Hans Reiter

Hans Reiter’s story traces the passage of a boy who feels most at home beneath the sea into a soldier who survives war, reads the papers of a persecuted writer, and begins a new life under the name Benno von Archimboldi. His defining allegiance is not to the land or the forest conventionally associated with Germany, but to the seabed: an alternative world that gives form to his solitude and imagination. The name he adopts eventually brings him into the literary world, but it does not erase the history that preceded it.

Identity and the Sea

Born in 1920, Hans Reiter seems less like an ordinary child than like a strand of seaweed. He rejects both the earth and the surface of the sea, drawn instead to the seabed, with its strange plains, valleys, and cliffs. The distinction is fundamental to his way of seeing: the familiar world above water appears to him less compelling than a hidden realm beneath it.

As an infant, Reiter repeatedly slips from his mother’s hands while she bathes him and sinks to the bottom of the washtub. On one occasion, his father tells his mother not to lift him immediately, to see what the child will do. Reiter remains still, watching fragments drift away, until he runs out of breath and is finally lifted from the water. The episode gives an early, concrete form to his unusual relation to danger and to the submerged world: he does not instinctively struggle toward the surface, but attends to what lies below until his body’s limits intervene.

His physical proportions set him apart as he grows. At six he is taller than most boys several years older, a height that later becomes a practical complication as well as a defining feature. The family’s own physical history is marked by difference: his father is one-legged, and his mother is one-eyed. Their son’s childhood unfolds in a household where bodily vulnerability and unconventional perception are ordinary facts, while his own attention turns persistently away from the surrounding landscape.

Childhood, Books, and Family

At six, Reiter steals his first book, Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, and hides it under his bed. He has swum since he was four, but in 1926 he begins to dive deeper, no longer satisfied with looking around only a few feet below the surface. As he dives, he mentally turns through the book’s pages and discovers Laminaria digitata, a large seaweed with a strong stem and fan-shaped leaves. Seeing a seaweed forest for the first time moves him to tears underwater. The book does not simply give him information: it supplies a vocabulary through which the seabed becomes legible, and a private imaginative companion for his excursions below the waves.

At eight, he loses interest in school. He has already come close to drowning once, when a visiting Berlin tourist named Vogel spots him near the rocks and swims out to rescue him. The episode makes the danger of Reiter’s fascination plain, even as his attention remains fixed on the water. School and conventional paths through the countryside hold little appeal beside the imagined descent into a world of marine creatures and unfamiliar forms.

When Reiter is ten, his parents have a daughter, Lotte. His sister becomes the first person on the surface of the earth to interest or move him. Left in her care, he quickly learns to change her diapers, prepare her bottles, and walk with her until she falls asleep. He tries to draw her in the notebook where he has sketched seaweed, but at first his pictures turn her into marine insects or other shapes from his underwater world. Eventually he draws her as a smiling mermaid, more fish than girl. The image is imperfect as a likeness, but it conveys his affection and his sense of her hopeful character.

Leaving School and Finding a Literary Guide

Reiter leaves school at thirteen, in 1933, the year Hitler comes to power. He dislikes the school in the Town of Chattering Girls and dawdles on the way, mentally transforming the landscape into marine life. His imaginative world remains more vivid than the institutions meant to prepare him for ordinary adult life.

His parents and relatives try a succession of jobs. He works for three months on a fishing boat but is dismissed because he watches the seabed rather than helping with the nets. He is then let go from farm work, peat gathering, an apprenticeship in a tool shop, and a job helping a farmer sell vegetables. Each position fails for a similar reason: Reiter is seen as idle, or as more hindrance than help. Finally, he and his mother work at a Prussian baron’s country house in a forest near a lake. Reiter dusts the rooms and the enormous library, handling its inherited books carefully without reading them. His existing marine reference book remains sufficient, and he fears being caught by the seldom-seen baron.

The baron’s nephew, Hugo Halder, becomes Reiter’s first friend. On visits to the country house, Halder spends increasing amounts of time with him, talking in the library or walking through the estate grounds. He also opens a route beyond Reiter’s single beloved book. When Halder asks what good book Reiter has read, Reiter names Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Halder explains that he means literary writing, distinguishing it through the beauty of story and language, and introduces authors including Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Novalis. Reiter’s difficulty recognizing the distinction between reference and literary books shows how narrow his reading has been; Halder’s patient insistence makes literature a possible new world without displacing the sea that first shaped his imagination.

