The Antichrist (10 page)

Thunder and lightning, the blessings of rain and corn and fruit
on the tree, the terror of hail, in short, life and death – these are given to us by the power that we call the Lord.

He also gives us understanding of how we may perfect His blessing and lighten His curse.

Instead of praising Him, we think that we see in the consequences of His mercy proof that He does not exist.

Thus, we are like the beggar and scrounger who was once given alms by a rich man, alms that later bore fruit so that he himself became rich. Then, however, he said: ‘The rich man didn't give me anything. I alone have made myself rich.'

I know of no other kind of rich man.

In this country they strive to re-establish the worth of all people, without distinction. By this I recognized the reign of the Antichrist, even in this place where they value all people equally.

The worth of man, who was created in God's image, cannot be established where it is regarded as strictly his own worth and not as a divine grace. They may build houses in this country as tall as those in America, and set up a new Hollywood, an Unholywood, where the salvation of actors is located, and a thousand new factories, and a thousand hospitals, a thousand schools small and large, yet they will not dwell easily in the houses, no shadows will find salvation, the products of the factories will have no excellence, those dying in the hospitals will not be cured and in the schools no scholars will become wise … without grace, without that which we call ‘grace'.

In the human face of today, nothing has grown; everything within has been drawn out or thrust out of the surface – and wonders that it still exists …

The transference to the mechanical sphere of that which is mobile, hurried, provisional, fleeting in the modern face – this is the cinematic face. The cinema could only be invented because of the modern face. Confronted with the monumentality of the human face as it used to be, the movements on the cinema screen would never have dared to combine together into a picture resembling a face. They would have separated and become dispersed before this monumentality. – Max Picard,
The Human Face

I went to the country where the houses are built so high that they scrape the sky. They are, therefore, called skyscrapers.

The land is large and spacious but expensive. Because of this, they did not build one house next to another but one house
over
the other, for the air is still free there.

Thus the people prefer to 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 and
attitude. 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 famous
men 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 their own noses at all but those of the famous dead. If these particular noses don't happen to be needed, then one of the twenty naysayers answers no. But if one such nose shadow does happen to be needed, then the yeasayers answer, people who sit in another office also in front of telephones. In the plazas and streets stand many statues of famous men, just as in other cities. In all the other cities of the world, however, statues have no other purpose than to bear witness to the fame of those they portray. But in this city, many of the statues have the job of proclaiming and praising various wares. For example, many famous personalities can be seen in stone and marble or copper and bronze, drinking a cup of cheap and tasty coffee or sucking on cough drops to fight hoarseness. And, whereas in this city the shadows of living men are taken together with their animation, such that the original owner becomes the shadow of his own shadow, the dead statues are supplied with the needs of living people. It may therefore truly be said that in this city, which is inhabited by nothing but shadows, only the statues are people – tasteless, it is true, but people all the same.

Just as the people are shadows and the statues are people, the plants in this city are statues. The palms of Hollywood, for example, don't grow in the soil in which they appear to be rooted but are merely fixed in like statues. They are plants with bases instead of roots. But, whereas statues for the most part stay in the same location for a long time, this is by no means the case with the palms. For the people who rent the palms carry them first to one
garden, next to another, and while their characteristic of being fixed into soil makes them similar to the statues, the fact that they change residences makes them resemble fleeting shadows. So it is that some of the most immobile things on earth, namely trees, become nearly as fleeting as the most fleeting phenomena on earth, namely shadows. Moreover, even the palms are now and then called upon to give up their shadows for the screen. And as they are capable of wandering from place to place it can be said of them, as it can also be said of men, that they are the
doppelgängers
of their own shadows. The natural shadow that they cast in their quality as trees becomes the
doppelgängers
of its shadow.

Shadows of clouds and of cloud shadows are also purchased by these factories, which use them whenever a suitable occasion arises. Sometimes men and women arrive who were able to photograph clouds from hardly accessible mountains or clouds in other dangerous locales. And these people are able to sell their cloud shadows to the factories for a designated price.

