Stephan Labude—Justizrat Labude

Stephan Labude and Justizrat Labude are father and son whose relationship comes into view most fully after Stephan’s suicide. The father acknowledges that he was not a man who lived for his son, yet his response to the death unsettles any easy equation of emotional reserve with lack of attachment: he seeks the facts behind Stephan’s death, reads the work his son spent five years writing, and turns against the portrait of Lessing associated with the reported rejection. Their belated encounter is shaped by what they did not share while Stephan lived, and by the father’s effort to understand him when understanding can no longer become conversation.

Distance and Self-Accusation

Justizrat Labude arrives at the house while Fabian is there. After seeing that his son is dead, he goes into the illuminated room alone; outside the closed door, Fabian and the old servant wait for a cry or other sign of grief, but hear nothing. The scene offers no access to what happens between father and son at the bedside. Its silence is not proof of the father’s indifference: it leaves his grief unreadable, even as the observers stand ready to interpret it.

When the father later speaks with Fabian, he describes himself as unable to respond to tragic events with unmediated sympathy. Years of courtroom pleading and procedural routine, he says, have given his limited capacity for fellow feeling an artificial sheen. Looking toward Stephan’s body, he admits that he was not a father who lived for his son. Instead, he calls himself an older man in love with pleasure and with life, and insists that life does not lose its meaning because of that fact. He also says that Stephan knew what he was doing and that, if his son thought suicide the wisest course, the others need not weep. The composure of these claims sits uneasily beside his admission of paternal failure: he speaks as if accepting Stephan’s decision, but also names the distance that had separated them.

The Manuscript and the Cause of Death

Fabian tells Justizrat Labude that Stephan’s suicide was prompted by the rejection of his Habilitationsschrift, a scholarly study of Lessing. Fabian withholds the fact that Stephan left a letter, instead referring to a short note that attributed the death to the rejection. When the father asks whether the work was poor, Fabian answers that it is one of the best and most original works of literary history he knows. He takes a copy from the bookshelf and places it on the desk.

The manuscript changes the father’s response from abstract acceptance to an attempt at verification. Justizrat Labude admits that he had never read it because he had never found the time. He looks through the pages and then telephones the Geheimrat, who had supposedly rejected the work. From the Geheimrat’s wife he learns that her husband is away in Weimar for a Shakespeare Society meeting. The call cannot settle the matter that night, but it gives the father reason to doubt the reported rejection: the Geheimrat had recently described the study as exceptionally interesting and had said he was eager to hear its conclusion. He apparently does not yet know that Stephan is dead.

A Father’s Late Reading

The contradiction between praise and rejection shocks Fabian, who asks whether a scholar would reject work he had praised. Justizrat Labude answers that accepting work one thinks poor is, in any case, more common. His remark is dry rather than consoling, and it leaves open what the Geheimrat intended or what exactly happened to Stephan’s study. The father does not claim certainty; he resolves to visit the Geheimrat at the institute the next day and read the manuscript himself.

He asks Fabian to leave him alone with his son and says that he will remain there and read the work. Fabian confirms that Stephan spent five years on it. That duration gives the father’s belated attention a painful scale: the manuscript embodies a sustained effort that he had not made time to read while Stephan was alive. The work now becomes both an intellectual object to be judged and the closest remaining means by which the father can approach the son’s mind.

The Portrait and the Aftermath

Before Fabian leaves, Justizrat Labude points to the portrait of Lessing on the wall and identifies it as the cause of death. He takes the picture down and smashes it against the desk without visible agitation, cutting his right hand. He then calls for the servant to sweep away the debris and bring sticking plaster. The act gives physical force to an accusation the evidence has not yet conclusively resolved: the portrait stands for the academic decision that Stephan believed had destroyed the value of his work, while the father’s injury makes his response bodily rather than merely argumentative. His controlled manner persists even as he breaks the image and bleeds.

The next day, at the institute, Justizrat Labude and his wife wait for the Geheimrat. His wife, looking very old and weeping, says that they had not cared for Stephan. The father asks whether their son was not old enough, a question that resists the full weight of parental blame without erasing it. He reports that he read Stephan’s work during the night. Although he does not understand the foundations of the inquiry, he recognizes its conclusions as clever and incisive; Fabian insists that the foundations are sound as well and calls the work masterly. The parents’ presence before the absent evaluator turns the private loss into a demand to have Stephan’s scholarship acknowledged.

Frau Labude asks why they would take away the cause for which Stephan died now that he is dead, then urges the two men to leave and let him rest in peace. Her plea exposes the cost of the father’s pursuit of the truth: establishing whether the rejection was real may correct a false account, but it may also reopen the explanation around which the bereaved have organized their grief. Justizrat Labude’s relationship with Stephan therefore ends in a tension rather than a reconciliation. He recognizes the quality and duration of his son’s work only after death, while the manuscript, the shattered portrait, and the unanswered question of the rejection preserve both his belated attachment and the irreparable lateness of his understanding.