Zufall und Schicksal

Zufall und Schicksal is the novel’s recurring problem of how intention, accident, and consequence come apart. A lie meant as a joke becomes inseparable from a death; a belatedly corrected falsehood cannot restore the person who believed it; and, at the novel’s end, an impulsive rescue succeeds for the child but costs the rescuer his life. The pattern makes chance more than an explanation for misfortune: it tests the limits of responsibility and the comfort of moral accounting.

Invention and the power of words

At the newspaper office, Münzer treats fabrication as routine production. When a young employee suggests waiting for usable news, Münzer tells him that if a note is needed and none exists, one can be invented. He writes a few lines on the spot and sends the employee away to fill a column. The resulting item declares that street fighting between Muslims and Hindus in Calcutta left fourteen dead and twenty-two injured, then assures readers that order has been fully restored. The invented report is delivered beside the continuation of a chancellor’s speech, which Münzer is assembling from six pages of typescript. News, political speech, and invention share the same editorial machinery: all become material to be prepared and fitted for publication.

This episode establishes that fabricated words can acquire public authority simply by entering print. The report’s precise death and injury tolls give it the surface of verified fact, while its confident declaration of restored calm closes off doubt. The scene does not make the report the cause of the later personal tragedy, but it establishes a world in which a plausible assertion can circulate as truth despite having been made up. That atmosphere gives particular force to the private lie that later becomes fatal.

The verdict Labude believes

Stephan Labude’s final letter to Jakob Fabian explains the circumstances that preceded his death. Labude writes that he went to the institute to inquire about his habilitation thesis and was told by Weckherlin, an assistant to the Geheimrat, that the work had been rejected as wholly inadequate. According to the message, the Geheimrat would not even forward it to the faculty, considering that an imposition, and did not wish to make Labude’s humiliation public. Labude says that five years of work had become five years spent producing a disgrace that would be buried in the smallest circle out of pity.

The alleged rejection strikes at more than Labude’s prospects. He describes it as his ruin, above all psychologically, and links it to Leda’s rejection and the university’s supposed censure. He had considered calling Fabian but felt ashamed and believed their conversation would amount to mutual deception: Fabian would minimize the academic disaster, and Labude would pretend to agree. In the letter, he refuses the consolations of historical examples of great men who had been poor students or unhappy lovers. His despair takes the combined losses as a verdict on his worth, not as setbacks that statistics could neutralize.

The letter also records Labude’s practical arrangements. He asks his parents to clear out apartment number two and leaves them free to dispose of its furniture; his books are for Fabian. He says he found two thousand marks in his desk and asks Fabian to take the money, enough, he thinks, for a small journey. The precise instructions make the letter both farewell and evidence of how completely Labude believed his future had closed. After reading it beside his friend’s body, Fabian gently strokes Labude’s forehead and whispers, “Daß man lebt, ist Zufall; daß man stirbt, ist gewiß.” The line places the certainty of death beside the contingency of life, while Fabian’s smile suggests that even at this moment he is trying to comfort the dead.

The truth arrives too late

The Geheimrat’s account overturns the message Labude received. On learning what had been said in his name, he insists that he had sent the thesis to the faculty with a strongly favorable recommendation. He had called it the most mature work in literary history to reach him in recent years, praised its importance to modern research, and proposed issuing it as a separate publication. Labude had not been rejected by the institute: Weckherlin had lied about the verdict.

Fabian responds by running to the catalog room, where Weckherlin is bent over cards recording new library acquisitions. When Weckherlin does not promptly come with him, Fabian grabs him by the collar, pulls him from his chair, and shoves him toward the door. The revelation explains the lie, but it cannot reverse Labude’s decision or return him to the life that the false verdict helped end. The truth changes the meaning of the death without changing its fact.

Fabian’s reflection after the exposure keeps that distinction unsettled. He wonders why he struck Weckherlin with a rage that seemed greater than his grief, and whether a man who caused such ruin unintentionally deserved pity more than hatred. He comes to understand his instinct through the asymmetry between intention and effect: Weckherlin had meant to wound Labude, not kill him. Fabian imagines the lie as a detonator thrown into Labude and Weckherlin running away to watch the explosion from a safe distance. The image assigns malice to the act of deception but does not turn its author into someone who planned the death.

Justice without repair

Weckherlin loses his post and is beaten, but Fabian cannot regard either punishment as an adequate answer. He asks whether it would have been better if Weckherlin had kept his position and escaped the blows, or if the lie had continued after Labude’s death. The exposure has given Labude’s parents the truth—that their son fell victim to an infamy—but it gives them no remedy. What had first appeared to be suicide becomes, in Fabian’s bitter formulation, a tragic joke; justice arrives as an explanation, not a restoration.

Fabian imagines the funeral and Labude’s mother tearing the black crape veil from her hat before collapsing in grief. He then asks whether he ought to have concealed the truth from the parents, sparing them knowledge that could no longer help their son. These questions have no clean moral answer in the episode: keeping silent would leave the lie intact, while telling the truth exposes the cruelty but cannot undo its consequence. The information itself becomes another burden added after the loss.

The counterfactual that follows makes the contingency painfully concrete. Had Weckherlin not intervened, Labude might have learned that his work was genuinely admired. Fabian believes the success could have encouraged him, eased the disappointment over Leda, and given room to his political ambition. Labude had spent five years on the thesis partly to prove his own ability, and he had counted on success as a force in his development. Yet, as Fabian recognizes, Labude believed Weckherlin’s report rather than his own expectation. A single false account displaced the future Labude had carefully calculated for himself.

Accidental rescue and the final reversal

The novel’s closing rescue sharpens the gap between good intention and outcome. Fabian sees a small boy balancing on a stone bridge railing, hurries toward him, and watches the child lose his balance, cry out, and fall into the river. Fabian takes off his jacket and jumps in after him. The boy reaches the bank, crying; the rescue succeeds on its immediate terms, but Fabian drowns.

Set against Labude’s death, the scene refuses a simple moral equation. Weckherlin’s deception was meant to injure and produced a death he did not intend; Fabian’s leap is an effort to save a child, yet its consequence is his own death. Neither outcome can be measured by intention alone, and neither is corrected by later understanding. The recurring force of Zufall und Schicksal lies in this cruel imbalance: life turns on what people do not know and cannot fully control, while the consequences remain real even when the intentions behind them differ utterly.