"So, set all means in motion to arrive at a vindication in court. Should this be unsuccessful, absolute silence will be the best course of action, and should this be successful, even that part of the press which supports your presents opponents will also have to accept the court's exoneration and spread the word among the people.
"Sickness has delayed this letter. Forgive this openness, which comes from honest benevolence, and let me greet you
"yours truly
Peter Rosegger."
Krieglach, 7/2/1910.
That Peter Rosegger, the distinguished, sensitive, and humanely thinking aristocrat of the mind, regards what he has mentioned concerning my youth as finished and done away with, goes without saying. Only lowly developed persons can wade through such dregs and residues. I myself have also, a long time ago, erased this chapter of my life, and thus I have to judge everyone who talks or writes about me by the same standards which I here find in Rosegger's letter. He who does not forgive, will not be forgiven either; this is the just law of heaven and of earth.
As far as the "obscenities" are concerned as well as the proof that they were not written by me, I will have to discuss this subject in the next chapter, but let me make one remark, which I deem necessary, right here and now. This is that I am not the one who has to prove that these indecent passages were not written by me, but rather they will have to prove to me that I am the author. This is just as self-evident as it is correct. No judge of our times would even consider dragging me back to the times of thumb-screws and the "Spanish maiden", when the accusor was not required to prove anything, but the accused was the one who had to prove his innocence. This simply had to be impossible in most cases. For strategic reasons in the course of a lawsuit, I have been falsely accused of having written the "Book of Love" for Münchmeyer. How can I prove that this is untrue? Let's suppose Münchmeyer's lawyer had come up with the insane idea to assert in court that Peter Rosegger had written the notorious "Temple of Venus". Would Rosegger supply the proof that this was a lie? Or would he say that the truth of this assertion would have to proven to him? I am convinced, he would do the latter. And I do so as well. I demand that my original manuscripts are brought in as evidence. There can be no other proof.
As far as the acts of plagiarism are concerned, Peter Rosegger had mentioned, the situation is like this: The Benedictine monk Father Pöllmann has written a series of articles against me and my works, starting with the threat that out of my works he would construct a figurative noose around my neck, to "whip me out of the temple of German art". Here, he has employed the right metaphor, for every one of his allegations, he afterwards cast upon me, was nothing but a snap of a whip, harsh, sharp, tough, loveless, and sadistic, therefore outraging the readers, and the echoes of its snap faded away without effect. It was also such an empty crack of a boy's whip, when he accused me of plagiarism and unsuccessfully made every effort in proving the truthfulness of his allegation. There, he talked like an ignorant man and could therefore achieve nothing but the well known effects of ignorance. The newspaper called "Grazer Tagespost" wrote about this:
"Father Pöllmann, a well known gentleman, who has just lately, with genuinely Christian humility, awarded himself the decorative cognomen of a `respected critic', has very quickly forgotten the moral defeat which he had suffered in his battle of name-calling against the travelling author Karl May, because recently he again put his foot in his mouth etc. etc."
The thing was that in some of my very first and oldest traveller's tales, which I wrote when I did not possess the necessary experience yet, I let the events I described take place before a geographical background which I took from well known, readily accessible books. This is not just allowed, it even happens quite frequently. To adapt descriptions of places for one's own needs, can never be a theft. A literary theft, plagiarism this is, is only committed when essential components of another author's mental creation are copied and then used in a manner which makes them an essential component of the plagiarist's work and thereby the impression is created that they were his own thoughts. But I have never done something like this and I also never will. Works of geography, especially when the information contained has become common knowledge, can be used without thinking of it twice, as long as no entire printed sheets or sequences of pages are copied identically and the second author's work, in spite of the copied parts, forms an independent mental achievement. In the introduction to Voigtländer's book on "Authorship and Publishing Law" it reads:
"No person creates the world of his thoughts solely by himself. He constructs it on top of what others have invented, said, and written before him or together with him. Only then at best, his very own creation begins. Even the most creative of all activities, the one of a poet, ranks highest, achieves the greatest success, when it consecrates with an artistic form those ideas, which along with the poet, are also thought and felt by his entire people. And not even the form is entirely the poet's property, because the form is supplied by the refined language, "which creates literature and thinks for you", and which has given to many a man who thinks himself to be a poet more than the form, but also thoughts or the appearance of thoughts. To put it brief, writers and artists are with their knowledge and abilities in the midst and on the top of the cultural achievements of many millennia. If Goethe had grown up on a lonely island, he would not have become Goethe. But once someone has been granted such a gifted spirit, that he has been able to advance the cultural achievements of mankind by one step, because he has been allowed to continue the ancestors' work, then it is just right that his work in turn shall in due time be made available for others, to use it freely, not just its contents, but also its form."
This is what the publisher of the law says, and there is no cause to dispute what he says. I, not even having committed what he explicitly permits, am thereby perfectly vindicated. Someone else wrote: "Everything is more or less plagiarism committed against achievement of culture, the mind, or the imagination. The intellectual upper class, those who possess education and culture to a higher degree, will always, more or less, feed on one reservoir which has been filled by the achievements of other, earlier, greater minds."