And just as lives can be turned into shadows, so can death. For in many films the shadows must die. And if it is very difficult to live according to the special laws of the shadow-world, it is much more difficult to die according to those laws. It is so difficult that a genuine death could never be harder.

For I have seen a shadow-master make the
doppelgängers
of a lovely shadow die nineteen times before he declared her death to be genuine and true. He required that her shadow must die not only beautifully but also in vanity. So she lay down and exposed her legs, the pretty
doppelgängers
of leg shadows. The shadow-master was the same one who had displayed the bathing Egyptian girls and the dead soldiers many years before, when I was a boy, arousing our lust, which is directed as much towards the horrors of death as it is towards living flesh.

The people in this city regard death in the same way they regard birth.

When a child is born, it awakes in its mother the hope that it will become a suitable, well-paid shadow.

For, in fact, it sometimes happens that an infant delivers up its tiny shadow and its voice to the screen.

In this city live many devout shadow-worshippers. As they are not content merely to worship shadows, all their thoughts and hopes are directed towards catching a glimpse of, speaking to, embracing or applauding the
doppelgängers
of the shadows they adore. These worshippers are unaware that the originators of the shadows are only
doppelgängers.
The worshippers believe that the actors are yet masters of themselves and of their shadows. And just as many lovers of books and literature have a yearning to see the authors of their favourite works in the flesh, so the shadow-worshipper also wants to see, hear and touch the supposedly living actors. However, they merely encounter the shadows of the famous and beloved shadows.

None the less, even those who are only the shadows of the celebrated and beloved shadows imagine that they are quite alive, like all other people. They are so maintained and strengthened in this conceit by the adoration of their worshippers that a
doppelgängers
of his beloved shadow becomes very unhappy if he is not greeted as he was the day before or if one of his colleagues is greeted more cordially than he.

This vanity and this jealousy nearly led me to believe that these shadows of shadows are somehow human.

On other occasions, however, I was persuaded that they are very different from the rest of mankind.

For example, I saw that women who were pregnant were forbidden to sell their shadows any more.

So they left the shadow-factory, without a word. This seemed to them quite natural.

When pregnant women are shown in films, they are played by non-pregnant women who place a pillow under their clothes and over their wombs. And, as the manmade and moveable palms are preferred to the genuine and rooted palms, the padding is preferred to the pregnant womb.

It is, by the way, wondrous that the
doppelgängers
of a shadow should still possess the natural ability to become pregnant, sometimes even from the embrace of the
doppelgängers
of another shadow

In this, however, let us recognize the immeasurable goodness of God.

His unfathomable benevolence calls the female shadow to the life of motherhood. Because she has become a living person, because of what is, in her case, the twofold wonder of motherhood, she can no longer play a role – in the actual sense of this word – in the world of shadows. And they chase her out of the gates of the shadow-factory.

I will take this opportunity to mention that in all the countries of the world that are viewed as civilized, the laws of humanity and religion forbid a woman to have the ripening fruit of her body removed.

If I had the power, in the name of divine or earthly justice, to issue decrees, I would outlaw the shadow-factories of Hollywood, if only because they compel women to have the ripening fruit extracted from their bodies.

It grievously astonishes me that ecclesiastical and secular legislators do not know, or do not notice, the inhuman laws of the shadow-factories.

In all the countries of this civilized world a hungry beggar woman is thrown in prison if she has an abortion.

A shadow-manufacturer, however, who causes pregnant women to get abortions, is not sent to prison.

God sees all this. And He will judge the lawmakers as He will judge the shadow-manufacturers. But He will not judge the beggar women.

The Lord will not judge the poor. Nor will He, unlike the law-makers of this world, in any way judge the destitute who sneak into houses, into strangers' houses.

Such poor I have seen in Hollywood, too. There the poor also sell their shadows. Only there they are not called poor but ‘extras'.

And it happens that for one shadow-show or another, many shadow-people are wanted, for example to dwell in a wonderful palace.