The Antichrist Page 2

  As regards actors and the public fascination with them, Roth was again spot on with observations that seem especially true in today’s celebrity-crazed culture of paparazzi stalkers and tabloid newspapers paying millions for photographs of celebrity babies. In describing how the actor sells out and provides his shadow on screen for all eternity Roth wrote: ‘Yes, one could say that he is even less than a shadow of himself, since the shadow is actually his true existence.’ Yet Roth’s true feelings about the cinema may not have been so harsh; the same year the first English translation of The Antichrist was published Twentieth Century Fox was busy making a film based on his novel Job.

  The Antichrist was not only a product of its turbulent times but also the turbulence of Roth’s own personal situation. After his reluctant flight from Germany in 1933, what had already been a life of questionable happiness and stability took a drastic turn into a downwards spiral from which escape would be impossible. While Job sold about 30,000 copies and Radetzkymarch sold a very respectable 40,000 copies in Germany, after Hitler took power Roth’s future in Germany was over. The blunt force of The Antichrist’s arguments demonstrate a raw and emotional side of Roth that was usually not evident in his books, as if he was releasing some of the tension and anger that had accompanied his involuntary relocation. Roth never did find a permanent home during his exile, living out of hotel rooms in Paris and the many places he visited.

  Between 1933, when he wrote the book, and 1935, by which time The Antichrist had been published first in German and then in English and other languages, Joseph Roth had a great many concerns weighing on his mind. Besides the rapidly crumbling stability of his beloved Europe he had an array of personal worries. He fretted constantly about his precarious financial situation, when he would be paid and how much he was owed. Although several of his books met with substantial critical and commercial success, he was nevertheless in need of funds. He complained that the Nazis had taken 30,000 marks of his money after he left in 1933. Whatever level of comfort and success he had achieved during the German years, by 1934 Roth was desperate for cash. At one point during his exile Roth sent money to his French translator for safekeeping for fear he himself could not be trusted with it.

  While in exile Roth worked hard to keep track of the various foreign rights that had been sold and the translations of his works that were under way, a formidable task in itself. He also worried about the legal status of the children of his girlfriend, Andrea Manga Bell, a half-Cuban half-German woman whose husband had abandoned her.

  During this time Roth often complained to friends about the poor state of his health. He sometimes signed his letters ‘old Joseph Roth’ and wrote frequently of being drained after working exhausting ten- or twelve-hour days on his various projects. These long days of work were his ‘Waterloo’, as he explained. He was often physically and mentally spent after writing, yet he hardly took a break, continuing to churn out new books one after another. He described himself in one letter as depressed, with ‘mountains of chagrin’, and in another letter said: ‘I work in a great anguish, a true panic.’

  Although only forty years old when The Antichrist was published, Roth was by this time a physically ruined man. Excessive amounts of alcohol, chronic worry, overwork and a generally weak constitution had irreparably taken their toll. By the time of his death in May 1939 Roth had lived to see the world enveloped in a growing darkness that he had warned against six years earlier when writing The Antichrist. The last line of his book rings all too true. For just as his protagonist of the same name did, when Joseph Roth had seen enough he ‘left the theatre’, so to speak.

  Although his pen was stilled so many decades ago, at long last Roth’s warning to the world can finally be read again in English.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Joseph Roth said in a 1934 interview: ‘For me, a good translation is that which renders the rhythm of my language.’ I hope that I have met his standards, which, because of the differences in German and English syntax, can be a challenge. As I worked I tried to be as faithful to the spirit of the German original as possible. I carefully compared the original English translation of 1935 with Roth’s German text of 1934 while creating the new translation of 2010. I have preferred to retain Roth’s sometimes brief and emphatic sentences rather than combine them. For the most part I use the same paragraph breaks as Roth, rather than split longer paragraphs and combine shorter ones (the first English translation featured much of the latter). I have also tried not to eliminate any sentences in their entirety, even if repetitive. Precisely because Roth’s emphatic writing style is a bit different in Der Antichrist than in his other books, I wanted to retain and highlight that difference. I have sought to preserve the tone and style of the original German version; the result is an interesting sermon-like quality in parts of the book, which I believe Roth fully intended. Fresh from being forced into exile from the country he loved, Roth was both angry and frightened, eager to warn the world of its dire situation, and I wanted to ensure that this came across in translation.

  The original English translation glossed over some important moments in the book. One notable instance occurs on pages 94, 96 and 163, when in the original German Roth says ‘Hollywood, ein Holle-Wut’. This play on words meaning ‘hell fury’ was entirely left out of the original English translation, probably because the translator simply did not know what to do with it. This wordplay in particular was a concern of Roth’s at the time. In fact, he enquired of his French translator what she had done about it in her version. In this new English translation I have chosen to use ‘Unholywood’ as it sounds and looks close to Hollywood and has a meaning I believe is close enough to what Roth intended with his clever play of words. Using ‘hell fury’ in English would not make sense in the context; however, I do use it later in conjunction with a repeated use of ‘Unholywood’. (Similar wordplay by Roth, the use of Edisons versus Edi-sohns, worked in English because sohn translates as ‘son’.)

