The Antichrist Read online

  They will then reply: ‘The latches and vessels were taken from us more or less by force.’

  ‘But,’ you will then ask, ‘wasn’t violence also used upon the churches when their bells, their golden tongues, were removed?’

  And the answer will be: ‘As they began to shoot the cannon, the golden tongues also began to toll to announce that the hour of killing had arrived. And it is entirely correct to say that the bells themselves then began to kill, as they became cannon and guns. Since they have lied once, how can we believe that they now speak the truth? That is why the thunder of cannon, the false and inharmonious singing of the crowd, the bawling of apparatus, and the howling of sirens is more pleasing to our ears than the clanging of bells.’

  So you enquire further: ‘But don’t the crowds and the gramophones and the sirens also lie – and don’t the cannon lie and kill at the same time?’

  And the people will answer: ‘We don’t believe that.’ They will give this answer because people have faith in new things that they haven’t yet caught in a lie; towards those things that they used to venerate, but which have deceived them, they are quite cruel.

  It is easier for the Antichrist to scoff at the venerable and inexplicable by setting up man’s reason as a judge and, in flattering it, flattering man himself. Nothing pleases a man so much. If he is told that he is handsome, strong, brave, affectionate, kind – he is delighted. Tell him he is clever – and he is blissful. And he will believe you merely because you have told him that he is clever, for he assumes that you would never try to lie to someone who is discerning.

  I, however, who have always known that the Antichrist finds it easier to pollute the amazing products of our reason with his breath than the consecrated objects of our faith – even though he finds it easier to defame the latter – I am struck with horror at the broad scope of power that he already wields. If the sons of Edison, the Edisons, the sons of Edom, have fallen under his control, what does that matter? But he has swung himself on to the roofs of the churches and sits astride their spires; he takes the bells out of the belfries, and he renders the churches dumb; he rips the clappers from the bells and makes them empty – and have we not seen him with our own eyes leap with a single bound from the church spire where he had been sitting to the cross and bend it crooked, up and down and right and left, with the hateful strength of his arms and legs?

  And this terrifies me more than his power over the products of our reason. For this is the first time he has had the profound insolence to bestow upon his name a visible and victorious symbol. Here, for the first time, he has emerged from the anonymity in which he had hidden himself. He has even had the audacity to print a calling card. And he announces himself in his true guise – namely as the Antichrist – through the Anticross.

  THE MASTER OF A THOUSAND TONGUES

  After we had taken all the pieces of guns that were formerly bells to the factories where they were to be turned into bells once again, we were all without employment, and each of us went in search of the kind of work to which he was best suited.

  I went every morning to stand in front of one of the mightiest buildings, one in which newspapers are produced, those thousand-tongued messengers on the backs of which each day are printed enquiries both from men seeking work and employers seeking men under the title ‘Employment Market’; that is to say, where work is offered for sale.

  As I couldn’t find any employment, my vanity led me to enter the great building and not to leave as did the others. In my foolishness, I thought that a building whose doors and walls were a market for work must likewise have work for sale within, and that the exterior alone of such a building would not reveal to me what it knew within its depths.

  So I went to the master of this great house and asked him if he had any work for me.

  At first glance I thought that I knew him. But I couldn’t remember where I had seen him before. He was a gentle master, without a beard, and I thought that I had met him when he had worn a beard, but I couldn’t recall the occasion.

  He had a pleasant voice and a kindly glance. When he looked at me I immediately believed that he wished me well, and as his face seemed so familiar to me I felt that he must have also been well acquainted with me.

  When he asked whether I would be willing to serve him, I said: ‘Yes, I will, with pleasure.’

  Thus I began to serve him and so became one of the thousand tongues with which the newspapers meddle in the world every morning. I soon saw, however, that what my own tongue said was not only different from what the other tongues said but that all our thousand tongues were contradicting one another and that even this contradiction was no immutable law, as at one moment our tongues agreed, while at another they accused one another of lying, and this changed from moment to moment.

  Many tongues repeated what mine had said but repeated it differently and in such a way that we were both wrong. I no longer knew if I had spoken truth or falsehood or whether the others were right or wrong, and when I realized that the world hears all our thousand tongues at the same time then I understood that it is entirely impossible for the world to recognize the voice of truth even if it should one day be heard.

  But if I was one of the thousand confusing tongues that made the voice of truth unrecognizable then I was also guilty of confusing the world. And I realized that I had entered into the service of the Antichrist, who sat in this great publishing house as a gentle Master of a Thousand Tongues and smiled with kind eyes. And sometimes, so that his very gentleness might not betray him, he pretended to be furious. This, too, brought him profit, for when he let his anger subside and began to smile again, so that those who were under his command could once more exhale, their fears quieted, he appeared to them to be even more gentle, agreeable, good and honourable than before – and so they praised and esteemed him beyond measure, regarding themselves lucky that they came to be in his service and not in anyone else’s.

