Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

Interestingly, Roth used one English word in the entire book — ‘nothing’ — the word used by the Hollywood talent agents to tell the shadows there is no work to be had.

I would like to thank the wonderful Peter Owen, Antonia Owen and Simon Smith for their belief in this important project. I would also like to thank Simon Hamlet for his encouragement. Thanks also to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Richard Panchyk

New York, 2010

The Antichrist has come; so disguised that we, who have been expecting him for years, cannot recognize him. Already he lives in our midst, among us. And over us spreads the heavy shadow of his vile wings. We are already smouldering in the icy glow of his hellish eyes. Our unsuspecting throats near the reach of his strangling hands. Already is he licking at our world with the blasphemous flames of his tongue. Already is he lifting his fiery feet so he can stomp on the flimsy and flammable roofs of our homes. Long has he been pouring poison into the innocent souls of our children. But we do not notice!

For we have been struck with blindness, with the blindness that it is written will befall us at the end of time. In fact, for a long time now we have not been able to recognize the nature and face of things that we encounter. Just like the physically blind, we have only names for all these things in the world that we can no longer see. Names! Names! Sounds without shape. Hollow tones with which to clothe unimaginable and therefore bodiless and lifeless phenomena. Are they shapes? Are they shadows? The blind cannot differentiate one from the other. We, the blind, recognize nothing. To real things we give false names. Hollow words ring in our poor heads, and we no longer understand the meaning of the words. We can no longer recognize form, colours or dimensions. We only have names and terms for form, colours and dimensions. Since we became blind, we apply these names and terms incorrectly. We call something big small, something small big, the black white and the white black; shadows light and light shadows; the bright dull and the dull bright. Thus names and terms are devoid of content and meaning. It is worse than at the time of the Tower of Babel. Then, only tongues were confused and one man could not understand another, for each had different names for the same things. Now we all speak the same but false language, and all things have the same but false terms. It is as if we are building a horizontal Tower of Babel, but the blind, who are unable to recognize dimensions, believe it is vertical and growing ever higher; and they believe that everything is in order because they understand each other perfectly … whereas their comprehension of the proportion, form and colour of things is only that of the blind. That is to say, they apply terms that were originally applied correctly, and which fit the phenomena of this world, in a false and inverted sense; the towering is flat and the flat towering. For a blind man cannot distinguish between what is high and what is low. At the time of the Tower of Babel it was only people’s tongues and ears that were confused. A few of the builders could still understand each other by the language of the eyes, the mirrors of the soul, as they say. But now, people’s eyes are blinded (and tongues are just servants, while eyes are masters in the hierarchy of the human senses). How can people still hope that the Antichrist has not yet come? This faith and this hope are further evidence of our blindness. For just as one can convince a blind man that night is day and day is night, so can we, who have been blinded, make ourselves believe that the Antichrist is not in the world, that we are not burning in the fire of his eyes, that we are not standing in the shadow of his wings.

But our blindness is worse than mere physical blindness of the type I have already described. For our blindness is one that can only be struck by the Antichrist, and that, as I said at the beginning, will be our doom before the end of time. It is a hellish blindness, for although we were blinded we think we can see. In truth, we are ‘blinded’ rather than ‘blind’. We do not recognize the Antichrist because he comes dressed as an average citizen, in the garb of a commoner in every land. According to the legendary image we have of him, he should have come with all the hellish accessories, with his traditional attributes: horn, tail and cloven hoof, stinking of pitch and sulphur, enveloped by all the theatrical traits our childish fantasies demand from a creature of his nature and origins. People do not like to think that someone who looks just like them can bring them to ruin. Our egotism requires certain formalities at the hour of our ultimate death. But the Antichrist tries to outsmart us. He comes in the everyday dress of a commoner, yes, equipped even with all the signs of the base piety of the middle class, his innocent-seeming greed and what he imagines to be sublime love for certain human ideals — for example, faithfulness until death, love for the fatherland, heroic readiness to sacrifice himself for the whole, chastity and virtue, reverence for the tradition of his fathers and of the past, dependence on the future and respect for the high-sounding parade of phrases with which the average European is accustomed, even bound, to live. In this innocent-seeming masquerade has the Antichrist recently arrived into the world. For centuries we had been expecting his appearance in a spectacular theatrical entrance. Now that he has come, however, not as a destroyer stinking of sulphur but sometimes even as a pious man cloaked in incense, crossing himself while greeting us, murmuring the Lord’s Prayer as he plays the stock exchange, praising human virtue (lowered to ‘bourgeois’ virtue) so he can destroy us, pretending to defend European culture with the very weapons with which he destroys it, promising to honour the past and proclaiming a future (all the while knowing that after him there will be none), promising to redeem mankind and humanity while he brings men to their deaths, as though his lying tongue does not know what acts his murderous hand is committing. Now that he has come in such a deceitful guise we have not recognized him, the Antichrist.

But I have uncovered him. I see through him when, in the east of this failing continent he proclaims the freedom of the workers and the ennoblement of work; when in the West he promises to defend the freedom of culture and raises the false flags of humanity over the roofs of prisons; when in Central Europe (meaning between east and west) he promises a nation blessings and prosperity while laying the groundwork for the war that will destroy it; when he persuades the island race of Europe, the English, the sailors of the old continent, to maintain indifference to all that may occur on the mainland — as seafaring sailors, although sons of the mainland, can be persuaded to disregard the fate of the homes in which they were born; when he promises the sons of the European mountains, the Swiss, and the children of the coast, the Dutch, profit and fortune from the mutual destruction of others; when he pits the yellow races against the white and the blacks against both; when he offers the Italians the might of Ancient Rome and the Greeks the glory of Ancient Hellas. Yes, even when he, the Prince of Darkness, visits the Vatican and dictates concordats … I recognize him, the Antichrist.