by Joseph Roth
The founder of their world was named Lenin, and after his death they put him into a glass coffin. His body was embalmed and paraffin was injected into his cheeks so that for decades after he will still look as though he is sleeping peacefully, not like a dead man. They set the transparent coffin in the middle of the square behind whose walls is the place where the inheritance of the deceased is administered. Thus any of the citizens and any visitor to the country can look at this dead man who seems only to be asleep.
Many childlike people believe that he really is asleep, and is only resting temporarily.
If one enquires why and on what basis was the dead man embalmed and displayed in a kind of solemn shop window, one soon comes to the conclusion that there were many reasons and a variety of purposes. The sweepers wanted to snatch from eternity at least a part of what belongs to it. And since it is impossible to conquer Death, they wanted at least to conquer the corpse, whose law is decay and not permanence. Thus it is like an ostentatious – but, naturally, at the same time childish – threat to Death, who is shown that his victim can none the less be preserved, like a piece of jewellery that is no longer worn.
To provide visual proof of this was one of the most important goals.
‘You have taken him from us,’ said the sweepers to Death. ‘We will show you, however, that we can keep him. And we will display him to all the world just as he looked during his lifetime.’
If they had been capable of hearing Death’s answer, it would have been something like the following: ‘Your threat is childish and your pride is foolish. It is my purpose to take from this earth not his face but his life and what you loved – his breath. He is extinguished, like a lamp. I have taken wick and oil. You may keep the vessel. I am not concerned with it. It was his flame that you loved and his light! Why are you now flaunting the miserable vessel that held them? I have already extinguished many great lights, and monuments were built to them. And that is wiser than what you do! For a monument does not deny but rather confirms the law according to which I act. And since it confirms me it conquers me as well. Because a monument, however insignificant, is the sign that the living remember the dead, and it is a terrestrial, inadequate but reverent form of resurrection. However, you don’t cause the dead man to be resurrected; you only make his corpse last. You prevent it from decaying. Why shouldn’t a corpse turn into dust and ashes? Did men come from paraffin and wax to become paraffin and wax once again? If you have as much respect for the dead man as you say, don’t you understand that he should not be exhibited the way a barber displays wax busts with wigs? Why do you so proudly show off for me – for Death? You have snatched nothing from me. Instead, you have detracted from your own dignity – your own dignity as well as the dignity of your dead.’
But, as I said, the sweepers were unable to hear the voice of Death.
Neither was he speaking to them. He was talking to himself with a compassion-filled voice.
In the vicinity of the city lived a righteous man, and I was advised to seek him out. He was surely one of the thirty-six righteous men – of whom it was written that on their account, and on their account alone, the world will continue to exist-who live scattered around the earth, their significance and influence unrecognized by mankind, expert in interpreting the language of animals, the song of the birds and the silence of the fish.
So I went to this righteous man.
He lived meagrely but so alone that the confinement of his room was no longer confinement but rather a wide expanse. He was surrounded with the regal splendour of solitude in which all earthly misery was lost like a speck of dust in a strong, sweeping wind.
They had treated him unjustly, for it is written that the righteous must suffer.
In this, however, the righteous man is like God, and this grace was granted him that he might serve not only as an image of God, as we all are but as an exalted image of our Creator. The righteous man is never unjust, and he treats you and I the same as he treats the unjust. It is only because we are, in truth, incapable of recognizing a righteous man that we say he forgives his enemies.
The righteous man who is the topic of this discourse had been thrown into prison. And it was claimed that he had wanted to eliminate the liberty of the people; he, who hated slavery and loved liberty, and who lived only to ensure that there would exist only free men and no more slaves.
It only became evident that he was one of the thirty-six righteous when his righteousness was not recognized and he was thrown into prison under the accusation of being unrighteous.
Accordingly, he bore imprisonment, hunger and beatings with the dignity of the righteous. He was lonely in prison. He was surrounded always by the strong armour of solitude, which is stronger even than iron.
This armour of solitude came between him and the violence that struck him, so that sometimes he almost wished that the blows were truly painful.
I spoke with this man. I told him that I could see the signs of the Antichrist in his great, vast and beautiful country; that I feared the Antichrist alone had triumphed.
‘He hasn’t triumphed,’ said the righteous man. ‘He has only left here, there and everywhere so strong an imprint of his evil fingers that we are tempted to believe that all new creations are the work of his hands. But it isn’t true. They bear the impression of his fingers only where he touched them.
