Archimboldi and Bubis begin their publishing partnership when Benno von Archimboldi accepts the Hamburg editor’s offer for Lüdicke and travels to meet him. The arrangement grows out of a modest advance and a promise of serious editorial care, but its decisive force lies in Bubis’s willingness to stand behind books that find little public favor: when Archimboldi’s first two novels sell only a few hundred copies, Bubis still means to publish every book that follows.

The offer and the journey

A letter from Hamburg reaches Archimboldi while he is working at a bar. Signed by Mr. Bubis, a prominent editor, it praises Lüdicke in guarded but unmistakable terms. Bubis asks whether the novel has already been promised elsewhere; if not, he would like to publish it. He admits that the advance he can offer is laughably small by the standards of fifteen years earlier, but promises the book the finest treatment and distribution through respected bookshops in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A leaflet enclosed with the letter advertises forthcoming books by Döblin and Heinrich Mann, placing Bubis’s proposal in the context of a publishing house trying to re-establish a literary life after the war.

The letter is not merely an offer of money. Bubis presents his firm as an independent and high-quality publisher, and his promise of care answers the economic weakness of the offer with cultural standing and professional attention. Archimboldi writes back the next day to say that Lüdicke is uncommitted and that the proposed advance is acceptable. Bubis then invites him to Hamburg to sign in person, explaining his distrust of the German post and his new habit, acquired after returning from England, of meeting his authors face to face.

Archimboldi takes leave from work and travels by train to Hamburg. The publisher’s building remains where it stood before 1933, but neighboring buildings and others across the street have been flattened by bombs. Employees privately joke that Bubis directed the raids himself, an absurd rumor set against the visible destruction surrounding the house. The firm’s small staff includes a copy editor, a bookkeeper who also handles press relations, a secretary, and a storeroom attendant; the cellar stock is repeatedly threatened by rainwater and groundwater. Its cramped and precarious circumstances make Bubis’s claims for literary seriousness all the more tangible: this is a working enterprise struggling to keep books in circulation amid the physical and institutional damage of the postwar years.

Meeting Bubis

At seventy-four, Bubis can seem ill, bad-tempered, mistrustful, and miserly, but the impression is misleading. He is healthy, ready to smile, and trusting, though not generous in what he pays his employees. Before Archimboldi reaches him, the young writer sees the publisher’s office: shelves packed tight, books and manuscripts piled on the floor in precarious towers, and first editions, works of so-called degenerate art, French and English books, American paperbacks, and magazines that seem like treasure to an impecunious author. The room’s disorder, abundance, and international range embody a literary world that persists despite war and injustice.

After the usual introductions, Bubis immediately asks for Archimboldi’s real name, certain that the name in the letter cannot be genuine. Archimboldi answers that it is his name. The exchange turns the pseudonym into the partnership’s first test: the publisher questions the identity on which his offer rests, while the writer holds to it directly. Once Archimboldi identifies himself as Benno von Archimboldi, Bubis gestures as if applauding, then sends him to Mrs. Bubis’s office.

There, Archimboldi recognizes Anna Bubis as the Baroness Von Zumpe, a woman from his past. She has changed, and he initially says nothing; she, too, takes time to confirm who he is. As they leave the building’s dark stairs for a walk and perhaps coffee, she tells him that she recognized him and was sure he had recognized her. Archimboldi replies that he recognized her instantly. The publisher meeting thus opens onto a personal history neither of them can treat as new, even as their immediate purpose is to establish a professional relationship.

Bubis as publisher and reader

Bubis’s invitation carries a painful account of his own publishing history. Before 1933, he published promising young German writers. In 1940, alone in a London hotel, he tried to calculate how many of those writers had joined the Nazi Party or the SS, contributed to antisemitic newspapers, or advanced through the Nazi bureaucracy. He writes that the result nearly drove him to suicide. Instead, he struck himself, opened the hotel window, and watched the bombing of London: the bombs seemed to fall close to the hotel, searchlights crossed the sky, and explosions flashed over the barrage balloons. His self-reproach takes place inside the spectacle of war, joining the moral failure of literary culture to the destruction unfolding around him.

That history gives the face-to-face meeting a particular weight. Bubis does not present publishing as an innocent business untouched by political complicity. His earlier authors’ careers have become part of his own reckoning, and the new partnership begins with a publisher who has returned to Germany carrying that burden. The office full of books is therefore more than a sign of taste or wealth: it is the working setting for a renewed commitment to literary judgment after a past in which writers and institutions were implicated in the regime.

Early books and continued commitment

Archimboldi goes on to write The Endless Rose in less than three months. Before Lüdicke has even come off the presses, Bubis receives the new manuscript, reads it in two nights, and wakes his wife to say that they must publish it. His response distinguishes the editor’s judgment from ordinary commercial calculation: he is deeply shaken by the book and considers it better than good.

The sales record supplies a sharp measure of how little that conviction is rewarded. Lüdicke receives two positive notices and one negative one, yet only 300 copies of its first edition sell. The Endless Rose appears five months later, receives one positive review and three negative reviews, and sells 205 copies. Archimboldi’s finances improve only slightly. At readings arranged through the Cologne Cultural Center, the audience is small: fifteen people, including Ingeborg, attend the Lüdicke reading, and just three buy the book; nine, again including Ingeborg, attend the reading from The Endless Rose, and only three remain at the end. Even Ingeborg later admits that she had considered leaving.

Despite these results, Bubis is prepared to publish not just a third Archimboldi book but the fourth, the fifth, and every book that comes afterward. The contrast between meager sales and expansive commitment defines the partnership. Bubis offers the writer neither instant fame nor financial security; what he offers is continuity, a publisher willing to keep reading, judging, and bringing the work into print when the market gives little reason to do so.

Significance of the partnership

The alliance is formed through a sequence of acts of recognition: Bubis identifies promise in a book by an unknown writer, Archimboldi accepts an offer whose advance is small, and the two meet in a damaged city inside a publishing house still occupying its pre-1933 premises. The encounter with Anna Bubis, formerly the Baroness Von Zumpe, adds a private past to that professional beginning, while Bubis’s account of his former authors makes the ethical stakes of literary work explicit.

The partnership’s strength becomes clearest when success fails to arrive. Critical notices remain mixed, readership stays small, and Archimboldi’s livelihood improves only marginally, yet Bubis continues to choose his books. That persistence turns the editor’s initial promise of good treatment into a long-term relationship of trust and literary advocacy. In the wider story of Archimboldi’s emergence under a pen name, the Hamburg meeting is the point at which a concealed identity begins to acquire a public literary career.