Herr Aristides (with a person in his line of work you can never tell if that was his first or his last name or if he really was called something else entirely) was a victim of driving at a speed that even I have to call irresponsible, and I like to drive fast myself. He lost his life in a crash in which no one else was injured, thank God. It was in France, thirty kilometers or so beyond Avignon, on January 13, 1968, between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m. precisely. That exact date—probably the only certain one in the life of a man like him—has stuck in my memory so well because it was when the disagreeable arguments began with my French coproducer at the time, arguments that led to a falling-out (which, as far as I personally am concerned, has been flawlessly resolved) and so to the collapse of the Lost Daughter project and thus to the provisional liquidation of INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS, all because of a certain Herr Aristides, today celebrated as a poet by those of his ilk.

In point of fact, at the time of his accident my screenwriter Aristides found himself, under my contractually stipulated directive, en route from Paris to Cannes. Waiting there for him and the completed script for the film The Lost Daughter was a camera-ready crew—everyone from the cameraman to the best boy and the actors under a renown, first-class director—which it was my job as producer to have up and running. I was staying at the Hotel Martinez and punctually at 11:00 p.m., I received a call from the highway patrol advising me of the accident and cause of death. On the spot and still in my tuxedo, I personally set off directly from the bar to the scene of the accident, which—on account of extremely adverse road conditions in what will be remembered as that unusual winter of 1968—I did not reach until 2:00 a.m.

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.