FULL-SPOILER SECOND READING

This optional thematic page may discuss major events from all three novels. Read the complete literary sequence first.

Documentary ethics as dramatic action

Record, Counter-Record, Question Book

The documentary method is enacted through people making, carrying, correcting, disputing, and publicly using an incomplete record—not through a neutral transcript descending from outside the story.

01

Arbeitsprotokoll

Adornfeld’s working record names source, date, confidence, quotation, paraphrase, reconstruction, contradiction, and gap. Missing testimony remains missing. Acquittal remains a legal result rather than becoming automatic moral exoneration.

02

Gegenprotokoll

Julia changes the record’s jurisdiction. Names precede categories; defendants remain distinct; contradictions sit beside one another; jury arithmetic enters the body of the account; later public use becomes answerable to correction.

03

Fragenbuch and portable method

Twenty-seven questions can travel because they are not a manifesto with one owner. The movement grows through tasks, rooms, handles, records, routes, and the right to ask what changes if a claim is true—or who pays if it is false.

From record to institution

The working record and counter-record become the Schattendorf Tables.

The Tables preserve evidence, dispute, missing testimony, affected persons, thresholds, dissent, named action, material consequences, review, and stopping conditions without turning historical reconstruction into a people’s retrial.

Open the Schattendorf Tables