Ruth Reiter

Ruth Reiter is a sculptor whose studio turns artistic work into a precarious social world of exposed bodies, drink, desire, and money. She draws Stephan Labude and Jakob Fabian into that world, becomes entangled with the lives of the people who pass through it, and later reappears at the scene of Labude’s death with a judgment that is both blunt and difficult to forget.

Identity and the Studio

Reiter is introduced as a sculptor with an atelier, though Fabian qualifies the claim that she sculpts with the dry phrase that one must take her word for it. The studio’s central activity is figure drawing: beneath a lamp, among sculptures and plaster figures, a naked model stands on a wooden table while Reiter sketches from a stool. Reiter directs the model, Fräulein Selow, into a new pose, calling the sitting an evening nude. Her instructions are practical and authoritative, treating the body as both a living presence and an arrangement to be composed.

That arrangement is never simply the calm work of art. Selow asks for a drink because she is cold; Fabian approaches her as though inspecting a bronze, and Reiter sharply forbids him to touch. The prohibition marks a boundary around the model’s body, even as the room makes that body available to the gaze. Reiter controls the pose and the terms of looking, but the people gathered around her do not remain within the orderly roles of artist, model, and observer.

The Atelier as a Social World

When Fabian returns to the studio’s other activity, Reiter is kissing Selow on the stomach and breast. Selow drinks gin and strokes Reiter’s back; the gestures seem disconnected, as though neither woman quite knows what the other is doing. Nearby, Kulp and Labude lie together on a chaise longue, caught in a whispered embrace. The studio has become a crowded intimacy in which artistic looking, physical contact, alcohol, and flirtation coexist without settling into a single, stable meaning.

That room also has an economic edge. A huge, wooden-legged man named Wilhelmy arrives, asks for Kulp, and gives Reiter banknotes. He says the others should leave for an hour, perhaps allowing Selow to stay, then laughs and calls it a joke. The money and the request make the studio’s intimacy vulnerable to purchase, while the supposed joke leaves the extent of the threat uncertain. Reiter is not shown accepting his terms as a settled arrangement; instead, the scene establishes how easily cash can enter the same space as art and desire.

The consequences later become stark. Reiter tells Cornelia Battenberg that Kulp has been taken to the Charité with internal injuries, while Wilhelmy, once thought to be dying, has remained in the studio, wheezing and occupied with death. The earlier scene’s troubling mixture of money, bodies, and joking coercion thus gives way to physical harm and illness. Reiter’s studio is not a refuge beyond the city’s violence: its occupants carry that violence into the room.

Reiter and the Other Women

Reiter’s relation with Selow is expressed through both work and intimacy. She positions Selow as a model, corrects her stance, and watches over her discomfort; later, she kisses her while Selow drinks. The women’s touching does not resolve into a simple declaration of love or a fixed relationship. Instead, the scene presents desire through actions that sit beside indifference, exhaustion, and the practical demands of the sitting.

Reiter also takes an active interest in Labude. After Kulp is injured, she comes to Cornelia’s room and appears less surprised to find Fabian than intent on learning where Labude lives. She explains that she had hoped to discover Fabian’s address from her school friend and then reach Labude through him, since the staff at the Grunewald villa would give her no information. Fabian refuses to disclose Labude’s address, although he tells her Labude had been sitting in the next room only minutes earlier. Reiter cries out in surprise and runs off. Her search shows that her connection to Labude continues beyond their encounter at the studio, but the evidence does not establish what she hoped to say or what kind of future she imagined with him.

Spectacle and Violence

In Fabian’s fantastic vision of a world beneath a glass surface, Reiter appears again among the people from the studio. Older men and women watch young performers parade on a raised runway, then surge toward them in a grotesque rush of desire and money. Reiter is identified among the figures in the spectacle, alongside Kulp and Selow. The vision turns the studio’s mingling of bodies, looking, and exchange into a public tableau of appetite, but it offers no literal account of Reiter’s actions there; its force lies in the way familiar people from her world reappear within Fabian’s distorted spectacle.

The vision also makes the danger surrounding her circle impossible to miss. Wilhelmy, naked and balanced on a bed with his wooden leg, strikes Kulp with his crutch until she releases her grip and falls. He then fishes for a banknote among the writhing crowd. Selow takes the bait and is caught by the tongue; Reiter appears behind her, wraps both arms around her, and pulls her backward as Wilhelmy tries to drag her the other way. In the vision, Reiter’s embrace becomes an effort to rescue Selow from a contest in which the human body is treated as something to be tugged, injured, and consumed. This is not a documented event in the studio’s ordinary chronology, but it intensifies the violence already associated with Wilhelmy and the women around him.

Labude’s Death and Reiter’s Judgment

After Labude’s death, Reiter is among the five young women found in the apartment when Fabian arrives with the police. A room has been demolished, and the police are investigating whether the women’s account of a private quarrel explains the disorder; the commissioner suspects a jealousy scene among people in unusual relationships. Reiter’s presence places her within the unsettled circumstances surrounding Labude’s suicide, but the investigation does not establish her as responsible for his death. The women had called the police and waited at the apartment rather than fleeing.

When the women enter the room where Labude’s body lies, Reiter takes a practical role: she fetches a napkin and ties his lower jaw shut. The gesture is unceremonious care, directed at the dead man’s open mouth. Soon afterward she contrasts his death with Wilhelmy’s apparent recovery: the doctors had given Wilhelmy no hope, yet he was growing healthier in her studio, while the strong young Labude had killed himself. Her words are not an explanation of Labude’s motives. They register the brutal mismatch between the body expected to die and the one that did, and give Reiter a final, unsentimental place in the aftermath of his death.