Stephan Labude
FabianStephan Labude, Jakob Fabian’s closest friend, is a scholar and political reformer whose intellectual seriousness sets him apart from the cynicism around him. He works for years to reconstruct Lessing’s thought, imagines a cross-class reform movement led by young people, and insists that the reasonable and the just must still dare to act. Yet private heartbreak and a fabricated account of his academic failure leave him convinced that he has been rejected by every world to which he might belong. His suicide, followed by the discovery that the report was false, makes his story a devastating collision between institutional indifference, personal vulnerability, and the consequences of speech treated as a joke.
Identity and Intellectual Work
Labude keeps a second apartment in the city center, a little-known retreat from the West, his socially prominent relatives, fashionable women, and the telephone. There he pursues both scholarly and social interests. His private rooms offer a counterspace to the life of obligation and interruption from which he withdraws, but not an escape from the judgments on which his ambitions depend.
His major academic project is a study of Lessing. Labude has spent five years taking apart and reassembling the writer’s thought, seeking to treat the reasoning of a canonical author as the work of a particular human mind rather than as an untouchable expression of pure logic. Fabian admires the originality of this approach, which reads Lessing’s collected works psychologically, identifies errors in the writer’s thinking, and presents them as meaningful processes. Labude, however, expects the scholarly establishment to resent the method: to him, making a revered author psychologically legible risks offending the very people whose recognition he needs.
The delay in receiving an academic judgment deepens his uncertainty. The senior scholar responsible for reading his habilitation thesis has been occupied with promotions, examinations, lectures, seminars, and senate meetings. Labude makes light of the wait by imagining that he will have a full beard before the work is read, but the joke carries a serious dependence on a verdict that has not arrived. His work is both an intellectual undertaking and the hoped-for route into a profession.
Politics and Public Action
Labude’s politics grow from his conviction that the existing order is approaching a continental ruin and that passive observation will not prevent it. At a student meeting in Hamburg, where speakers from socialist and bourgeois groups interrupt one another, he presents a program for a radicalized bourgeois youth. He calls for voluntarily limiting private profit, reducing capitalism and technology to reasonable dimensions, expanding social provision, and deepening education and culture. He hopes that young people across class divisions can form a new front against egoism and avert a system-wide collapse.
The proposal is met with amusement by representatives of the extreme factions, but a motion to establish a radical-bourgeois initiative wins support and the group is formed. Labude, the organizer Rassow, and others plan to circulate an appeal to European universities, visit German institutions to give talks, and establish similar groups. They also hope to build a cooperative alliance with socialist students and, once the university groups are in place, approach other intellectual organizations. His politics thus have a practical sequence: public argument, student organization, inter-university coordination, and broader intellectual engagement. Fabian welcomes Labude’s ability to begin putting his plan into practice, even as he remains doubtful that reason can ever be joined to power.
The gap between Labude’s political idealism and the violence of the streets becomes literal during a shooting near the Märkisches Museum. When Fabian argues that reasonable and just people will not come to power, Labude challenges him to consider whether they should nevertheless dare to try. Gunfire and a cry interrupt the exchange; Labude runs toward the museum, while Fabian follows despite his aching heart. Labude takes a revolver from a wounded man and kneels to make a temporary dressing for the man’s leg. The injured man explains that a quarrel began in a pub after someone drew a swastika on a tablecloth: an argument became a blow, then a pursuit and a shooting.
Fabian takes the weapon from another man and addresses the opposing participants, condemning the attempt to preserve intolerable conditions through dictatorship while warning that shooting one another will achieve nothing. The workers’ and fascists’ hostile political language has already become bodily danger; Labude’s intervention is direct and practical, not merely rhetorical. The revolver he removes from the scene will later acquire an unforeseen and fatal significance.
Friendship and Private Relationships
Labude’s friendship with Fabian is one of the few relationships in which he speaks openly about both conviction and failure. Fabian listens to the account of the Hamburg initiative and responds with encouragement, while also voicing his belief that reason and power are irreconcilable. Their disagreement does not dissolve their attachment. Labude can challenge Fabian to act, and Fabian remains the person to whom Labude’s final letter is addressed.
