Bubis’s death is a sudden interruption in the life of his publishing house: laughter carries through its rooms, stops at eleven twenty-five, and gives way to the discovery of Bubis dead at his desk. The episode joins an intimate, almost joyful final moment to the practical succession of the business and to Benno von Archimboldi’s private, unresolved response from far away.

The last morning in Hamburg

Bubis is in his office reading a book by a young writer from Dresden, a work described as viciously funny and already troubled by censorship in the Democratic Republic. He laughs so hard that the publicity chief can hear him across the publishing house: in the lobby, the bookkeeper’s and copy editors’ offices, the meeting room, the reading room, the bathroom, the kitchen and pantry, and even the office of Bubis’s wife, the farthest away.

Then the laughter stops. Everyone remembers the time: eleven twenty-five in the morning. Bubis’s secretary first knocks and waits, reluctant to disturb him. When an urgent call comes through and no one answers, she knocks several times more and opens the door. He is slumped over among books artfully scattered across the floor. He is dead, but his face retains a happy expression. The contrast is stark: the sound that had animated the whole building disappears, while the room preserves the signs of his reading and the unexpected serenity of his final expression.

Succession and farewell

Bubis’s body is burned, and his ashes are scattered over the waters of the Alster. His widow, the baroness, takes the helm of the publishing house and declares that she has no intention of selling it. The company thus continues under her direction, while the death closes Bubis’s own part in the business without ending its institutional life.

The young writer’s book remains an unresolved detail in the aftermath. No one says anything about the manuscript, despite the writer’s difficulties with censorship in the Democratic Republic. Its appearance in Bubis’s final reading links his death to the publisher’s work, but the scene does not explain what will happen to the manuscript.

Archimboldi learns of the death

After moving back to the Continent, Archimboldi is reading a German newspaper on a terrace in Missolonghi when he learns that Bubis has died. He reads the story again, then a third time, and gets up shaking before walking around the town. The news reaches him not in Hamburg but at a distance, through print; his repeated reading and physical agitation register the impact without supplying an explanation of what Bubis meant to him in that moment.

Missolonghi is presented through its memorials to Byron, which seem to make the English poet appear to have done nothing there but stroll between inns, taverns, backstreets, and squares. The narrative corrects that misleading picture: Byron was too ill to move, while Thanatos, personified as a tourist who walks, looks, and takes note, moves through the landscape. This meditation follows Archimboldi’s news of Bubis’s death, enlarging the episode’s concern with death beyond the office while preserving the distinction between the actual report and the literary reflection it prompts.

The unsent condolence

Archimboldi wonders whether to send a card to the publishing house and even imagines the words he might write. He then decides that none of it makes sense and sends nothing. The episode ends not with a message or a journey back to Hamburg, but with the abandonment of an imagined gesture. Bubis’s death produces a concrete succession at the publishing house and an inward response in Archimboldi; the condolence that could have connected them remains unwritten.