War, Injury, and the Hidden Papers

Drafted in 1939, Reiter completes training and joins the 310th Regiment of the 79th Light Infantry Division, first as an assistant machine-gun operator and then in an assault company. He tries to secure service in a submarine, an ambition encouraged by Halder, but his height makes him an unsuitable fit for the cramped living conditions aboard. The same stature that an officer thinks might inspire fear in drills is understood to be a disadvantage in actual assault combat.

During the war, Reiter is shot in the throat and chest. He receives the Iron Cross at a field hospital in Novoselivske for his reported actions at Chornomorske and Mykolaivka, but the medal accompanies a permanent change in his life: after an operation, he can eat and move his neck normally, yet he cannot speak. The doctors cannot decide whether to send him home or return him to his division. Winter and a Soviet counterattack delay the decision, and he is eventually sent with other wounded men to Kostekino, a sparsely inhabited village by the Dnieper.

There, Reiter discovers papers belonging to Boris Abramovich Ansky behind a hearth. He finds them while searching for a clean bandage after examining himself in a mirror and removing the dirty one around his throat. The hiding place is concealed within the depth of the hearth, behind a narrow opening in its soot-dark interior. Reiter studies how it works, trying to understand the conditions it would take to build a fire or heat a pot while someone hid inside. He concludes that the hiding place was designed for two people: one to shelter and another to remain outside and maintain the fire. From that practical problem he imagines a relationship between rescuer and rescued, survivor and victim. The concealed space becomes a material puzzle through which he tries to approach the desperate history behind Ansky’s papers.

Reiter reads the notebook repeatedly and becomes absorbed in the life it suggests. He dreams of Ansky and of the possibility that he himself killed him. The uncertainty turns into guilt and nightmares; at times Reiter believes he is already dead. In a dream set in Crimea, he approaches a fallen soldier fearing that he will see Ansky’s face, but discovers his own instead. When he wakes, his voice has returned. His first spoken words express relief that he was not the killer. The return of speech follows not a medical explanation in the account but a dream that confronts him with the fear he has carried while reading Ansky’s papers.

From Soldier to Writer

In the summer of 1942, Reiter is sent back to his division. He carries Ansky’s notebook under his jacket as the unit moves through Crimea, Kerch, the Kuban, Krasnodar, the Caucasus, and the Kalmuk Steppe. The notebook travels with him through military retreat and renewed fighting, a private record kept alongside his uniform. His former comrades have changed in voice and bearing, and the division suffers further losses as it retreats westward.

After the war, Reiter tells Ingeborg that the man he killed was Sammer, a killer of Jews. Sammer had used the name Zeller and had spoken to Reiter in a prisoner-of-war camp, where American police questioned Reiter about him and recorded Reiter’s own name. Reiter says the authorities were looking for prominent war criminals, while Sammer was an unimportant civil servant. He insists that he answered the questions truthfully, asked for help finding his parents, and eventually escaped during a transfer of prisoners. He fears that both American and German police may be looking for him or may have placed his name on a list of suspects. The account connects his postwar uncertainty to his wartime past without resolving every question surrounding his identity or what the authorities know.

Reiter’s first novel is called Lüdicke. He writes it while living in Cologne and seeks a typewriter from someone who does not know him as Hans Reiter. After finding an old French typewriter in good condition, he borrows money from women at a bar to meet its owner’s high price. When the owner asks his name, Reiter answers, “My name is Benno von Archimboldi.” The name begins as an answer given in the moment, but it becomes the identity under which his literary career will take shape.

A letter from Hamburg then brings the new name into contact with publishing. Mr. Bubis, an editor, writes that he has read Lüdicke with interest and would like to publish it, praising its originality while acknowledging that the available advance is small. He promises that the novel will receive careful treatment and distribution through bookshops in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In meeting Bubis, Archimboldi is asked what his real name is; he insists that Benno von Archimboldi is his name. The exchange leaves the boundary between biography and literary persona deliberately unsettled: the name is invented in circumstances of concealment, yet Reiter claims it as his own.

Transformation and Narrative Significance

Reiter’s transformation is not a clean break between one person and another. The boy who carries a marine-life book into his dives becomes a young man introduced to literary beauty by Halder; the wounded soldier carries Ansky’s notebook through the war; and the writer adopts a name that allows his work to enter public life. At each stage, a book or written name mediates between private experience and a world that Reiter otherwise finds difficult to inhabit.

The sea remains the defining image of his early consciousness, but the novel does not reduce his later life to a simple escape from land into literature. War places him inside institutions and histories he did not choose, while his reading of Ansky forces him to imagine persecution, concealment, survival, and death through another person’s records. His identity as Benno von Archimboldi emerges from that layered past: it is both a chosen literary name and the continuation of a life shaped by hiding, displacement, and the uncertain boundary between what can be known and what must be imagined.