by Joseph Roth
THE HOME OF THE SHADOWS
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 horr
ors 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.
They aren’t allowed to live in the palace as real people but only as people’s shadows or shadow-people.
Once their shadows have been sold they cannot stay in the palace any longer.
It happens that many of the poor who are extras in Hollywood have no shelter for the night.
And, although they have sold their shadows that these shadows may sleep in the palace, they, as doppelgängers of their shadows, may not spend the night in this palace. They aren’t Roman legionaries, Nubian slaves, armoured knights, janissaries or Crusaders any longer. They are poor homeless people. They call them in this city ‘extras’.
Even truth here is nothing but a shadow. After I had seen this city I knew that it – and it alone – was the true capital of this great country, and I had no desire to see any other cities or villages in this land.
It is true that the leader of the country lived in another town.
It is also true that those who had wealth or engaged in business lived in yet another, but Hollywood was the capital. This city, I had come to realize, was the capital not only of the country but of the entire world.
For it is the capital city of the shadows, and it is shadows that rule the world.
All the shadows have their residence in Hollywood. Yes, when I left the city and came to other cities my eyes no longer believed the reality of the things and people they saw in these other cities. If I came across a skyscraper, I imagined it had only been erected for a week’s duration so that its shadow might be projected on to the screen for a particular film in which a skyscraper was required.
And, in fact, someone told me that this particular building was about to be torn down and another near by had been constructed just a week before.
As quick and fleeting as shadows, and more transient than the clouds they touch, are the buildings in this country.
The actors are also removed, for people have no use for memories.
I saw kind people in this country as well, but people without time.
Just as the shadows take up no space, so the people in this country have no time.
Goodness, however, requires both time and space.
Even truth in this country is a shadow.
The laws of truth are proclaimed from the capital of the shadows.
It is the truth of shadows and not of people.
Yet even in this country I met a just man. He urged me to have patience and not to be so hasty as the shadows I was condemning.
‘This country,’ said the just man, ‘will perhaps give over all of its shadows and skyscrapers to other countries and itself arrive at life and truth. Perhaps the people here will one day have time and will build little houses and love people of every colour; perhaps they will love permanence and hate transience and despise money. This country is a young heir of older countries. And the heirs have inherited before their elders were dead. Let the elders lie under the ground first, and then the young ones may become magnificent heirs.
‘You must have patience!’
I, however, who am not a just man, don’t have the virtue of patience.
I am a weak man, and I fear the Antichrist.
UNDER THE EARTH
I went to many other countries in the service of the master who had a thousand tongues at his disposal.
I descended eight hundred metres beneath the surface of the earth and saw men who for eight hours a day, eight hours on a daily basis, lie on their backs eight hundred metres under the earth. With hammers they broke off the coal over their heads, coal that is plentiful below the earth.
They are threatened by poisonous gases, by falling stones, by rocks that collapse suddenly and block the way out. And many workers had already died such a death.
God Himself made the coal form underground so that it may warm us, so that it may heal us, drive our machines and support the works of our reason.
But I also met people who deal in coal. And these did not lie on their backs for eight hours a day, eight hundred metres below the eart
h.
It is certainly true that God granted them the intelligence to trade just as He gave the others the strength and endurance to lie on their backs and hack at the coal above their heads.
The men who deal in coal can thus not be less in the eyes of God than the men who mine it.
Before God, I said, they aren’t less. But before people, they are less, for their work is less strenuous and they earn more money.
Human justice is not as perfect as divine justice. People look at the degree of toil and the amount of its reward.
Every half-hour a lift brought the men below, eight hundred metres deep. When one is underground, eight hundred metres from the light of the world, one not only loses the light that illuminates the earth but one longs for the sky; one has nostalgia for the heavens.
We were not made as hamsters, moles, salamanders or worms but as humans; the earth is meant to be under our feet and the sky above our heads.
We were created to walk upright, on two legs not on four feet. Our arms and hands are not for crawling around the earth but for working, for embracing our neighbour and to stretch towards the heavens.
Through this also are we differentiated from the animals, in that we alone, among all the beings of creation, have the ability to stretch our arms and hands towards the sky.
We are also different from animals through the fact that our forefather Adam received the breath of God. It is as though we had been granted this power because we yearn for contact with He of whom we are a reflection.
When we descend into the earth, however, no more can we stretch our arms skywards. No longer can we create the symbol of redemption, the sign of the Cross, with our bodies while we stand.
The Cross is not just the instrument of torture upon which the Redeemer of mankind suffered. It is first and foremost the simplest depiction of man with his arms outstretched, his feet planted on the earth, his head towards the sky. Every person on earth who stretches out his arms in distress forms a cross. He redeems himself, as it were, from his afflictions through the sign of the Cross, which he does not make but himself depicts.