  In dealing with the Hollywood film studio mentioned in the last chapter, I have gone with what the German original text says: ‘Goldwein-Mutro-Meyer’ (which is referred to twice and then, bizarrely, is switched to Mutro-Goldwein-Meyer), whereas the first English translation takes a less provocative path with ‘Cinema Ltd’.

  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

  I have written this book as a warning

  and exhortation, that one might recognize

  the Antichrist in all the forms in which he appears.

  THE ANTICHRIST HAS COME

  How lonesome it is in such times with he who clings only to the intellectual! Ah, for whom should one write, in the midst of political clamour and shouting that deafen the ears to more moderate sounds … with whom one can enter into a theological debate, since theology has fallen into the hands of doctrinaires and zealots, whose last and best argument for their point of view is to horse-riding troops and cannon? Your hunt … has begun: with ball and chain and hangman’s sword you think you serve the cause of Christianity … Rome, the glory of the world, has been conquered by mercenaries – oh God, what bestial instincts rage in your name! No, the world no longer has room for the freedom of the heart! … And now you die, Erasmus! – Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam

  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.

  And although his power is far greater than mine, I fear him not – and will try to unmask him.

  A FORCE HAS COME BETWEEN US AND THE GRACE OF REASON

  This has also been attempted, in order to guard against surprise; surprise is imitated, they try to anticipate it using machines. They manufacture technical surprises, so that it may seem as though there were only these and that spiritual ones were no longer possible. Surprise has been mechanized. There exists today a machinery of surprise. In the technical, there is such a tremendous potential today, that everything seems possible. All possibilities are contained in this machinery, and they need no longer become reality. And thus whatever becomes reality can never surprise – one knows that everything was already inherent in the great machines. – Max Picard, The Human Face

  I have already said that the Antichrist did not come with pitch and sulphur as we had imagined he would arrive. His entrance was so excellently prepared that the hellish elements had long before been transformed into those that were seemingly natural, familiar and earthly. I should not be understood as agreeing with the opinion of those narrow-minded advocates of the view that industry and technical civilization are the works of hell. No! I am far removed from this viewpoint. For I believe that God himself has bestowed upon us the reason to investigate, to enquire, to uncover answers and solutions, better answers and solutions and still better answers and solutions. We were granted intelligence so that with its help we might relieve our hands of their heavy burden and gradually learn to hold high our heads, which were made in the image of God, so that they may project towards the heavens where, as it were, their sublime and eternal reflection is mirrored. When man was exiled from paradise and condemned to cultivate the earth in the sweat of his brow, limitlessly mild God – for He blesses even where he punishes – gave him the grace of reason to lighten his way, a memory of paradise, so to speak, a shining memory, a tiny jewel from the endless crown o
f divine wisdom. The good God gave man the blessing of reason to make the curse of labour milder and lighter. They are thus fools and knaves who say that inventions and discoveries are a curse, that machines are vices. But it is a vice to characterize invention, discovery, the fruits of research and the perceptions of the mind as victories that human understanding has gained over the eternally secret wisdom of the Infinite. As a tiny pebble to a mighty boulder, so does our ability to discover and invent compare with the wisdom of the Power that rules over us. For we have, as an example, conquered the air (for the moment), but this does not allow us to fly up to Heaven. Not only has it been ordained, as the proverb goes, that trees cannot reach Heaven, neither can men visit it. And never will we see a pilot harness the power that resides in an angel’s wings. Yes, one could say that Heaven becomes ever higher and ever further away from earth the higher and further we fly. And when we have reached the so-called stratosphere we have done nothing other than transport our earthly selves to a sphere that so far no earthly inhabitant has reached. We have lifted the earth upwards, so to speak; however, in no way have we brought Heaven downwards. And if we were able to climb even higher, to some unnamed planet, Heaven would recede even further away. (Let us take all this as a parable. Let us say that it is the nature of God’s fathomless wisdom that it remains unfathomable.) Oh, we have no idea what is above and what is below! We are so blind! And although we point upwards in ‘blind faith’ as we refer to God, there may be no such thing as above. And the folly of those who believe they have discovered the emptiness of Heaven because during their flight into the stratosphere they searched but found no God would be a hundred times greater than is the blindness of those believers who point upwards when they name the origin and the source of their faith. What is ‘above’? What is ‘below’? Alas, the world is populated with nothing but blind people! These blind are also confused! Many of them say that they are wise because they found knowledge in a place that other blind men, with no thirst for knowledge, showed them. And since a segment of those without sight declared that God is ‘above’, another portion of the blind make their way ‘above’ and, having not seen God, come back and say that He is not there. The reason that they do not see Him, however, is that they are blind. If they could see there wouldn’t be any need for them to make their way along the path that their blind brothers have showed them! One cannot see God with one’s physical eyes! One cannot smell God with one’s physical nose! One cannot hear God with one’s physical ears! One cannot feel God with one’s physical hands! For He has, and by no means without reason, given us only five senses. Had He wished that we should know Him during the span of our earthly life He would have granted us not five but a thousand senses. But He has given us no more than five! Perhaps so that we may not be capable of knowing Him in our lifetime.