  Some time ago we came across a rather unknown and, in our opinion, intriguing
paper by Otto R\"ossler on autocatalysis. That the paper is written in German
might be one reason for having spent 50 years below the radar despite being of
potential interest to many people in the field (as we found anecdotally). We
felt it is time to translate it. We provide some margin notes and a
commentary/introduction that has been solicited for a book project aimed at a
general scientific audience.
