The establishment of the Hamburg Students' Initiative Group

The founding of the Hamburg student initiative marks the moment Stephan Labude gives institutional form to the reforming politics he has long discussed with Jakob Fabian. At a student meeting in Hamburg, he helps establish a radical bourgeois initiative, hoping to connect university groups across Germany and Europe and build a coalition capable of checking social and economic collapse. The initiative’s emergence is significant not as proof that reform can succeed, but as a direct challenge to Fabian’s conviction that reason and political power cannot be reconciled.

Background and Founding

Labude recounts the initiative’s origins after returning from Hamburg. The occasion was a meeting at the Auditorium Maximum, where Rassow had invited him to speak alongside a lecture on tradition and socialism. Rassow described his journey through Russia and conversations with Russian artists and scholars; socialist students repeatedly interrupted him, and a communist speaker was in turn interrupted by bourgeois students. The meeting thus began amid the very divisions the initiative would seek to bridge.

When his turn came, Labude sketched Europe’s capitalist predicament and argued that bourgeois youth must become radicalized to halt the continent’s ruin. He proposed that young people prepare to take over leadership in politics, industry, landholding, and commerce from a generation he considered exhausted. The initiative was founded in Hamburg after Rassow proposed its formation and received applause, even though representatives of extreme groups had greeted Labude’s reformist speech with their customary laughter.

Program and Organization

Labude’s platform called for voluntary reductions in private profit, a scaling back of capitalism and technology to what he regarded as reasonable dimensions, expanded social provision, and deeper cultural education. He presented these reforms as an alternative to systemic breakdown: if class rule could not be abolished, he argued, society should at least choose the regime of his own age group. His proposed alliance across class lines rested on his belief that young people—at least an elite among them—rejected unrestrained egoism and might prefer an orderly reform to collapse.

The founders drafted an appeal intended for universities throughout Europe. Labude, Rassow, and several others planned to visit German universities, deliver lectures, and establish comparable groups. They also hoped to form a kind of cartel with socialist students. Once university groups existed across the country, they would approach other intellectual organizations. The account presents a staged organizational plan: begin with student networks, connect political tendencies, then extend the initiative’s reach into wider intellectual life.

Fabian’s Skepticism and the Political Stakes

Labude had not told Fabian about the Hamburg meeting the day before, expecting his friend’s skepticism. Fabian responds warmly to the initiative’s move from plan to practice, but immediately asks whether Labude has contacted independent democrats and points him toward Copenhagen’s Club Europa. His encouragement is real, yet he warns Labude not to be too disappointed by the young and reiterates his belief that reason and power will never be joined.

Their disagreement sharpens the initiative’s stakes. Labude treats organization and reform as possible means of preventing ruin; Fabian sees human beings as trapped between violent attempts to improve their condition and a hypothetical contentment that would end in self-destruction through boredom. The Hamburg group therefore stands between political hope and the novel’s surrounding evidence of crisis. Elsewhere, Fabian and Labude encounter gunfire after a dispute over a swastika and the International, and Fabian argues that rival parties’ violence achieves nothing. At Wedding, workers and police clash in a confrontation of songs, advancing police lines, horses, gunfire, stones, and batons. These episodes give concrete force to the instability against which Labude’s proposed coalition is directed, without establishing that the initiative can overcome it.

Significance

The initiative converts Labude’s reformist convictions into a plan with a founding meeting, a written appeal, lectures, and a strategy for building alliances. Its cross-class ambition answers the divisions visible in the Hamburg audience, while its proposed reforms address the economic disorder voiced elsewhere in the novel: production rises as employment falls, mass purchasing power shrinks, and workers bear the consequences of industrial expansion.

Yet the group’s future remains prospective. The account records its formation and intended expansion, not the results of that expansion. That distinction preserves the tension at the heart of the episode: Labude acts on the possibility of collective reform, while Fabian’s doubts and the novel’s recurring street violence leave the possibility of success unresolved.