85. Public Prosecutor And Poet

The latest issue of the Viennese weekly Die Zeit contains a report that deserves to be read by as many people as possible. The poet Wilhelm Schäfer published a novella entitled “The Murderer” in this weekly several months ago. He describes the events leading up to a murder and the subsequent fate of the murderer. What does the public prosecutor do? The poet himself writes about it: “I based my story on an actual murder that took place in my home country a few decades ago and that caused great excitement among us children. The murdered man was found exactly as I described it: naked and without a head. In this story, the public prosecutor has found a series of events that, strangely enough, correspond exactly to what the investigation has only recently brought to light, and what no one except the investigator could have known, but which I invented in order to draw the refined reflection of my murderer. In this way, I have fallen under suspicion of complicity as a brash fabulator. And so much so that the day before yesterday I was interrogated in the matter of the “murder in the Aaperwald”."