There is no doubt whatsoever that in this manuscript, extremely personal experience strives to achieve poetical form. It is, however, by no means a conventional autobiography. What seems to be the author’s account of how he was moved to write the book is in fact the architectonic floor plan of the book itself. Very deliberately, events and the experiential impressions they leave on the experiencing subject are selected and arranged to create the illusion that this is only a first sifting of drafts, beginnings, and experiments that have been assembled in order to review their suitability as material for a book to be written in the future. In reality, the result is this very book in its inventive form, a form however, that in the final analysis is a dead end. As if in a mannerist painting, more or less finished sections of the work as well as the artist’s tools of the trade are arranged in an atelier still life and reflected in the mood of the artist—in his own personal problematics—constantly revealing new and surprising aspects that proceed from the artist himself, who also looks out at us from these reflections. The result is an insight into the structure of the work in statu nascendi, i.e., in its origin in the creative artist, and thus also his self-portrait. Everything written in this book is the experience of a writer, i.e., a person for whom writing is not just a calling and a profession, but existence itself, in a word: destiny. Accordingly, what we have is a way of experiencing that is fundamentally different from that of a nonwriter. The author’s claim—based on a quotation from Nietzsche (the prediction of an “artistic era”?)—that thanks to a predominantly literary education, modern man is already a potential writer and thus experiences reality in the same way as the writer, assumes a general awareness of the process that is being described: the continual transformation of factual events into literary material. The dissection of this process also reveals the falsification necessarily inherent in all novelistic literature.

Personally, I have nothing to add to this impeccable evidence of the poet Aristides’s respect for the truth.

One reason I am publishing the manuscript of The Lost Daughter is to document the lamentable fact of alienation from reality and the unfortunate neglect of box-office receipts that has rightly been levelled against the movies and is solely and exclusively due to the collaboration of madmen of the ilk of Aristides.

Munich, September 21, 1984

Heinz Wohlfahrt
INTERCOSMIC LITERARIA
(formerly INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS, Munich)

Handwritten enclosure, presumably not for publication:

As a former journalist and the current wife of the producer Heinz Wohlfahrt before I came to the movie business via television, I would like to add a few personal words to my husband’s preface. I am of course not sufficiently familiar with the technical details of the rights to the Aristides manuscript to form a conclusive opinion. I know my current husband well enough to be able to say that he is incapable of any dishonest behavior whatsoever. At least for my own person, I applaud his decision to have Aristides’s manuscript printed in book form, thereby applying the organizational skills of an entrepreneur more to literature in these times of crisis, which in the end must also benefit film.