Wartesaal Europa

Wartesaal Europa is the image through which Jakob Fabian describes life suspended between a crisis already underway and an unknown future. Recalling his wartime wait to Stephan Labude, Fabian says that Europe has become a waiting room once more: people know that something will happen, but not what, or what will become of them. The repeated image makes historical uncertainty feel at once collective and intimate, while Labude’s reply sets Fabian’s waiting against an attempt to act reasonably.

The wartime waiting room

Fabian traces the image back to the period before his military service. He and his classmates continued writing essays and dictations, apparently studying, though the work seemed beside the point because they expected to be sent to war. He remembers their confinement under a glass bell from which the air was slowly and steadily pumped out: their restlessness came not from exuberance but from suffocation. Believing that life might soon end, they developed a dangerous hunger for experience, as if they were already eating a last meal.

Six months later, Fabian was ready to march. Given eight days’ leave, he went to Graal, a place he had visited as a child. In autumn he walked through the melancholy, yielding ground of alder woods; the Baltic seemed mad, and the spa visitors were few enough to count. He says he slept with six of the ten women he considered passable. With the future seemingly intent on turning him into blood sausage, he asks what he could have done in those days: read books, improve his character, or earn money? He describes himself as sitting in a vast waiting room called Europe. The train would leave after eight days, but nobody knew where it was headed or what would become of him.

A crisis without an itinerary

Fabian draws the past into the present with the words that they are sitting in the waiting room again, and that it is again called Europe. The wartime train had at least a known departure date, even though its destination and Fabian’s fate were unknown. In the later crisis, the uncertainty has returned without a visible end: they still do not know what will happen, live provisionally, and face a crisis that does not conclude. The repeated waiting-room image thus joins two periods without claiming that their circumstances are identical; what recurs is the experience of living under an approaching but indeterminate future.

The image also frames Fabian’s own account of his aimless movement through life. He tells Labude that watching to see whether the world has any talent for decency was only part of the explanation; he is also wandering and waiting, as he did before the war. Wartesaal Europa therefore names more than a historical atmosphere. It describes a posture in which action is deferred while the observer waits for events to determine what comes next.

Waiting and the demand to act

Labude challenges Fabian’s stance rather than accepting it as a universal condition. If everyone thought as Fabian did, he argues, stabilization would never come. He, too, feels the provisional character of the age, but insists that he does not merely watch: he tries to act reasonably. Their exchange makes the waiting room an argument about agency as well as uncertainty. Fabian answers that neither the reasonable nor the just will come to power, casting doubt on Labude’s confidence in purposeful action without resolving their disagreement.

The expression’s force lies in its recurrence. A waiting room is a place of passage, not arrival; here, however, the passengers cannot identify the destination, and the present crisis supplies no timetable. By returning to the image of the wartime wait, Fabian turns his personal memory into a measure of Europe’s renewed suspension, while the contrast with Labude preserves the question the image cannot answer: whether waiting is an unavoidable response to history or a way of standing aside from it.