Hans Reiter · Benno von Archimboldi

Hans Reiter / Benno von Archimboldi is an elusive novelist whose fiction preserves intimate parts of his family history even as he remains absent from the people who lived it. His sister Lotte recognizes their childhood in The King of the Forest, and, after years without seeing him, receives him at her door. Their linked stories make the written work at once a private record released into public circulation and a belated route toward reunion.

Identity and Writing

After Inheritance, Archimboldi sent Bubis the manuscript of Saint Thomas, an apocryphal biography of a biographer whose subject is a great writer of the Nazi regime. Some critics wanted to see the fictional writer as a likeness of Ernst Jünger, but the narrative distinguishes the character from Jünger. At that time, as far as Bubis knew, Archimboldi lived in Venice and was probably still working as a gardener, although the advances and checks his publisher sent periodically would have allowed him to write full-time. The contrast between literary provision and continued manual work leaves his working life partly uncertain rather than resolving it into a simple portrait of a professional author.

A later manuscript arrived from Icaria, where Archimboldi had rented a little house in the rocky hills, with the sea in the distance. Bubis imagined the landscape as resembling Sisyphus’s final surroundings and wrote to Archimboldi, confirming receipt and reading of the text while offering three forms of payment. Archimboldi replied with a story about Sisyphus escaping hell through legal stratagem: before Zeus freed Thanatos, Sisyphus instructed his wife not to perform the customary funeral rites, anticipating that Death would come for him; once in hell, he blamed her and asked permission to return to Earth to punish her. The exchange joins the island setting and the manuscript’s arrival to a tale of death evaded by argument, while showing the correspondence through which publisher and author remain connected.

Lotte’s Childhood and the Absent Brother

Lotte was born in 1930. Like her brother, she was blond and blue-eyed, but she never grew as tall as he did. When Archimboldi went away to war, she was nine and hoped he would receive leave and come home covered in medals. Her childhood dreams gave his absence a bodily scale: she sometimes heard the giant’s footsteps, his enormous Wehrmacht boots striding toward the house where she and their parents slept, heedless of puddles and brambles. She woke so sad that she had to try not to cry.

Other dreams turned the hoped-for return into its opposite: Lotte imagined that she too had gone to war and found her brother’s body riddled with bullets on the battlefield. She sometimes told her parents about these dreams. The two recurring possibilities—an impressive homecoming and a brother dead far away—show how, for the child left behind, war organizes the imagination around his uncertain fate. His imagined size makes him at once the beloved brother and a figure almost beyond ordinary reach.

The King of the Forest and Recognition

In 2001, despite declining health and less steady nerves, Lotte was preparing for another trip to Mexico. While waiting at Frankfurt airport for her flight to Los Angeles, she bought a book and several magazines. She was not a habitual reader; the books she occasionally chose were generally celebrity memoirs, biographies, or volumes by television personalities. By mistake, or because she was hurrying not to miss her flight, she bought The King of the Forest, a book of no more than 150 pages by Benno von Archimboldi.

The novel described a one-legged father, a one-eyed mother, and their two children: a boy who liked to swim and a girl who followed her brother to the cliffs. As the plane crossed the Atlantic, Lotte realized with astonishment that she was reading part of her own childhood. Its writing was clear, sometimes transparent, but its successive stories seemed not to lead toward a destination. The family, neighbors, and animals remained, while nature itself gradually dissolved in a boiling cauldron and vanished. The book’s movement from recognizable domestic particulars toward disappearance gives Lotte’s recognition an unsettled form: she finds her family in it, but the world that held them does not remain intact.

As the other passengers slept, Lotte read the novel again, skipping the passages that did not concern her family, house, neighbors, or garden. She became certain that Archimboldi was her brother. She briefly considered that the author might instead have spoken to him, but rejected that possibility because the book contained things she believed her brother would never have told anyone. She did not stop to consider that writing them had already told them to the world. Her discovery thus exposes the contradiction at the center of the book: Archimboldi’s family history is concealed within fiction, yet publication makes that private material public and allows his sister to identify him through it.

Return and Narrative Significance

After Lotte spoke with Archimboldi, she was left in Mexico with the telephone pressed to her ear, hearing sounds she associated with falling into an abyss. Three months after she had returned to Germany, Archimboldi appeared. Lotte was in her nightdress and about to go to bed when the doorbell rang. She asked over the intercom who was there; he answered that it was her brother. The reunion begins not with a public announcement or explanation, but with a voice at the door confirming the relationship Lotte had reconstructed through a book.

The sequence brings the absent brother back into the family narrative by way of two forms of recognition: Lotte first reads him in a novel, then hears him identify himself at her home. It does not erase the years of separation or the childhood fears shaped by his departure to war. Instead, the return gives those fears a concrete counterpart: the brother who once existed for Lotte as remembered footsteps, dreamed rescue, or a body lost on a battlefield is again present, though the passage offers no further account of what follows their encounter.