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

Dienach’s “Chronicles From The Future” (“Pages from a Diary” was the original title of the first edition)

offers the essence of the cultural development of Western Europeans in the distant future. More specifically, here, right after Dienach’s “First” and “Second Diary”, the continuation of Western civilization’s history, from the 21st century onwards, is illustrated over a long period of time. Outwardly, however, these prophetic manuscripts are very simple in form: they appear to be passages of travel fiction, a time travel to the countries of our continent, to those distant future times, a panoramic view of social and spiritual life, within that distant future cultural development—pieces of a vivid and real life as seen and known by the author, who hereby narrates it as a traveller-narrator. It was, he says, his own fate that his life be bound, as he writes, with one of the rarest meta-psychic and spiritualistic phenomena. It was thanks to this that he managed to experience all he describes.

Paul Amadeus Dienach left neither a name nor, most probably, the slightest publication in his homeland. In autumn 1922, he arrived from central Europe in Athens and later on, in winter, started tutoring students of limited financial means in foreign languages, namely French and German for a small fee. Having spent, as he said, his childhood in one of the various districts of Zurich, where his parents had settled after his birth, he went on to spend his adolescence in a village, close to this big cultural hub of Germanic-speaking countries. Afterwards, he pursued humanistic studies, with a particular flair for history of civilisation and classical studies.

In 1906, he briefly worked as a teacher, in a private school most likely, perhaps in one of the towns surrounding Zurich. Being of weak and delicate constitution—he had the appearance of an intellectual—he travelled, though rarely and as much as he could afford, to the West and South. Of his travels to Paris and Rome, I gather he has written about it somewhere in his manuscripts.

I remember his deep affection for his mother, who appears to have been a saintly woman from all that he told me and, above all, a wonderful mother. When I met him, she had already passed away.

As he was leaving the manuscripts in my care, he had called me “his most appreciated one in his small circle of students” and I remember him using the phrase “my young friend”. It is nothing but obvious that feelings of loneliness and desolation flooded his soul at the time of writing the note. None of his family was left. At some other point, he had told me: “He who has not experienced isolation cannot know its meaning.”

He passed away, I gather, in the Athenian suburb of Maroussi or perhaps on his way back to his homeland, through Italy, in some town of our neighbouring peninsula, most probably during the first six months of 1924, after suffering an attack of tuberculosis, which manifested in Athens and did not last but a few months. Over the course of my twelve recent summer trips to Zurich, from 1952 to 1966, I did not manage to locate his relatives or other traces of the Dienach family. Maybe, however, he has distant relatives of the new generation on the outskirts. It could be, nevertheless, that the young anti-Hitler reserve officer of the German Occupation army was right—I shall write about his version further down, at the end of this pre-introductory note—that my teacher “suffered from the complex of his people’s guilt” of the imperial era. In this last case, one would search in vain outside the German ethnicity to find him based on a “borrowed” surname.