Stephan Labude—literary historian and Geheimrat

Stephan Labude’s relationship with the literary historian and Geheimrat turns on a fatal misunderstanding: Labude dies believing that the scholar rejected his five-year study of Lessing, while the scholar later insists that he praised it and urged its acceptance. Their connection is therefore reconstructed only after Labude’s death, through a collision between institutional judgment, a false report, and the truth that arrives too late to matter to its victim.

The work and the supposed rejection

Labude’s connection to the Geheimrat is bound to his Habilitationsschrift on Lessing, a scholarly work on which he had spent five years. Before the truth comes out, the available account of its fate appears categorical: the work has been rejected, and its author has killed himself. The scholar is initially absent from the scene of mourning, and neither Labude’s father nor Fabian has yet established what he actually said or did about the manuscript.

The distinction between an evaluation and a decision becomes crucial. When Labude’s father and Fabian discover that the Geheimrat had called the study exceptionally interesting and expressed anticipation about its conclusion, Fabian asks whether a work that had been praised could nevertheless be rejected. The father does not treat praise as proof of acceptance; he observes that work considered poor is, if anything, more often accepted. The exchange leaves the central fact unresolved: what the Geheimrat thought of the work is not yet the same as what he recommended to the faculty.

The father seeks the truth

After Labude’s death, his father, Justizrat Labude, takes up the unanswered question himself. He telephones the Geheimrat late at night, despite the hour, and learns that the scholar is away in Weimar for a meeting of the Shakespeare Society. The call reaches the scholar’s wife instead. The father asks whether her husband had read his son’s thesis; she cannot say. He tells Fabian that the Geheimrat had recently spoken of the Lessing study as exceptionally interesting and said he was eager to reach its conclusion.

That recollection makes the report of rejection harder to reconcile with the scholar’s apparent interest, but it does not yet establish the truth. The father resolves to visit the institute the next day and read the manuscript himself. Before Fabian leaves, he points to a portrait of Lessing on the wall, calls it the cause of death, takes it down, and smashes it against the desk. He cuts his right hand and orders a servant to sweep away the fragments and bring sticking plaster. The violent gesture gives physical form to grief and rage while the question of who supplied the false account remains open.

The Geheimrat’s account

The next day, the Geheimrat arrives at the Labude home with an institute attendant carrying a small case. He greets the grieving parents and recognizes Fabian as their son’s friend. After briefly excusing himself to wash his hands, he tells those gathered that he will see no one else. He explains that he learned of Labude’s death that morning from a newspaper bought in Naumburg, and asks the parents what could have driven their son to take his life.

Justizrat Labude answers directly: his son shot himself because the Geheimrat had rejected his work. The scholar is stunned and denies knowing anything of the kind. The father urges him to come and see the body on the sofa, while Labude’s mother says that the scholar is killing her son a second time. The accusation places the supposed professional rejection before the man blamed for it, turning an abstract report into a confrontation with the bereaved family.

The Geheimrat then gives a detailed account of his actual recommendation. He says that he placed the thesis in circulation before the faculty, describing it as the most mature work of literary history in recent years. In his written assessment, he said that Dr. Stephan Labude deserved the keenest interest of specialists because of the study; that Labude’s contribution to modern research was invaluable; and that he had never received work of comparable importance from among his students. He adds that he had proposed issuing it as a separate publication in the scholarly series. These claims contradict the rejection Labude believed had occurred, though the scene does not provide an independent account of how the lie reached him.

The lie and its irreversible consequence

Fabian is shaken by the discrepancy. He runs to the institute’s catalog room and finds Weckherlin, a scientific assistant, sorting cards that record new library acquisitions. When Weckherlin initially makes no move to follow him, Fabian grabs him by the collar, pulls him from his chair, and pushes him toward the door. This action brings the man associated with the false account into the room where the Geheimrat has just disclosed his own favorable judgment. The revelation exposes the deception surrounding Labude’s belief, but it cannot restore the time in which he might have learned that his work had been praised.

The relationship is thus marked less by direct interaction between Labude and the Geheimrat than by the fatal space between the scholar’s recorded endorsement and the rejection Labude understood himself to have received. The manuscript, the delayed inquiry, and the father’s broken portrait of Lessing give that gap its concrete form. The Geheimrat’s favorable report changes the family’s understanding of the academic decision, while the timing makes correction powerless against the outcome it might once have prevented.

Narrative significance

The episode places personal catastrophe within a wider world of unreliable information and obstructed judgment. Elsewhere the novel presents a newspaper office where reports are selected and headlines manufactured, and an employment office where Fabian is sent to the wrong location before finding the proper registration branch. Against that background, the false account of the thesis is another consequential failure of information: what a person hears about an institution can become more decisive than the institution’s actual judgment. The novel does not establish that these incidents share a single cause, but their recurrence makes misdirection part of its social landscape.

The revelation also sharpens the difference between moral intention and practical consequence. The Geheimrat’s recorded praise and recommendation matter as evidence of what he did; they cannot reach Labude in time to alter what he believed. Fabian’s response, arriving in a rush from the catalog room, is similarly too late to change the death that has already occurred. The relationship therefore culminates not in reconciliation but in exposure: a false claim is confronted with the scholar’s account, and truth becomes legible only after it can no longer save the person most affected by it.