The birth of the pen name Benno von Archimboldi

The birth of the pen name Benno von Archimboldi is a small, decisive act of self-invention: while completing his first novel in Cologne, Hans Reiter supplies a stranger with a name that begins as an expedient and becomes the identity under which his work will enter the literary world. The name is born not in a public ceremony or a declaration of ambition, but beside an old French typewriter, in an encounter shaped by anonymity, money, and an old writer’s uncompromising account of Germany’s moral evasions.

The name at the typewriter

Reiter finishes his first novel, titled Lüdiche, and needs a typewriter. He deliberately searches the backstreets of Cologne rather than borrowing or renting one from anyone who knows him as Hans Reiter. The separation matters: he wants to write without bringing his familiar name into the transaction. His search ends with an old man who owns a French typewriter in perfect condition and, though he does not usually rent it out, sometimes makes an exception for writers.

The price is high. Reiter initially considers looking elsewhere, but the clean, carefully maintained machine changes his mind: every key seems ready to make its mark. The owner requires payment in advance, so Reiter borrows money from several girls at a bar. When he returns the next day, the old man opens an accounting book and asks for his name. Reiter has come seeking anonymity, but the demand for a name turns that absence into a choice.

His first answer is immediate: he says that his name is Benno von Archimboldi. The old man does not accept it, asking him to stop playing games and give his real name. Reiter repeats the invented identity, now addressing the man respectfully and making clear that he will leave if it is treated as a joke. The brief exchange gives the pseudonym its first force: it is no longer a passing answer, but a name Reiter is willing to stand behind, even when challenged.

The old writer’s rebuke

The pause after Reiter repeats the name gives the encounter a charged stillness. In the old man’s dim study, his dark eyes seem black; Archimboldi’s blue eyes appear to him tired and reddened, yet young, and in a certain sense pure. That judgment leads into a bitter reversal. The old man says the country has tried to topple other countries into the abyss in the name of purity and will, and he rejects both as empty ideals. In his account, those ideals have helped turn people into cowards and thugs, only for them afterward to claim ignorance and blame the Nazis.

The rebuke makes the naming scene more than a playful first step toward literary authorship. It places the new name beside a critique of the very language that might make a name seem noble: purity, will, innocence, and the wish to be forgiven. The old man’s accusation does not explain why Reiter chooses this particular name, and the scene does not supply a hidden origin for it. Instead, it gives the naming a moral setting. Reiter listens, answers that he understands, and the old man then reveals that he, too, was a writer.

The narrator marks the moment cautiously: that afternoon, Reiter may have become Archimboldi. The qualification preserves the gap between speaking a name once and inhabiting it. Yet the scene’s practical facts—the borrowed money, the rented machine, the name entered into an account—give the transformation a material beginning. Authorship here starts not as pure inspiration but as a transaction, and the name offered in that transaction carries the weight of the old writer’s warning.

From private alias to literary identity

The name soon reaches beyond the room where Reiter first speaks it. After Mr. Bubis writes about his publishing house and the books it is preparing to release, Archimboldi shows the letter to Ingeborg. She is surprised because she does not know who Benno von Archimboldi is. He answers that it is him, and she asks why he changed his name. The exchange makes visible a divide that had been useful to Reiter: the person closest to him knows Hans Reiter, while a publisher’s correspondence addresses a writer under another identity.

Archimboldi explains the change in terms of safety. When Ingeborg questions his account, he says that it is safest for him if Reiter is forgotten. The explanation follows the earlier insistence on remaining unknown to the typewriter owner, but now the separation has a sharper consequence: the name may protect him if the police pursue him over Sammer’s murder. The narrative leaves open whether safety was the original reason for taking the name or whether it has become a reason afterward. Ingeborg initially calls him a liar, then believes him; before he leaves for work, she smiles and predicts that he will be famous.

That prediction introduces a possibility Archimboldi says he had never considered. He distinguishes fame from the people and writers who matter to him: Döblin is his consolation, Ansky his strength, Ingeborg his joy, the missing Hugo Halder his lightheartedness and fun, and his sister, from whom he has had no news, his innocence. These attachments answer particular needs; fame, by contrast, seems to him rooted in delusion and lies, or perhaps ambition. He considers it reductive, a force that diminishes both what leads to it and what follows from it. In his formulation, fame and literature are irreconcilable enemies.

An origin that remains unsettled

The name’s meaning is not resolved when it is first spoken. Archimboldi spends the day turning over possible explanations. At the bar and among his acquaintances in Cologne, people know him as Hans Reiter; the police, should they pursue him over Sammer’s murder, could find clues. Perhaps Ingeborg is right that he expects fame and is arranging protection for a future public life. Perhaps the change means something else. The thought ends not with an answer but with repeated uncertainty, keeping the name between concealment and emergence.

That tension also shapes what follows. The day after receiving Mr. Bubis’s letter, Archimboldi writes that the novel is not promised to another publisher and that the proposed advance is acceptable. The name that began as an answer to a typewriter owner now appears in the correspondence of a prospective publishing partnership. Its birth is therefore not a single clean break between Hans Reiter and a finished literary persona. It is a staged passage: first uttered under pressure, then explained as protection, recognized by Ingeborg, and carried into a negotiation over the novel.

The episode’s central irony is that the name may be intended to keep Reiter forgotten, yet it is precisely the name through which his writing becomes recognizable. Archimboldi himself distrusts fame because it compresses a life into a public label; the narrative, meanwhile, shows that a label can both conceal and enable. The pseudonym begins as a refusal to be known by the wrong person, and its literary future grows out of that refusal without settling whether the motive is fear, ambition, or something Reiter cannot yet name.