Cologne is the first sustained setting in Hans Reiter’s postwar life and the place where he begins the transition from former soldier to writer. Amid ruined streets, improvised housing, and the uncertain routines of occupation, he stays instead of returning to his village, meets Ingeborg Bauer, finishes his first novel, and adopts the name Benno von Archimboldi. Cologne becomes both a practical refuge and the threshold of a literary identity; later, when Lotte searches for her brother there, the address that once held their shared life has vanished beneath a new apartment building.

A city of makeshift lives

After leaving the prisoner-of-war camp, Reiter goes to Cologne. He first lives in barracks near the station and then shares a cellar with two men: a taciturn tank veteran with a burn on one side of his face, and an older former newspaper reporter, friendly and talkative by comparison. The men sometimes seem childlike despite their ages. The reporter has kept clippings from wartime articles celebrating life in Panzer divisions, and the veteran praises the writing, a remnant of wartime ideals now circulating among people who have survived defeat.

Reiter initially spends several days trying to obtain a train ticket back to his village. Instead, he finds work as a doorman at a bar frequented by American and English soldiers, whose tips are generous. He takes on small errands for them as well, including finding apartments, making introductions to women, and connecting them with black-market sellers. These jobs make staying in Cologne possible. When his cellar companions leave for the countryside in good weather, he sometimes has the basement to himself for a week or two.

The city’s everyday life is shaped by scarcity and provisional arrangements. Reiter writes with only a notebook and pencil, while reading is harder: public libraries remain closed and the few available bookshops, often mobile, charge high prices. Even so, he observes people reading wherever he looks. His impression of a population focused on reading and food is explicitly uncertain, but it registers the narrowed priorities of life after the war. The bar, the cellar, and the streets between them form a modest geography in which he can earn money, observe others, and work on his own writing.

Ingeborg Bauer and the life made in Cologne

One night, while guarding the bar door on Spengler-strasse, Reiter hears a young woman call his name from the darkness. He does not recognize her at first. She says she is his girlfriend and that he should know who she is. After she waits outside the bar, Reiter finds her asleep in a doorway. When she wakes, the doorway has become a room decorated with performers’ photographs, dolls, and stuffed bears, though cases of wine and whiskey are stacked on the floor. Reiter remembers her as the girl who lived in Hugo Halder’s old flat. She supplies her name: Ingeborg Bauer.

The next morning, Ingeborg tells Reiter about her family’s displacement. Her father died in a bombing raid; her mother and sisters fled Berlin before the Soviet siege, and the family’s attempt to stay in the countryside brought hunger and danger. They eventually returned to their home town in the Westerwald, leaving Ingeborg and Reiter alone together. In Cologne, their relationship develops alongside the struggle to establish a workable life. Ingeborg finds employment at a small dressmaking shop, first assembling patterns and then visiting clothing shops to take orders that she fills herself. The shop turns old dresses into new ones and unfashionable garments into fashionable ones, its success sustained by the owner’s resourcefulness despite her expectation that another world war will begin by 1950.

The first novel and a new name

In Cologne, Reiter completes his first novel, called Lüdiche. To type it, he searches the backstreets for someone willing to rent him a typewriter, deliberately avoiding anyone who knows him by his birth name, Hans Reiter. He eventually finds an old man with a well-kept French typewriter. The rental price is high, so Reiter borrows money from several women at the bar and returns the next day with the payment.

When the owner asks for his name to enter in an accounting book, Reiter answers with the name that comes to him: Benno von Archimboldi. The moment joins a practical transaction to a lasting act of self-creation. The typewriter makes it possible to prepare the manuscript, while the name separates the emerging author from the soldier and former doorman who has been living in Cologne. A letter from Hamburg soon brings the consequence into view: Mr. Bubis, a prominent editor, has read Lüdiche and offers to publish it, praising its originality while acknowledging the limited advance he can afford. He promises careful treatment and distribution in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Cologne is therefore where Archimboldi’s public literary life begins, even as the publishing relationship reaches beyond the city.

Departure, return, and absence

Cologne remains connected to the couple’s changing circumstances. When Ingeborg is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Archimboldi moves with her to Kempten on the specialist’s advice, giving up his bar job and using money from his fourth book, Rivers of Europe, to support the move. After the hospital, they return to Cologne by train but stay fewer than three days. Ingeborg does not want to see her mother or sisters; instead, she wants to travel. The couple obtain a passport and money from friends, then leave for Austria and Switzerland before continuing through Italy. Cologne is the point of return before their life together turns into travel elsewhere.

Years later, Lotte Reiter asks to drive through Cologne while returning from a holiday with her husband, Werner, and looking for the only address she has for her brother. The place where Archimboldi once lived with Ingeborg has been replaced by a new apartment building. None of its residents remembers the tall, blond, bony former soldier she describes. Lotte is quiet for part of the journey home, then recovers her mood while talking about the cities they have visited. The episode gives Cologne a second meaning: the city that enabled Archimboldi’s beginnings cannot provide evidence of where he went. Its changed address makes absence concrete, while the novel’s movement from the brother’s former home to the next generation, Lotte’s son Klaus, carries the family story forward without resolving the search.