I herewith declare under oath that, despite personally conducting a thorough search, I did not turn up among the papers found at the accident scene a script entitled “The Lost Daughter.” Nor did such a script emerge during later searches of Aristides’s paltry literary remains in various third-rate hotels in Hamburg and Paris. The one and only thing contained in the folder marked “The Lost Daughter” was the manuscript being published here.

Claims to this manuscript have been asserted by a lawyer representing the mother of Aristides’s underage son (they divorced in 1952) as well as by Herr Klaus Scherping of Scherping Publishers, Hamburg, and the stockbroker von Rönnekamp, also Hamburg, all under the pretext that it is not simply a movie script but a literary masterpiece and that it belongs to them.

Be that as it may, it only shines a harsher light on the dark ignorance of those ladies and gentlemen, who are not even aware of the fact that in this manuscript their friend Aristides depicted with microscopic precision the roles they play in it, such that from the very first page, anyone with half a brain knows with one hundred percent certainty what I suspected from the very first, and which Aristides even has the gall to admit himself—namely, that with their total support it was his intention from the beginning to double-cross INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS—a.k.a. in this case me, Heinz Wohlfahrt—in the most cynical way, by never intending to write a script but a work of literature instead.

That is confirmed by the statements of other equally experienced, top-notch experts in film production whom I have consulted. Their unassailable conclusion is that not even one of the madmen who were yesterday dubbed the “New Wave” and today find themselves on top—not even one of them could make the manuscript in question into a movie, much less a box-office hit of the kind our financially high-risk industry is dependent on, for better or for worse.

And now they expect me to sacrifice my interests to their opinion? Even though it was against my express warning and opposition that the fellow was contracted to write the script on the basis of—if you can believe it—nothing more than a treatment of three (3!) typewritten pages. My French coproducer insisted on it in consultation with the distributor against my vote as executive producer, because Aristides’s oral presentation of his idea was supposedly so brilliant that he was to set to work immediately on the shooting script, skipping the treatment that is standard in the industry. I have a memo of September 4, 1967, as proof that the distributor agreed with the French coproducer and therefore put pressure on me at this time of crisis to pay an advance out of my own personal pocket (certainly not the usual practice for unknown authors in my country) and promise to take over half the costs once the script was ready. These partners were then content to get an occasional look at only a few pages of the script that was purportedly in progress. The contracts for the actors were drawn up from a cast list handwritten by Aristides. Here I want to stress that this unthinking lack of caution was encouraged by the influence of the female lead, Nadine Carrier, whose relationship to Aristides he himself depicted in a way that leaves little to the imagination.