Hans Reiter (Benno von Archimboldi) and Ingeborg

Hans Reiter, writing as Benno von Archimboldi, and Ingeborg are married partners whose shared life is marked by her tuberculosis, his writing, and repeated movement between places. Their relationship joins ordinary mutual care to a sense of threatened time: Archimboldi responds to her illness by changing their circumstances, while their final travels take them far from the routines and family ties she has left behind. Ingeborg’s death ends their life together, but not the uncertainty surrounding its last days.

Illness and mutual care

During a routine medical checkup, Ingeborg was diagnosed with a pulmonary condition. She initially kept the diagnosis from Archimboldi and took the prescribed pills irregularly. When she began coughing blood, he took her to an English doctor, who referred her at once to a German lung specialist. The specialist diagnosed tuberculosis, then common in postwar Germany.

Following the specialist’s advice, Archimboldi used the money paid for his novel Rivers of Europe to move with Ingeborg to Kempten, in the Bavarian Alps, where the cold, dry climate was thought likely to help her recover. She took sick leave from work, and he gave up his job at a bar. Her health improved little, but the days they spent there were happy. The arrangement makes the limits of care plain: he can alter their lives in response to medical advice, but he cannot secure her recovery.

Ingeborg was not afraid of tuberculosis; she believed she would not die from it. Her confidence stands against the practical seriousness of the diagnosis and Archimboldi’s efforts to respond to it. When her illness later worsened, he again became her immediate support, accompanying her through hospitalization and promising not to leave her alone.

A life organized around writing and travel

In Kempten, Archimboldi brought his typewriter and completed his fifth book, Bifurcaria Bifurcata, in a month, writing eight pages a day. The book was about seaweed. Ingeborg was struck less by the subject than by the speed and assurance of his typing: he spent only three or four hours a day at the machine, yet handled it with the fluency of a veteran typist. His work continued alongside their life together, rather than replacing it; the time he devoted to writing was bounded, while their shared days remained central.

Eight months after their first stay, they returned to Kempten. The town no longer seemed as beautiful, and after two days, when both were on edge, they left by cart for a village near the Austrian border. Fewer than twenty people lived there. They rented a room from Fritz Leube, a dairy keeper who lived alone after losing his two sons in the war and his wife, whose death he attributed to sorrow. The villagers, however, said he had pushed her into a ravine. The contradiction gives their temporary refuge a disturbing undertone: the couple’s private life unfolds in a place where loss is explained differently by the person involved and by the surrounding community.

Leube was troubled by Ingeborg’s cough because he feared tuberculosis was contagious, though the couple saw little of him. On some evenings he shared brandy and asked them about the city, which to him meant any place with more than thirty thousand inhabitants. Ingeborg’s answers often furrowed his brow. He would end these conversations by praising country life. The couple’s stay was at once hospitable and uneasy, with the illness present even in the practical details of their lodging.

Intimacy under the shadow of illness

During their time in the village, Ingeborg and Archimboldi made love often, as if they had a foreboding. Their intimacy extended across the rented rooms and the stable, while the household and village slept or Leube was away at work. In the mornings they looked exhausted and bruised; Leube attributed their appearance to the unhealthy habits of city people. The narrative places their closeness beside illness and apprehension, not as a cure for either but as a form of shared life intensified by uncertainty.

After one long coughing spell, Ingeborg asked Leube how his wife had died. He answered that it had been from sorrow, as he always did. Ingeborg then told him that she had heard in town that he had killed his wife. Her question brings the village’s rumor into the room and places the couple’s own precarious circumstances beside another contested account of death. The exchange also shows Ingeborg speaking directly where Leube’s habitual explanation leaves the matter unresolved.

The night at the border and its aftermath

At some point, Ingeborg left during the night, and Archimboldi went after her through snow toward the border post. On the climb he imagined seeing her beside the road or near the ravines, only to find that some apparent figures were rocks or fallen trees. He was frightened by the possibility that she might fall. Near the post, he found her standing by a tree and ran to embrace her. His search turns care into a physical pursuit through a landscape where darkness and snow make it difficult to distinguish a person from the surrounding terrain.

In the border cabin, Archimboldi found two dead men. He swept up the glass from the window he had broken earlier, taking care to make it appear that the damage had been caused from inside, and left without touching anything else. The next day Ingeborg was too ill to get out of bed; her temperature reached 104 degrees, and by evening she was delirious. An ambulance went toward the border post, followed later by a police car; the ambulance returned to Kempten carrying bodies. Archimboldi and Ingeborg were not questioned, possibly because Leube intervened.

That night Ingeborg was taken to a hospital in Kempten. Leube visited Archimboldi there and advised him to say nothing if anyone asked about her nighttime flight, adding that no one in the village knew of it. He also asked about her treatment, food, and medicine, then left a parcel of cheese, bread, and cured meat. When Archimboldi saw the food, he felt an overpowering urge to vomit, but stored it in Ingeborg’s bedside table rather than throwing it away. The parcel becomes a small, concrete sign of Leube’s concern, set against Archimboldi’s distress and the silence surrounding the border incident.

Ingeborg’s fever began to subside after three days, but her mood swings grew more pronounced. She spoke little and repeatedly demanded to be taken out of the hospital. During another delirious episode she did not recognize Archimboldi; at dawn she vomited blood and, as she was taken for X-rays, pleaded with him not to leave her alone or let her die in the hospital. He promised that he would not. Three days later the fever had begun to lessen. Leube returned the day before her discharge, bringing Ingeborg a second package like the one he had given Archimboldi.

Departure and an unresolved death

After leaving the hospital, the couple returned to Cologne by train, but stayed less than three days. Archimboldi asked whether Ingeborg wanted to visit her mother. She said she planned never to see her mother or sisters again and wanted instead to travel. The following day she applied for a passport, while Archimboldi collected money from their friends to support the journey. Their departure was therefore not simply a change of scenery: it followed Ingeborg’s explicit refusal of a return to her family and her choice of continued movement.

They traveled first through Austria and Switzerland, then Italy, visiting Venice and Milan and stopping in Verona. They continued through Brescia, Padua, Vicenza, Mantua, and Bologna, spent three days in Pisa, swam at Cecina and Piombino across from Elba, visited Florence, and made their way to Rome. The account presents them as vagabonds, moving from city to city rather than settling back into a stable domestic life. Their travels preserve their partnership as a shared undertaking even as Ingeborg’s health remains fragile.

Later, the Baroness Von Zumpe received a telegram from Mr. Bubis saying that Archimboldi’s wife had died in a remote village on the Adriatic coast. The baroness wept and set out to find the couple’s destination, accompanied by a young editor from Turin. In the village, however, people gave a different account: a German couple had arrived, the man had left alone, and the woman had drowned. Her body had never been found, and she was not buried in the cemetery. The contrast between the telegram’s report and the villagers’ story leaves the manner and circumstances of Ingeborg’s death uncertain. Their relationship ends not with a witnessed final scene but with a gap between reports, an absence that echoes the couple’s life of departure and the novel’s larger pattern of lives only partially recoverable.