  When I grew to suspect that I was serving the Antichrist I decided one day to leave his employment. I went to him and told him that I’d had enough of his job and that he must likewise have had enough of my services.

  He smiled and took from his pocket a gold cigarette case, asked me to take a seat and told me to have a smoke.

  Then I remembered him – I did know him. How often he had already given me cigarettes!

  And to make sure that I was not mistaken, I said to him: ‘Sir, I’ve often thought that we’ve met before, and it seems to me that this isn’t the first time that you’ve offered me a cigarette!’

  ‘I wish,’ he replied, ‘that we really had known each other for a long time, because I like you. I have no intention of releasing you from my service. I have chosen you for a number of important assignments. You are to get to know the world and describe it for me. I am sending you to a foreign land. A revolution is going on. A true hell seems to have broken out there, and because you have an eye for this hell, you will go there.’

  ‘You have a better eye yourself!’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said he, ‘I will first learn of hell only after my death. However, let us forget the various departments of the next world so long as I live. I shall give you money and you will go, and you will report to me everything that you have seen.’

  Since I was now driven by curiosity as I had previously been driven by vanity, I took the money and went to the country in which hell had broken out.

  I wrote from there about everything that I saw. And I saw much.

  I lived in one of the great houses that are called hotels. The Hotel Excelsior was its name, so clearly it was a greatly important hotel. I had money.

  Across from my windows stood an old, venerable church, and from my elevated vantage point I could see directly into the belfry of this church.

  At a time when cannon were being fired in the town against those of its inhabitants who were deemed rebels, I heard the bells tolling loudly, and I watched from my window as the heavy bells swung.

  So I went into the church and asked the sexton, who was pulling the ropes, why and for what purpose he was ringing the bells.

  ‘The minister gave me the order,’ said the sexton.

  I went to the minister, who was sitting in his room reading the Bible.

  It was already night-time. On the priest’s table a lamp was burning under a green shade. I heard the booming of the bells near by and the cannon thundering in the distance.

  He was a gentle man, the minister. He had a smooth face, kindly eyes and a pleasant voice.

  ‘I can’t hear the sound of the cannon,’ he told me. ‘I’ve ordered that the bells are to be rung whenever they begin to fire the cannon.’

  ‘Your Reverence,’ said I, ‘are you perhaps the brother of my master, who has sent me here? For I believe that he would have acted the same way as you!’

  ‘No,’ said the minister, ‘I don’t know your master.’

  And he began once more to read the Bible.

  I remained in the service of the master who ruled over the thousand-tongued messengers, whose tongues themselves manufactured the news. And he sent me here and there in many directions wherever anything happened and there was unrest. There was unrest everywhere in the world.

  THE PLACE OF PEACE

  From now on, his love is to be found wherever culture and books rule; no longer does he divide the cosmos by countries, rivers, and seas, no longer according to race and class; he recognizes only two classes now: the aristocracy of learning and the mind as the upper world and the plebs and barbarism as the lower. – Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam

  But I also came to a peaceful place in a peaceful town. Here delegates from all the restless nations in all the restless parts of the world had convened to consider in what way the tranquillity of the world might be restored. That is to say, they did not mean the actual tranquillity of the world but the state of unrest that ruled the world, which seemed to them to be a state of peace and tranquillity. These delegates of the various peoples did not wish to bring real peace into the world but, rather, to make the conflict that dominated the world feel so natural that the world would begin to believe it was actual peace. This demonstrated to me that their minds were truly confused. The Antichrist had so confused their minds that they mistook conflict for peace and strove to consolidate it. They resembled doctors who cannot let a terminally ill man die because law and conscience forbid them to do so, and they persuade the sick man that, because he hasn’t died, he must therefore be healthy. The world, however, is like a sick man who imagines he must be healthy because he is being kept alive. And the place of which I am speaking, peaceful although it was, none the less resembled a battlefield, namely one on which doctors are battling death, and I could smell the same odour that arises at medical consultations, for I was actually standing at the sickbed of a terminally ill world that could not be allowed to die. There was a stench of camphor and iodoform, and just as real doctors speak in Latin so did these doctors of the world, and the sick patient could understand only every tenth word of what they said.

  I came to this peaceful place upon the instruction of my employer, the Master of a Thousand Tongues, and as I could understand Latin I knew what the doctors were talking about. I was prepared to report everything I had heard and understood, and so I wrote it down and sent it to my employer. But he then took one of the numerous red, blue and green pencils that lay on his desk not so he might write with them but only that he could strike with them, and he thus struck out all the truths from my reports so that the world didn’t learn it was terminally ill and was simply not being allowed to die. And thus he acted like the anxious relative of a deathly ill patient. The terminally ill patient is not told that he is dying. He might in that case die sooner, and it would be claimed that the doctors were incompetent.