Labude’s relationship with Leda ends after five years. He first tells Fabian that he has been in Hamburg and that Leda sends her greetings, but later reveals that he has broken with her. He says he had lived for five years on a false assumption: only after she lay beside him and lied to him calmly did he understand the past. The betrayal makes the relationship’s history appear newly legible to him, and he declares the case closed. His brisk effort to consign it to the files and move on contrasts with the depth of the injury he describes. He has not simply lost a partner; he feels he has discovered that the love he believed sustained those years was never returned.
After ending the relationship, Labude turns toward a new social circle. He invites Fabian to Ruth Reiter’s gathering, explaining that he met her that day and that she has a studio where she works as a sculptor, if her claim is to be believed. The brief introduction points to Labude’s attempt to resume life and make new connections after the break with Leda. Later, the disorder in his apartment, where Selow and the sculptor are found together, becomes one part of the chaotic night that surrounds his death; the evidence does not establish that these women caused it.
Suicide and the False Report
Labude’s death is first encountered as a physical fact. When Fabian reaches the apartment, he finds police and several young women in a damaged room, with glasses and bottles on the floor. In the next room Labude lies on a sofa, pale, with a wound in his temple and dried blood in his hair. Fabian sits beside the body, places a hand on his friend’s cold hands, and addresses him in disbelief. The shock of the scene gives way to the letter that explains what Labude believed had happened to him.
In that letter, Labude reports that he went to the institute to ask about his thesis and was told by Weckherlin, the senior scholar’s assistant, that it had been rejected as wholly inadequate. According to the report, the scholar had not even considered it fit to send to the faculty and did not want Labude’s humiliation made public. Labude understands this supposed decision as the destruction of five years’ work, but calls the psychological impact the true ruin. Leda has rejected him, he believes, and now the university has done the same; in his own formulation, he has received a failing grade in love and in his profession.
The letter also records the collapse of his political hopes. He calls his trip to Frankfurt a failure and says the group ended by fighting. On returning, he found a chaotic gathering in his apartment and felt expelled from the circles in which he had once belonged, while unwilling to enter those that would accept him. He concludes that Europe can continue or collapse without him and that economic compromises will only accelerate or magnify the breakdown. His despair is therefore cumulative: an apparent academic rejection, the end of his relationship with Leda, political frustration, and a sense of social displacement converge in the same account of personal failure.
Labude writes that he took the revolver from the wounded communist near the museum to prevent an accident. In the letter, he says that the weapon will now serve a new purpose. The object connects his earlier attempt to interrupt political violence with his own death: the intervention that had temporarily removed a gun from a street confrontation has not removed the violence from his life. He bids Fabian farewell, calls him the only person he loved despite knowing him, and asks him to spare Leda the full account of how deeply her betrayal hurt him.
Exposure and Narrative Significance
The report on which Labude’s despair rests is false. When Labude’s parents and Fabian confront the senior scholar, he is appalled to hear that his work was supposedly rejected. He says that he had in fact circulated the thesis to the faculty with a strongly favorable assessment, calling it the most mature work of literary history he had seen in recent years. He had also written that Labude deserved the keen interest of specialists, had made an invaluable contribution to modern research, and should have the work issued as a separate publication. The exact opposite of the message delivered to Labude was true.
The reversal transforms the meaning of the suicide without making it less real. Labude had treated the reported rejection as confirmation that every institution and relationship had judged him unworthy; the favorable evaluation shows that this last judgment came not from the scholar or the university but from Weckherlin’s lie. Fabian runs to fetch the assistant and drags him from his chair when he does not respond promptly. The account later clarifies that Weckherlin had made a stupid joke and that the death only appeared to be a suicide in the simple sense: his words had supplied the false premise on which Labude acted. The revolver taken from the museum encounter, originally kept to prevent harm, became the instrument of his death.
Afterward, Fabian remembers Weckherlin’s cowardly smile and questions why his anger at the assistant had exceeded even his grief for Labude. That unresolved self-questioning keeps the ending from offering easy moral consolation. Weckherlin did not intend the catastrophe, but the narrative refuses to let lack of intention erase consequence: a joke, delivered to a man already wounded by loss and failure, becomes deadly. Labude’s tragedy rests on the distance between what was true and what he was told, and on the fragility of a life organized around judgments from love, scholarship, and public action.