‘But there is something else that you cannot see,’ the righteous man went on, ‘because you are a new guest to our country. The Antichrist didn’t emerge with the new era in this country but many years ago under the old regime. Clever as he was, he first tempted the standard-bearers, not the rebels. Not those who sought reforms but those whose jobs were to preserve the status quo. First he took up residence in the churches and then in the houses of the masters. For that is the method by which you may unmistakably know him, and it is an error, a mistake of the world, when it believes he can be recognized because he provokes and incites the humiliated and enslaved. That would be foolish – and the Antichrist is cunning. He doesn’t inspire the oppressed to rebel but inspires the masters to oppress. He doesn’t make rebels, rather he makes tyrants. He knows that if first he introduces tyranny, rebellion will soon come on its own. Thus his gain is twofold. For he forces the just, who would otherwise resist him, into his service. He doesn’t persuade the slaves that they should be masters, rather he first makes the masters his slaves. Then, when they have entered into his service he forces them to debase the powerless, the poor, the hardworking, the humble and the righteous into slavery. The wretched and the humble then revolt against the powerful, and the reasonable and the just rise up against stupidity and injustice. The just put weapons into the hands of the wretched. They must do it, for they are the righteous ones.
‘It is therefore false for the people of the world to say that the Antichrist leads the rebels. On the contrary; he leads those who wish for the status quo. Because his nature prevents it he cannot approach the sufferers as easily as he can approach the powerful. He who suffers is better equipped against evil than he who rules, gives orders and enjoys. The world is founded upon justice. This is the special cunning of the Antichrist, that he disguises himself in the mask of a rebel to prevent immediate recognition by his opponents, so that they seek him in the ranks of the rebels while he is actually raging and wreaking havoc among the ranks of the masters.
‘It is written that the righteous must suffer. It is true that all those who suffer are not necessarily righteous, but if one day I were given the mission of finding righteous men I would search for them in the endless ranks of the suffering. It is they who are first tasked with restoring justice in this world. And while they are striving to re-establish the justice that has been distorted by the Antichrist and his slaves, the tyrants, they must be placed under the suspicion that they are driven by the Antichrist. It is precisely by this that I recognize them as righteous. For their suffering is twofold. They suffer under the violence of the unjust and under the reproach of the just.’
‘But they won’t recognize God,’ I said, ‘and they claim that they themselves are gods.’
‘They must never have known God,’ replied the righteous man. ‘A human power had intervened between God and themselves, and just as the Antichrist first made tyrants of the masters before he led their victims to revolt, so he first made liars of the priests before he compelled the believers to deny God. Since the priests had blanketed God with lies, those who deny Him – or, as they call themselves, the godless ones – aren’t denying God but actually the false image that has been handed down to them.
‘Weren’t they told that God wanted murder, injustice, tyranny, gold and the whip? And, what is still worse, that he was, nevertheless, the God of Love? And didn’t the mediators of God cause the bells, the golden tongues of faith, to be rung to celebrate the hour at which the black jaws of cannon, the mouths of death, were opened?’
‘Above the statue of the Madonna,’ I said, ‘before which hundreds of people pray every day, they have placed the phrase: Religion is the opium of the people. What a saying!’
‘A lying and a stupid saying,’ said the righteous man. ‘However, is it worse than the motto that escapes from the mouths of our priests: Faith is honey for the people? It is the lying echo to this lying saying. People can’t shout lies into the world and expect the echo to shout back the truth.
‘So it is, my friend! The rotten fruit falls from the tree, the dry leaf withers, the dead spring dries up, the empty cloud delivers no rain, the gentle wind brings no storm, the empty heart is devoid of goodness, and a liar never speaks the truth. A steady throne won’t hold a weak emperor, the ruler who has become a slave of the Devil can no longer be a master, and the subject of this ruler is no longer a subject. A slave of the Devil can no longer rule. It is the lying mediator of God who denies Him and not the defrauded believer. It was God’s mediators whom the Antichrist first seduced. Then the godless ones came as a matter of course.
‘Even one who calls himself godless is not really without God. One who denies God by enveloping Him in lies is worse than one who simply calls himself godless. So if a man tells me that he does not believe in God, then I am sad for him. But if someone tells me that he believes in God but that injustice is justice, then I curse him.
‘Our people in this country,’ continued the righteous man, ‘deny the existence of God, but they don’t tell lies about Him. And it is, in truth, sinful to say that God doesn’t exist. It is more sinful – for sin, like hell, has countless gradations – to falsify God and defraud men with His falsified image. Therein lies the sin.’
