4 ideas
Stephan Labude, Fabian's wealthy friend, has spent five years on a Habilitation thesis on Lessing. A spiteful university assistant tells him as a prank that the thesis has been rejected, and Labude shoots himself. Afterward it emerges that the thesis had been judged excellent. In the book, a man whose political hopes and love life have already collapsed stakes his remaining identity on institutional approval, so a single lie is enough to kill him.
Back in his provincial hometown, having lost his job, Cornelia and Labude, Fabian sees a small boy fall from a bridge into the river. He jumps in to rescue him. The boy swims to the bank crying, and Fabian, who cannot swim, drowns. The novel ends his lifelong moral passivity with one decent act that is useless and fatal.
Labude argues that society can be saved by political and economic restructuring led by a reformist bourgeois movement. Fabian counters that a better system run by the same selfish, cowardly people will simply be corrupted, so individuals must first become decent. The novel treats both positions as stalled. Labude's program dies with him, and Fabian's insistence on moral preconditions becomes his excuse to stay a spectator who waits instead of acting.
When the Depression makes jobs unobtainable, affection and sex become assets to be traded for security. Cornelia leaves the newly unemployed Fabian to become the mistress of the film producer Makart, which gets her a screen career. She describes this as a clear-eyed transaction rather than a betrayal. The novel presents this as structural rather than individual vice: scarcity forces people to price their relationships, so love lasts only while both partners can afford it.