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! –
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.