The Antichrist by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk

scrape the sky rather than nestle close to the earth.
    And through this their arrogance continues to grow.
    In this country, when one has a yellow or black skin colour,he may not sit in the same room with a man whose colour is white.
    In this country there are thousands of churches. But in these churches money is collected with the help of devotions. The people carry God in the mouth and speak of God as if he were a rich and distinguished uncle who raises one’s worth when one mentions that one is His nephew
    Many people in this country are, in fact, not the Children of God but nephews of God – the nephew heirs of God.
    The poor ask Him for money, and the rich ask Him for even more money.
    And in this country God often acts as though He really were a wealthy uncle. To many of the poor He gives money, and to many of the rich He gives even more money.
    He enlarges the chimneys of the factories and increases the alms of the beggars; and He often hardens hearts that are already hard and breaks those hearts that are soft; He gives to those who have while taking away from those who have not.
    These are His special laws in this country. People’s worth is grounded in power. Liberty stands as a statue
outside
the gates; they have ejected her. And she has turned to stone.
    I went to Hollywood, to Unholywood, to the place where hell rages, that is to say, where people are the
doppelgänger
of their own shadows. This is the source of all the shadows in the world, the Hades that sells its shadows for money, the shadows of both the living and of the dead who appear on all the screens of the world. The owners of usable shadows assemble here and sell them for money and are treated as holy ones or saints, as befits the importance of their shadows.
    The living girls and boys around the world who see these shadows take on their walk, their facial expression, their form andattitude. That is why one often comes across men and women, actual people in the street, who are not the
doppelgänger
of their own shadows like the actors of the cinema, but even less, namely the
doppelgänger
of strangers’ shadows.
    It is thus a Hades, which not only sends its shadows up to the surface but also converts those who live on the surface and have not sold their shadows into
doppelgänger
of these shadows.
    This is Hollywood.
    Hell rages. There is a rush of shadow-players’ managers, shadow-dealers and shadow-brokers, shadow-arrangers (who are called directors), shadow-conjurors and shadow-renters. There are even those who sell their voices to the shadows of other people who speak a different language.
    I also saw there, namely in the factories that buy shadows, about twenty people sitting in large offices, each seated before a telephone. And every two or three minutes a couple of the apparatus would buzz and the men would take the receivers in their hands and say ‘Nothing!’ And that means: no work.
    For people call the shadow-factories every day wanting to sell their shadows. And because there are so many of them who want to offer their shadows, the factories had to engage twenty men to say no. And they say ‘Nothing!’ every three minutes. The whole day long.
    They say nothing else.
    So numerous are those in this country who thirst to sell their shadows.
    And these are the owners not of ordinary shadows like yours and mine but of remarkable shadows. One man is a giant, another a hunchback, a third a dwarf, a fourth has the face of a horse or a donkey, a fifth can climb like an ape, a sixth can dance on stilts, a seventh on a rope and so on. Others are
doppelgänger
of famousmen and can occasionally be used in historical films, and they are therefore double and triple
doppelgänger.
They are not only the
doppelgängers
of their own shadows but also of those of other shadows, which are, strange to say, also their own. Some look like Napoleon or Caesar. So they sell the shadows of their noses, which aren’t