Peter Deutschmann
Mystification from the firs to the nth degree
The history of the reception of the forged manuscripts is conceived in this paper as a story of successful communication and is described with the aid of Luhmann's theoretical system theory set. The associated abstraction stresses the role of the recipients, for it it only on the basis of their ‘understanding’ that communication can at all take place and be maintained. The fact that the manuscripts are hoaxes aroused long-term interest in this subject and so gave rise to a communications/social system that established itself around the topic of the manuscripts. Differentiating between psychical and the social systems allows for the deontologization of the issue of the authenticity of the manuscripts and in its place it is possible by means of various interpretations of the ‘psychical’ systems of sender and recipient to distinguish four types of interface between historiography and fiction. An analysis of the discussion over the manuscripts points to a growing fictionalization of comparisons. The division into fiction and non-fiction is replaced by other differences in observation (e.g. for a long time the division into authentic/forged has predominated), which as in the case of the novel by Miloš Urban Poslední tečka za rukopisy (Last Word on the Manuscripts) – enables new observations to be made on the manuscripts..
key words: systems theory – fiction – observations
design by Bedřich Vémola
