaningful rather than as mere defects challenges the reverence attached to a canonical author. His uncertainty is therefore not simply whether the work is good, but whether the institution can accept the kind of understanding the work offers.

The thesis also reflects Labude’s investment in ordered intellectual achievement. Later, after the disappointment in Hamburg has damaged his private system of order and, with it, his sense of morality, he seeks Fabian’s help in learning how to experience unrest and remain calm. The contrast gives the earlier academic uncertainty a personal resonance: Labude has spent years imposing coherence on Lessing’s thought, while his own confidence in an orderly life proves more vulnerable than his scholarly method.