I took leave of the righteous man and journeyed through the country.
And I saw that there had been built new houses, new monuments, new factories, new hospitals, new playhouses, new cinemas, new schools, high schools and colleges for older people who could not read or write.
People were working in the factories, people were living in the houses, people were healing and dying in the hospitals, people were acting in the theatres, people were teaching and learning in the schools.
Everywhere, even when it wasn’t in writing, I sensed the phrase that is just as foolish as the one that says religion is opium – namely, the saying: Education is power.
In this saying, too, the words do not have their original meaning but rather an applied one. One could say, if one desired: Power is education; or perhaps: Education is weakness; or, if one preferred: Power makes weak – or strong, depending on the situation.
After I had visited the righteous man I tried to see a little with his righteous eyes, and I realized that such foolish sayings were bound to come into being because those who had been powerful and also uneducated for so long believed that education, or this or that thing of which they had been deprived for that long, created and maintained the might of the mighty.
Whereas this phrase was actually false, if only because those in power are by no means educated; on the contrary, they are uneducated.
It is also childish for people to make education palatable by saying that it lends power.
It is similar to how children are foolishly promised sweets if they will be obedient and hardworking. They are led astray by the suggestion that obedience and hard work are not rewards in themselves but produce a reward for the tongue and palate, which have nothing to do with dutifulness and work.
Thus, because of this stupid motto, the people who were powerless for so long were led like children to believe that learning brings something other than the true reward, namely, an education.
It might, by the way, have been merely an idea of the Antichrist to persuade the people that they would obtain power.
Were it not an idea of the Antichrist the phrase would have gone something like this: Education makes us more just than we had been. For the world is built upon justice and not upon power. When the people, as if they were children, were promised the sweet poison of power, they began, with all the boundless enthusiasm that is only common to children, to absorb education. Since, however, the stuff of teaching and knowledge, which they call education, does not always contain the ultimate truth but only a temporary truth that may be contradicted or rendered obsolete at any second, the good people learned a mixture of truth and lies – and what they learned the most rapidly was to confuse one with the other.
For human knowledge is not divine truths but rather the pathways to reach these truths. Some are crooked, others are straight; some lead to the goal, others lead astray. When the real goal, namely truth and justice, is not expressly named but is alleged to be power, one cannot know whether he is travelling a straight path or a crooked one.
Therefore, the people in this country are going astray despite their diligent learning.
Those who could not read or write now read and write enthusiastically, day and night. Now it hardly matters whether a man can decipher or write letters, only what letters he deciphers or writes, and what meaning results. And if this yields a false or petty result, it is worse than if the people had not learned their letters at all. For in that case education is indeed not power (not even power) but only weakness and slavery. And the Antichrist leads people to learn their letters and promises them power only that the people grow even more powerless.
The people in this country are, however, very proud of all the knowledge that the human world has acquired so far. In this knowledge they see truth. And although they have learned that yesterday’s knowledge is contradicted by today’s, they still firmly believe in the knowledge of today – as though there were no tomorrow and no day after tomorrow. Therefore they have more respect for one of yesterday’s machines than for a truth that might emerge tomorrow or the next day.
Just as some peoples worship idols, knowing full well that these have been made of gold or wood by human hands, the people in this land worship machines, thus they too worship idols.
The people worship both the machine builders and the machines – just as the Children of Israel worshipped Aaron and yet danced around the golden calf that they had seen him create with their very eyes.
When people are taught that God does not exist, they will make themselves idols.
It is the same today as it was five thousand years ago. When Moses, who announced the God of the burning bush, disappeared for a forty-day period on the peak of Mount Sinai the Children of Israel demanded the golden calf.
If their St Elijah is taken away, they dance around a piece of scientific equipment.
And if they can no longer go about in processions, they will dance around a tractor.
I am far from wishing to disparage the tractor and praise the ox.
For, as I have already said at the beginning, the curse of God that we should plough the earth in the sweat of our brows was alleviated by the grace of reason, which allowed us to invent the tractor with which to plough the earth.
But we have as little reason to be proud of the tractor as we have to be proud of the ox. Perhaps there was a time in which fools worshipped the
plough and its inventor. God gave us the ox and the plough as well as the tractor. He alone must we worship.
If, however, we regard His gifts and mercies as human merits and, worse still, as proofs against His existence, then this happens at the command of the Antichrist.
The scientific apparatus with which we can recreate thunder and lightning was also given to us by God, just as he gave us the actual thunder and lightning. For he gave us the power of reason through which the machine was invented.
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’.
