Hamburg is a recurring literary and investigative setting in 2666: the city is home to the publishing house that helps launch Benno von Archimboldi’s career, and later becomes a destination for scholars seeking traces of the author after he has vanished from public view. Its significance rests on that double role. Hamburg preserves a damaged but active literary world, yet the people and records connected with Archimboldi can offer only partial knowledge.

The city and Archimboldi’s first books

In 1981, Jean-Claude Pelletier found two Archimboldi books in a small Munich bookstore: the short volume Mitzi’s Treasure and The Garden. This discovery followed his first reading of D’Arsonval in Paris and helped strengthen his admiration for the author. The Hamburg publishing house that had issued D’Arsonval was already part of his search: he wrote to it but received no reply. Years later, when Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza traveled to Hamburg to question the publisher, the city’s literary importance was no longer a matter of bibliography alone; it was a place where they hoped to recover information about a writer whose whereabouts had become uncertain.

The novel also returns to an earlier moment in Archimboldi’s life. After completing Lüdicke, he had only the original manuscript and one carbon copy, so he selected two publishers. He delivered the original in person to a Cologne house and sent the copy to the Hamburg publisher, which had published books of the German Left until 1933. The Nazi government had shut the firm down and tried to send its editor, Jacob Bubis, to a prison camp; Bubis escaped by going into exile. The manuscript’s arrival therefore links Archimboldi’s uncertain literary beginnings to the destruction and dispersal of German publishing under Nazi rule.

Bubis’s reply offered to publish Lüdicke, praised its interest and originality, and promised careful treatment and distribution in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, while acknowledging that the advance would be small. His letter gave Archimboldi a concrete opening after multiple rejections in Cologne. The Hamburg firm’s willingness to take a chance on the novel became the basis of the writer’s publishing relationship with Bubis.

The Bubis publishing house

When Archimboldi later traveled by train to Hamburg, the publishing house occupied the same building it had used before 1933. Neighboring buildings had been flattened by bombing, as had several across the street. The firm’s continued presence in that damaged neighborhood makes its address a material remnant of both the prewar publishing world and the destruction that interrupted it. Employees even joked, behind Bubis’s back, that he had personally directed the air raids on the district; the irony belongs to the building’s history, not to any actual role attributed to him.

Bubis ran the modest operation with four employees: a copy editor, a bookkeeper who also handled press relations, a secretary, and a storeroom attendant. The cellar storeroom was repeatedly under repair because rainwater and groundwater flooded it, leaving damp patches that threatened the books and the health of those working there. Marianne Gottlieb, Bubis’s most faithful former employee, also appeared at the premises. She had helped drive Bubis and his wife toward the Dutch border when they went into exile; the border police searched the car but found nothing. The house thus held together everyday editorial work, fragile storage, and memories of flight.

Archimboldi’s first visit made the firm’s internal life part of his own literary world. After three instructive days in Hamburg, he returned to Cologne on a crowded night train and told Ingeborg about Bubis, Mrs. Bubis, the copy editor Uta, the publicity-minded bookkeeper Anita, the secretary Martha, and the storeroom attendant Rainer, who had already passed through several poetic styles. He also recounted Bubis’s friends and his list of writers. The visit ended in shared laughter and renewed work: Archimboldi began his second book and finished it in less than three months.

Researchers seeking the vanished writer

In a later period, Pelletier and Espinoza returned to Hamburg and met the editor in chief, Schnell. He told them that he had never seen Archimboldi and that the publisher’s growing payments to the writer went into a Swiss bank account. Instructions arrived about once every two years. Their letters were usually postmarked from Italy, though the publisher’s files also contained letters stamped in Greece, Spain, and Morocco. They were addressed to Mrs. Bubis, the owner of the firm, and Schnell said that he had not read them. The evidence pointed to continuing contact and a widely shifting correspondence, but did not disclose where Archimboldi lived.

Schnell said that, besides Mrs. Bubis, only the publicity director and the copy chief at the house had met Archimboldi in person. By the time Schnell joined the firm, the writer had already disappeared. The publicity director could offer Pelletier and Espinoza only her impression that he was a good person. The institutional record therefore had limits: the publisher still received instructions and held letters, yet even its senior editor lacked firsthand knowledge of the author’s life.

That visit followed a dispiriting walk through Hamburg’s streetwalker and peep-show district, where Pelletier and Espinoza spoke of past love and disappointment without naming people or dates. They returned to their hotel in silence. A note from Schnell then changed the course of their visit: after speaking with Mrs. Bubis, he had secured an appointment for them. At her apartment the next morning, framed photographs of writers with Bubis drew the scholars’ attention. They were still trying to identify whether one man pictured beside him was Fallada when Mrs. Bubis appeared and confirmed the name. The scene places literary recognition, personal memory, and the search for Archimboldi within the same room, while offering no simple answer to the mystery of his absence.

A recurring meeting place

Hamburg reappears during later scholarly travel. When Manuel Espinoza and Piero Morini attended a German-literature symposium there, they visited the Bubis publishing house and brought Mrs. Bubis roses, but she was away in Moscow. Schnell praised her energy; the two visitors gave him the flowers before leaving. This modest episode shows the house remaining a point of contact among Archimboldi’s researchers and publishing world, even when the person they have come to greet is absent.

Across these episodes, Hamburg connects literary work to the conditions that make it possible: a publisher’s willingness to accept a rejected manuscript, the labor of a small staff, precarious storage, and the persistence of a firm in a bomb-damaged neighborhood. At the same time, the city’s records and witnesses never fully resolve Archimboldi’s disappearance. Letters arrive from different countries, but their contents remain unavailable to the investigators; people who met him can supply impressions, not a present location. Hamburg consequently acts as both archive and limit: a place that preserves the traces of a career while keeping its central figure out of reach.