Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

“Dienach’s main idea was to continue the love story with his dead beloved,” he told me. “This intense thirst of his soul was what made him write the Diary. This secret longing for such a possibility, his deeply human burning heartache breathed into him the desire to narrate all that. Using his pen, he gave his constrained human biological fate the time extension that real life would deny. All this happened in order to write the continuation of the ongoing story of a great love, which was prematurely terminated, and to pursue it. He did not actually live his writings. It is all ‘made up by himself’, artificial and imaginary. Dienach is an ‘incurable romantic’, ‘a poet with quite a few delusions’ and in fact ‘a psychologically ailing individual who lives inside ‘his own’ reality.”

The young anti-Hitler reserve officer of the German Occupation army later asked me to swear that those manuscripts were authentic and that Dienach had actually existed. I did so with pleasure, since I knew it well enough to be true. I tried to figure out his character: the content of the Diary had excited him, literally overwhelmed him. Anyone could speak with him freely. He was an honest humanist and not that ideologically distant from us Greeks.

“He doesn’t exist anymore,” he told me later on in the conversation, “but how wonderful it is that his mode of thinking has survived through these manuscripts…”

He confessed to me that many sections of the Diary had brought tears to his eyes.

“Are you sure that only his mother was Austrian?” he later asked me. “My personal opinion is that his father was also Austrian and that he had participated in World War I. He had nothing to do with Zurich and it will be pointless for you to search there when Europe is at peace. He was Austrian and a Catholic and he had experienced the terror of the 1914 War.”

At first, he showed me in the “First Notebook” the words written about Father Jacob that he “had gone out for a walk with three Protestant priests on August 14, 1922”. Then he showed me another phrase of the Diary Pages at the end of the 12th—VII: “How happy would I be had I been relieved of every feeling of disgust and shame, away from the smell of mustard gas,” he says where I have now put the title-header on the pages “The Valley of the Roses”

(original title of the First Edition) in my translation.

“He was a Catholic and his father was German or Austrian,” my interlocutor continued. He had a guilt complex, which could not be justified in his individual case. It is highly likely he had participated in the war. He was hypersensitive. He suffered from “the complex of his people’s guilt” of the imperial era. He literally writes anti-war literature in many parts of his texts. He was not Swiss. He had kept his real self secret from you and most probably his real name. He did this while trying to “find students” because he knew that half the Athenians of that time—in 1922 and 1923—were sympathisers of the Entente Powers.”

The university professor from the Greek island of Tinos and an outstanding man of intellect of those times found the Diary

’s central meaning elsewhere.

“What is most essential in Dienach’s manuscripts,” he said, “is his perspective that an incredibly great and beautiful solution to the great metaphysical problems shall be found after a long, long time. These problems are the problems of the world, God, the origins, the course and the end purposes of men, the beginning and the end of beings. This shall be an incredible interpretation to the deep mystery of life, a brilliant answer to all those great questions that have taunted man as a thinker in the most noble and valued of individual and group cases. It would be so great an explanation that the human mind ‘cannot perceive its grandeur and exquisite beauty for the time being’. He believes that there will be a time when what happened with the field of celestial mechanics and the natural universe in general at the beginning of the 20th century shall also happen in the field of a more universal worldview. In other words, true, ontological reality will prove to transcend to an incredible degree the highest dreams of the human spirit and the boldest expectations of the human heart. Dienach envisions that what people will once know about these issues shall be superior in terms of grandeur and beauty to what we know today, even more superior than the scientific knowledge of the beginnings of the 20th century of the issues of the natural universe in comparison with the times before Eudoxus, Aristoteles, Aristarchus, Hipparchus and Archimedes.”

I remember him telling me on another day: