Wer für die anderen dasein will, der muß sich selber fremd bleiben

The expression "Wer für die anderen dasein will, der muß sich selber fremd bleiben"—“Whoever wants to be there for others must remain a stranger to himself”—is Jakob Fabian’s formulation of self-sacrifice as a life that leaves no room for private claims. Spoken beside Stephan Labude’s body, it honors Lessing as its exemplar while exposing the painful distance between Labude’s imagined character and the person Fabian thinks he became.

The Expression in Context

Fabian states the principle while pointing to a copper engraving of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Labude’s room. He imagines Lessing as a man who bit back, fought, and wielded his quill like a sword; unlike Labude, Lessing, in Fabian’s account, did not live for himself or possess a private life apart from his struggle. The sentence gives this contrast its distilled form: service to others requires estrangement from one’s own wants.

Fabian’s image for that obligation is a doctor whose waiting room is full of people day and night, while the doctor himself never gets called in and never complains. The unserved patient is the doctor: selflessness means accepting that one’s own needs will remain at the back of the line. The aphorism therefore describes not simply generosity, but a demanding, potentially punishing division between care for others and care for oneself.

Lessing and Labude

The maxim is part of Fabian’s posthumous judgment of his friend. He calls Labude good, decent, and his friend, yet insists that Labude failed to become what he most wanted to be. Fabian attributes that failure to a self-conception that existed in Labude’s imagination; when that conception collapsed, Fabian says, little remained beyond a pistol and the body on the sofa. The line’s ideal of self-forgetting thus sharpens rather than softens Fabian’s criticism: Labude had not achieved the impersonal, steadfast life embodied by Lessing in Fabian’s telling.

The engraving itself remains silent under accusation. Fabian tells the pictured Lessing that he is to blame, but the portrait neither sees nor hears him; its composed face offers no answer to the living man’s appeal. The maxim emerges in that uneasy encounter with an ideal that can be invoked but cannot respond, as Fabian tries to make sense of his friend’s death by measuring him against a historical image of commitment.

Political Meaning and Limits

Fabian’s reflection turns from Labude to an anticipated struggle over material survival and possession: first bread and butter, then a plush sofa. He foresees rival leaders shouting proud slogans, their own rhetoric intoxication, and a public ready to hang those who tell the truth twice in succession or lie twice in succession. Against that approaching conflict, Lessing’s image stands for genuine combat, while Labude is described as neither reformer nor revolutionary. The expression links private self-denial to public action, but the scene does not present the maxim as an easy remedy: Fabian’s imagined future is crowded with spectacle, violence, and compromised speech, leaving the ideal starkly difficult to inhabit.