Selow

Selow is an evening nude model whose abrupt departure from an atelier gathering with Stephan Labude turns a scene of artistic display and uncertain intimacy into a decisive rejection. Both melancholy and disruptive, she resists the identities others assign her, though the account of her behavior comes largely through other people’s observation and speculation.

Identity and Introduction

Selow appears at a large studio as the model for an evening drawing session. She sits on a wooden table beneath a lamp and among sculptures while Ruth Reiter sketches her. Reiter directs her into a standing pose, and Selow follows the instructions, looking ahead with an indifferent, melancholy expression. When she says she is cold and asks the Baron for a drink, the posed figure becomes a person with an immediate need, though the studio continues to frame her as a model.

The scene introduces Selow through the gap between her public role and her apparent detachment from it. She is the subject of the drawing and the focus of others’ attention, but her reserved expression gives little access to her inner life. Later, she is still referred to as the evening model even as she drinks and moves through the gathering, an occupational label that follows her beyond the pose.

Conduct at the Atelier

In another part of the studio, Selow drinks gin while the sculptor kisses her. Selow empties her glass and strokes the sculptor’s back; the narrator presents the gestures as a disjointed exchange in which neither woman seems fully attuned to what the other is doing. Meanwhile, Kulp and Labude lie together on a chaise longue, making the studio a setting where several forms of intimacy unfold side by side, observed without being neatly explained.

Later, after Kulp is carried to a back room and a tango begins, the sculptor draws Selow into a close dance and speaks to her intensely. Selow is very drunk and scarcely listens. She breaks away, crosses the dance floor unsteadily, shuts the piano lid, and shouts a refusal. Her interruption changes the room’s rhythm: instead of remaining the model or partner others have positioned her as, she makes her rejection audible to everyone present.

Rejection and Departure

Selow repeats her refusal and says she has had enough; she insists that she wants a man and tells the sculptor to leave her alone. She pulls Labude from his stool, kisses him, puts on her hat, and draws him toward the door before he has properly taken his coat. Her cry, “Es lebe der kleine Unterschied!”, gives the exit a pointed emphasis on sexual difference. The two leave together, while the gathering is left behind.

The episode establishes a clear immediate outcome, not a lasting relationship: Selow chooses to leave with Labude after rejecting the sculptor’s attentions. The sequence joins declaration to action. Her words distinguish the kind of partner she says she wants; her sudden departure makes that preference consequential in the scene, without resolving what she will want or do afterward.

Reputation and Narrative Perspective

After the gathering, Labude tells Fabian that Selow kept him awake all night. He describes her as both melancholy and coarse, says she can sit for hours on a divan muttering obscenities, and reports that she drinks heavily. He also recounts her sudden awareness that she is alone in an apartment with a man, an episode he presents as making the situation alarming. These are Labude’s judgments and recollections, not independent confirmation of Selow’s feelings or intentions.

Labude cannot settle on a sexual identity for her: he says he does not think she is lesbian, then speculates that she may be homosexual. That uncertainty is part of the characterization rather than a definitive account of Selow. The novel gives her a forceful moment of self-declaration at the studio, but afterward her behavior is filtered through a male friend’s unsettled interpretation. Her character therefore remains vivid in action and resistant to confident explanation.