Documentary vs. Fiction
Peter Simon Altmann（Austria）

　

I have a problem with the topic "documentary and fiction", especially with the term “documentary”. When we talk about “documentary and fiction”, we must talk about “subjectivity and objectivity”. And when we talk about “subjectivity and objectivity”, we must talk about “reality and realism” and at the end we must use the term “truth”. Can anyone really claim to depict true life, to see true life – the truth?

We always interpret reality. All is fiction, would the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche say. Even a philosopher like Martin Heidegger doubted whether historical truth exists at all. For ethical reasons, however, I must hold on to the concepts of freedom and moderate realism.

An academic background in my novels is important to me. This background is for me the philosophy. But in addition to the philosophical tradition, I need invention and my own. For this I become an actor.

Thomas Mann says that the writer is always a prevented other artist. Thomas Mann saw himself as prevented musician. I am the prevented actor. But I don't act out plays like the ordinary actor. I am a pre-actor. I pre-act my life for creating. I pre-act first, the text is afterwards. In other words, it is exactly the opposite, how ordinary actor do. Pre-acting means the inverse of incarnation: The flesh become word.

Even I write novellas, I am not a novelist. I am in my heart always a poet. I am abandoned on the mountains of the heart, as Rainer Maria Rilke would say. That's why the distinction of fiction and documentary does not valid for me, and there can be more truth in fiction than in documentary, as we know from psychoanalysis.