Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

Shadows of clouds and of cloud shadows are also purchased by these factories, which use them whenever a suitable occasion arises. Sometimes men and women arrive who were able to photograph clouds from hardly accessible mountains or clouds in other dangerous locales. And these people are able to sell their cloud shadows to the factories for a designated price.

And just as lives can be turned into shadows, so can death. For in many films the shadows must die. And if it is very difficult to live according to the special laws of the shadow-world, it is much more difficult to die according to those laws. It is so difficult that a genuine death could never be harder.

For I have seen a shadow-master make the doppelgängers of a lovely shadow die nineteen times before he declared her death to be genuine and true. He required that her shadow must die not only beautifully but also in vanity. So she lay down and exposed her legs, the pretty doppelgängers of leg shadows. The shadow-master was the same one who had displayed the bathing Egyptian girls and the dead soldiers many years before, when I was a boy, arousing our lust, which is directed as much towards the horrors of death as it is towards living flesh.

The people in this city regard death in the same way they regard birth.

When a child is born, it awakes in its mother the hope that it will become a suitable, well-paid shadow.

For, in fact, it sometimes happens that an infant delivers up its tiny shadow and its voice to the screen.

In this city live many devout shadow-worshippers. As they are not content merely to worship shadows, all their thoughts and hopes are directed towards catching a glimpse of, speaking to, embracing or applauding the doppelgängers of the shadows they adore. These worshippers are unaware that the originators of the shadows are only doppelgängers. The worshippers believe that the actors are yet masters of themselves and of their shadows. And just as many lovers of books and literature have a yearning to see the authors of their favourite works in the flesh, so the shadow-worshipper also wants to see, hear and touch the supposedly living actors. However, they merely encounter the shadows of the famous and beloved shadows.

None the less, even those who are only the shadows of the celebrated and beloved shadows imagine that they are quite alive, like all other people. They are so maintained and strengthened in this conceit by the adoration of their worshippers that a doppelgängers of his beloved shadow becomes very unhappy if he is not greeted as he was the day before or if one of his colleagues is greeted more cordially than he.

This vanity and this jealousy nearly led me to believe that these shadows of shadows are somehow human.

On other occasions, however, I was persuaded that they are very different from the rest of mankind.

For example, I saw that women who were pregnant were forbidden to sell their shadows any more.

So they left the shadow-factory, without a word. This seemed to them quite natural.

When pregnant women are shown in films, they are played by non-pregnant women who place a pillow under their clothes and over their wombs. And, as the manmade and moveable palms are preferred to the genuine and rooted palms, the padding is preferred to the pregnant womb.

It is, by the way, wondrous that the doppelgängers of a shadow should still possess the natural ability to become pregnant, sometimes even from the embrace of the doppelgängers of another shadow

In this, however, let us recognize the immeasurable goodness of God.

His unfathomable benevolence calls the female shadow to the life of motherhood. Because she has become a living person, because of what is, in her case, the twofold wonder of motherhood, she can no longer play a role — in the actual sense of this word — in the world of shadows. And they chase her out of the gates of the shadow-factory.

I will take this opportunity to mention that in all the countries of the world that are viewed as civilized, the laws of humanity and religion forbid a woman to have the ripening fruit of her body removed.

If I had the power, in the name of divine or earthly justice, to issue decrees, I would outlaw the shadow-factories of Hollywood, if only because they compel women to have the ripening fruit extracted from their bodies.

It grievously astonishes me that ecclesiastical and secular legislators do not know, or do not notice, the inhuman laws of the shadow-factories.

In all the countries of this civilized world a hungry beggar woman is thrown in prison if she has an abortion.

A shadow-manufacturer, however, who causes pregnant women to get abortions, is not sent to prison.

God sees all this. And He will judge the lawmakers as He will judge the shadow-manufacturers. But He will not judge the beggar women.

The Lord will not judge the poor. Nor will He, unlike the law-makers of this world, in any way judge the destitute who sneak into houses, into strangers’ houses.

Such poor I have seen in Hollywood, too. There the poor also sell their shadows. Only there they are not called poor but ‘extras’.

And it happens that for one shadow-show or another, many shadow-people are wanted, for example to dwell in a wonderful palace.

They aren’t allowed to live in the palace as real people but only as people’s shadows or shadow-people.

Once their shadows have been sold they cannot stay in the palace any longer.

It happens that many of the poor who are extras in Hollywood have no shelter for the night.

And, although they have sold their shadows that these shadows may sleep in the palace, they, as doppelgängers of their shadows, may not spend the night in this palace. They aren’t Roman legionaries, Nubian slaves, armoured knights, janissaries or Crusaders any longer. They are poor homeless people. They call them in this city ‘extras’.

Even truth here is nothing but a shadow. After I had seen this city I knew that it — and it alone — was the true capital of this great country, and I had no desire to see any other cities or villages in this land.

It is true that the leader of the country lived in another town.

It is also true that those who had wealth or engaged in business lived in yet another, but Hollywood was the capital. This city, I had come to realize, was the capital not only of the country but of the entire world.

For it is the capital city of the shadows, and it is shadows that rule the world.

All the shadows have their residence in Hollywood. Yes, when I left the city and came to other cities my eyes no longer believed the reality of the things and people they saw in these other cities. If I came across a skyscraper, I imagined it had only been erected for a week’s duration so that its shadow might be projected on to the screen for a particular film in which a skyscraper was required.

And, in fact, someone told me that this particular building was about to be torn down and another near by had been constructed just a week before.

As quick and fleeting as shadows, and more transient than the clouds they touch, are the buildings in this country.

The actors are also removed, for people have no use for memories.

I saw kind people in this country as well, but people without time.

Just as the shadows take up no space, so the people in this country have no time.

Goodness, however, requires both time and space.

Even truth in this country is a shadow.

The laws of truth are proclaimed from the capital of the shadows.

It is the truth of shadows and not of people.

Yet even in this country I met a just man. He urged me to have patience and not to be so hasty as the shadows I was condemning.