  Among these doctors of the world I found some whose appearance was such that I was tempted to believe I had seen them before. Sometimes, when one or another of them gave me a cigarette, I got the feeling that at the next moment he would also offer me chocolate. He did not do this, however, for he believed I would then recognize him. And these were the most gentle of the convened doctors. And they were so affable and they knew their patient so well that they understood exactly in which of its limbs and body parts the world was weakest. And it was towards the weakest limbs and organs that they were the most gentle, almost gentler than they were by nature.

  So, for example, they discussed in a special commission, although here also they spoke Latin, in what way one might assist the coloured races.

  The coloured races – that is to say, in the language of this world, those people whose skin colour is not white but brown, black, yellow or reddish. And, although it should be clear and obvious to everyone that the colour of the human skin is as much intended by God as is the human face or the human form, people still believe that whatever their own colour might be, it is just through this colour that God has distinguished them from people of other colours. Whereas it is clearly written that God created man in His image: man, not his colour. He created grey, black, greenish and reddish trees and plants, and they are all trees and plants. He created grey, brown, red and yellow animals; silvery and golden fish; greenish, reddish and bluish waters; blue, green, silver and gold stars; clouds in all colours that our human eye can recognize and distinguish – yet they are all clouds, stars, waters, animals, fish and birds. And if the black raven could speak with reason and not only with its tongue it would not deny that the reddish-green parrot, although it is not black, is a bird like he, the black raven. This is because the animals, waters, clouds and plants are not delivered up to the Serpent, the First Serpent, the Antichrist. We humans, however, are delivered up to him, and thus a white man says he is superior to a black man and vice versa; whereas anyone of any colour would think it insanity if he heard someone say that a green room is better than a red one – is better and not that one person or another likes it more. Or if someone were to say the red leaves of autumn are better than the green ones of spring – and not that he likes them more.

  And instead of thanking God for creating man in His image, and truly with the divine magnanimity that we praise in Him, in all possible colours, people deny Him by the very fact that they say He did not create everyone in His image. We do not know the colour of Adam, the first human. Since, however, in the history of creation not only does every word have its obvious meaning but also every omission, we must assume that Adam’s skin colour would have been mentioned if God had intended to give a preference to any particular one. But we do not speak of the colour of the first man from whom we are all descended any more than we speak of his mother tongue, his race or his nationality. Rather, we assume that he, who was the founder of mankind, contained within himself the source of all languages, all races, all peoples and all the variations of skin colour. And Adam was the crown of creation. God Himself took a full five long days to make him, and these were not our short human days, from sun-up to sun-down, but vast in extent, according to the time reckoning of eternity not of the calendar. It is a hardly comprehensible honour that God bestowed upon us in devoting such a long period of thought to us. Many differences distinguish we humans from the animals. But the most important is that God gave Himself five days to create man and that He breathed His breath into him alone – just humans, not humans of one or another colour. This is the only permissible pride we may feel that cannot be called a sin. But it is a double sin that we commit when we pervert our just pride at being people into a vile pride at being white, black, brown or red people. And as it is already deemed as disgraceful in our everyday world when an unworthy fellow denies his grandfather, so should it be a mortal sin and branded as such when a man denies Adam, the ancestor of us all. Thus one denies God Himself with whom our first bond is that He animated Adam with His divine breath.

  God created man in his own image. We therefore blaspheme Him when we mock or disparage the hooked nose of the Jew, the slanted eyes of the Mongol or the large lips of the African. Since they are all human beings, each particular feature and each particular colour of every human race is to be found in the sublime and unfathomable countenance of God. Whoever insults the Jew’s nose or the African’s lips or the Mongol’s eyes or the white man’s pallor therefore insults the nose, the lips, the eyes and the colour of God. He also defames His breath, which was breathed into the first man. For in this breath were contained all the virtues of all future people. Within it were the wondrous singing voice of the African, the subtlety and also the fervour of the Mongol, the nobility of the Indian, the intelligence of the Jew – and so forth.

  In the Commission on Colours I saw, however, that not only were the powerful arrogant towards the powerless but that the latter defended themselves with an equal arrogance towards the powerful. And because at this time white men happen to be more powerful than men of other colours, those among them who were still conscientious were striving for the emancipation of the coloured peoples. The Antichrist, however, was already living among both. And he led the coloured peoples, who were not yet freed, who were still enslaved by the whites, to mimic their morals and vices and pretensions. And so the brown and black and yellow men all lived apart, ate and drank apart. The brown men were proud of their brownness, the black of their blackness and the yellow of their yellowness. It was obvious that they did not regard themselves first and foremost as people, but rather as coloured people. They also demanded in all their speeches and uprisings not so much the liberties that truly characterize human dignity as the unworthy ones that power usurps as its prerogative. What they demanded, and what they ever repeated, was ‘We want to be masters in our own country.’ Yes, they wanted to be masters, nothing else. And in their own country. Instead of saying ‘We want to be people in all the countries of the world,’ they said that they wanted to be masters in their own countries. And I thereby recognized that the Antichrist was in control among them also.