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

Ever since the day the handwritten translation of his manuscripts resurfaced, his distant remembrance returned unintentionally and insistently occupied my thoughts. This time, I took the final decision to have them published as soon as I saw them emerge from the old drawer one morning while looking for something else. Among them, I also discovered with some excitement some favourite yellowed letters and a notebook with notes from when I used to study along with other students whom I remember fondly.

A strange thing happened to me with Dienach: in those days of old, he was for me just an acquaintance of a few months. My carefree spirit at the time and, besides, the big age difference would not allow for a bond to develop between us worthy of being called friendship. But the more years went by, the more I realised that, when leaving for Italy in 1924—going there to die—Dienach had bequeathed a huge part of his soul to me. Thus, my spiritual connection with him flourished upon his death. A simple earlier acquaintance with this man of unique and unprecedented personal fate in life slowly became compassion and friendship over time.

As I later understood, he had formed the impression that from our entire group, a lively bunch of young students, I had somehow treated him better. The truth is I found him less boring that the rest did and, besides, I had set my mind on learning a foreign language at the time. Therefore, it is not strange that we happened to spend entire evenings together talking about all sorts of things. I shall always remember that cautiousness in his words as I mentioned before, even though he liked to exchange views with me—more than with the rest—on various philosophical and historical issues.

During the first years after his death, every time I read his manuscripts—I had since started translating them as best as I could and that was the case from 1926 to 1940—I would always say to myself: “Look, Dienach was set on writing literature. He attempted to portray a mentally ill character and by inventing a myth, a plot, he found the way to write his own ideas on all sorts of things.”

At the time, I was infused with scepticism, something very common for students of my time. I refused to believe anything defying the accepted laws of nature. I actually remember finding that religiousness flooding Dienach’s thinking, evident in the pages of his Diary, somehow exaggerated. As time went by, I realised how little we humans know of these laws and how thoughtless it would be to entirely exclude phenomena regarding psychological functions that defy the ordinary, rare as they may be.

But even more so, the more years went by, the better I pondered on some incidents from the time of my acquaintance with Dienach, some of his reserved words, which only now could truly interpret. In this way, my conviction that all these manuscripts written by a dead man, the sad man with the deep-set eyes who seemed so tedious to the rest of us—as one companion of ours had said not entirely unfairly one day—was actually his Diary

. I have now come to believe that this man, who was probably not highly educated or intelligent, this practically unemployed man in his final years, who was neither a craftsman of language, as is evident from his manuscripts (futile were the translator’s efforts to simplify the style in some cases, without betraying the meaning; to present the phrase less presumptuous and not so brightly coloured and ornate with all kinds of adjectives—as Dienach was given to waxing lyrical quite often, which he actually admits somewhere in his manuscripts), nor had professed having any other job in his homeland, apart from teaching, did not write of figments of his own imagination and nor could he have all those things he wrote about within him. He did nothing but narrate what happened in his life and what was meant for him to see and live by a strange turn of events.