Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

Thunder and lightning, the blessings of rain and corn and fruit on the tree, the terror of hail, in short, life and death — these are given to us by the power that we call the Lord.

He also gives us understanding of how we may perfect His blessing and lighten His curse.

Instead of praising Him, we think that we see in the consequences of His mercy proof that He does not exist.

Thus, we are like the beggar and scrounger who was once given alms by a rich man, alms that later bore fruit so that he himself became rich. Then, however, he said: ‘The rich man didn’t give me anything. I alone have made myself rich.’

I know of no other kind of rich man.

In this country they strive to re-establish the worth of all people, without distinction. By this I recognized the reign of the Antichrist, even in this place where they value all people equally.

The worth of man, who was created in God’s image, cannot be established where it is regarded as strictly his own worth and not as a divine grace. They may build houses in this country as tall as those in America, and set up a new Hollywood, an Unholywood, where the salvation of actors is located, and a thousand new factories, and a thousand hospitals, a thousand schools small and large, yet they will not dwell easily in the houses, no shadows will find salvation, the products of the factories will have no excellence, those dying in the hospitals will not be cured and in the schools no scholars will become wise … without grace, without that which we call ‘grace’.

I went to the country where the houses are built so high that they scrape the sky. They are, therefore, called skyscrapers.

The land is large and spacious but expensive. Because of this, they did not build one house next to another but one house over the other, for the air is still free there.

Thus the people prefer to scrape the sky rather than nestle close to the earth.

And through this their arrogance continues to grow.

In this country, when one has a yellow or black skin colour, he may not sit in the same room with a man whose colour is white.

In this country there are thousands of churches. But in these churches money is collected with the help of devotions. The people carry God in the mouth and speak of God as if he were a rich and distinguished uncle who raises one’s worth when one mentions that one is His nephew

Many people in this country are, in fact, not the Children of God but nephews of God — the nephew heirs of God.

The poor ask Him for money, and the rich ask Him for even more money.

And in this country God often acts as though He really were a wealthy uncle. To many of the poor He gives money, and to many of the rich He gives even more money.

He enlarges the chimneys of the factories and increases the alms of the beggars; and He often hardens hearts that are already hard and breaks those hearts that are soft; He gives to those who have while taking away from those who have not.

These are His special laws in this country. People’s worth is grounded in power. Liberty stands as a statue outside the gates; they have ejected her. And she has turned to stone.

I went to Hollywood, to Unholywood, to the place where hell rages, that is to say, where people are the doppelgänger of their own shadows. This is the source of all the shadows in the world, the Hades that sells its shadows for money, the shadows of both the living and of the dead who appear on all the screens of the world. The owners of usable shadows assemble here and sell them for money and are treated as holy ones or saints, as befits the importance of their shadows.

The living girls and boys around the world who see these shadows take on their walk, their facial expression, their form and attitude. That is why one often comes across men and women, actual people in the street, who are not the doppelgänger of their own shadows like the actors of the cinema, but even less, namely the doppelgänger of strangers’ shadows.

It is thus a Hades, which not only sends its shadows up to the surface but also converts those who live on the surface and have not sold their shadows into doppelgänger of these shadows.

This is Hollywood.

Hell rages. There is a rush of shadow-players’ managers, shadow-dealers and shadow-brokers, shadow-arrangers (who are called directors), shadow-conjurors and shadow-renters. There are even those who sell their voices to the shadows of other people who speak a different language.

I also saw there, namely in the factories that buy shadows, about twenty people sitting in large offices, each seated before a telephone. And every two or three minutes a couple of the apparatus would buzz and the men would take the receivers in their hands and say ‘Nothing!’ And that means: no work.

For people call the shadow-factories every day wanting to sell their shadows. And because there are so many of them who want to offer their shadows, the factories had to engage twenty men to say no. And they say ‘Nothing!’ every three minutes. The whole day long.

They say nothing else.

So numerous are those in this country who thirst to sell their shadows.

And these are the owners not of ordinary shadows like yours and mine but of remarkable shadows. One man is a giant, another a hunchback, a third a dwarf, a fourth has the face of a horse or a donkey, a fifth can climb like an ape, a sixth can dance on stilts, a seventh on a rope and so on. Others are doppelgänger of famous men and can occasionally be used in historical films, and they are therefore double and triple doppelgänger. They are not only the doppelgängers of their own shadows but also of those of other shadows, which are, strange to say, also their own. Some look like Napoleon or Caesar. So they sell the shadows of their noses, which aren’t their own noses at all but those of the famous dead. If these particular noses don’t happen to be needed, then one of the twenty naysayers answers no. But if one such nose shadow does happen to be needed, then the yeasayers answer, people who sit in another office also in front of telephones. In the plazas and streets stand many statues of famous men, just as in other cities. In all the other cities of the world, however, statues have no other purpose than to bear witness to the fame of those they portray. But in this city, many of the statues have the job of proclaiming and praising various wares. For example, many famous personalities can be seen in stone and marble or copper and bronze, drinking a cup of cheap and tasty coffee or sucking on cough drops to fight hoarseness. And, whereas in this city the shadows of living men are taken together with their animation, such that the original owner becomes the shadow of his own shadow, the dead statues are supplied with the needs of living people. It may therefore truly be said that in this city, which is inhabited by nothing but shadows, only the statues are people — tasteless, it is true, but people all the same.

Just as the people are shadows and the statues are people, the plants in this city are statues. The palms of Hollywood, for example, don’t grow in the soil in which they appear to be rooted but are merely fixed in like statues. They are plants with bases instead of roots. But, whereas statues for the most part stay in the same location for a long time, this is by no means the case with the palms. For the people who rent the palms carry them first to one garden, next to another, and while their characteristic of being fixed into soil makes them similar to the statues, the fact that they change residences makes them resemble fleeting shadows. So it is that some of the most immobile things on earth, namely trees, become nearly as fleeting as the most fleeting phenomena on earth, namely shadows. Moreover, even the palms are now and then called upon to give up their shadows for the screen. And as they are capable of wandering from place to place it can be said of them, as it can also be said of men, that they are the doppelgängers of their own shadows. The natural shadow that they cast in their quality as trees becomes the doppelgängers of its shadow.