Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

And as everything in the world has its rank and degree, I believe that even the truth of true things is falsified and turned upside down when these are used as pretexts for that which is great and sublime. So in using the wondrous discovery of mankind’s lawgiver as an excuse for showing the beautiful back and pretty breasts of the Egyptian princess, they destroyed the beauty of her body.

And this is one of the aims of the Antichrist. It is ever his goal to desecrate one marvel through use of another. By this, too, we may recognize him.

Later the war was shown. It was the Russo-Japanese War. Entire regiments were marching. They didn’t move from right to left or vice versa; rather, they came, as small as specks of dust at first from the background of the screen (which was not really a background), growing ever larger, swelling and marching directly towards us as they became ever more enormous, and they appeared as if they were about to trample over the front rows of spectators with their hobnailed boots. The first double row of marching soldiers were already lifting their massive feet to step upon our necks, and we began to duck in anticipation of the footfalls. But then they vanished, just as shadows vanish. They couldn’t survive outside of the screen. They had achieved as much as shadows can achieve. They had been able to grow, to swell to the size of a colossus. But in the same degree to which they grew larger they also became more transient and empty, and the textured surface of the screen began to show under the impending threat of their iron-shod boots. They were large, these shadows, but also porous. Holes appeared, bright holes, in the midst of their vast bodies, and the more threatening they seemed the more powerless they grew. The first column dissolved into space, then the second, the third, the fourth, the tenth. Soon we realized that we didn’t need to duck any more. But, just as this terror was overcome, an even greater one attacked us. And this was caused by our realization that the columns marching towards us were the images of actual troops. In the instant they were filmed marching they had been alive. Through the act of filming they had become shadows, the shadows they should not have become until later but which they actually became shortly after the film had been shot. We were seized with terror at the sight of them, because we were not yet accustomed, as are people today, to seeing living shadows without living bodies, and so at that moment we did not know if the shadows that were marching towards us were actually those of fallen soldiers. In one or another of the spectators this might have awakened the memory of the biblical scenes they had just viewed, that is, the breasts of the bathing Egyptian girls. And since the latter, as every child had to know, were dead and decaying for thousands of years, this understanding helped confirm that the shadows were those of dead soldiers.

So the true wonder, which uplifts us or flushes us with a fervent bliss, is different from the so-called technological wonder, which merely terrifies or amazes us or fills us with arrogance about the progress we have achieved. For we know that the latter was achieved through ‘natural things’. So we quickly recover from our fear and astonishment (while our arrogance increases), and we think about it and come to the conclusion that the bathing Egyptians are our living contemporaries who have set aside their clothing and sold the shadows of their naked bodies for money; shadows that were paid for just as real bodies are paid for in this world. But if this was the case with the girls, how was it with the soldiers? Surely they had not sold their shadows for money. And what an injustice, what a special injustice, even compared with the injustices that we have become used to in this world and which we have gradually come to perceive as right. The girls had been given money merely for doing healthful and pleasant work — for bathing in a river. On the other hand, the soldiers, who were marching to their deaths and were about to become true shadows, had not been paid a penny for giving up their shadows. Yes, at the moment they were off to meet their suffering, in the last hour of their lives, their shadows had been stolen at a moment when they could not think of asking for money. We, however, were paying for them with our entry fee, in other words, in order to see them heading to their deaths (just as we had paid to see naked, bathing Egyptians). And because the soldiers had not requested payment for their shadows, it was really they who were paying for the shadows of the bathing girls! Even if the film producer was committing a base fraud by pretending to show the discovery of Moses when in reality he only showed a tiny box (but life-sized shadows of women), yet at least he had invested money in this sham — money that even the law says justifies this or that. But the soldiers who were going to their deaths had received no payment from the man. He had stolen their shadows. And even in our world, in which money plays a role in justice, theft is punished. However, the man who animated the cinema with shadows could not be punished since otherwise it would not be possible to charge an entrance fee to exhibit the product of his crime. If only he had stolen the shadows of soldiers heading towards their deaths to demonstrate how many men must die for a cause that has no concern with any individual among them — but, no, he had actually stolen their shadows for the very same reason that he had bought those of the naked girls. For he knew that we were human, and he offered to us both the lust of the flesh and the horrors of death. He was deliberately playing on our sensuality, directed equally towards the flesh of our living brothers and living sisters as towards the horrible destruction of our neighbour. He exploited our human frailty, through theft if possible, and when he could not steal, through money. And so he put on a so-called ‘programme’ such as is still shown in all the cinemas of the world today.

To whom can it be due that a fruit of human reason, and therefore of divine grace, has been utilized, from the very first instant of its practical application, to distort that reason?

Which of all the forces that control our existence is equipped with such malice and power that it can pay bathing girls and steal from dying men.? Is he just an ordinary thief? Is he not more likely the same one who pays young girls to undress and enter the water while he arms men and sends them to their deaths, selling the shadows of the one and the other for the price of a ticket? Had he really robbed the soldiers of their shadows? Is he not far more mighty than just a thief or robber? Who can use the miraculous rescue of the lawgiver of the world as an excuse for girls to undress? Who can thus play upon our sensuality, which craves living flesh with the same intensity with which it devours horrible death? Who can thus transform the gift of reason into a curse? Who has the power to pay girls who are merely bathing and to rob the dying soldiers? And both at the same time? Had he not arranged a war between Russia and Japan? Just as easily as he arranged a bath for the naked girls? Did he not select the very moment when our reason began to do wondrous things to fool us? The very moment at which we believed that we could not be blinded, since we were performing so-called miracles? Can one fool gods? And do we not think that we are gods because we are in the process of learning from the gods how to perform miracles and even to make them intelligible? This is the moment for the Antichrist, this moment in which we take ourselves for gods because we perform miracles that we understand, even though we are not gods.

This is his hour; this is the hour of the Antichrist.