Read Online The Antichrist by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk - Free Book Online

because he is being kept alive. And the place of which I am speaking, peaceful although it was, none the less resembled a battlefield, namely one on which doctors are battling death, and I could smell the same odour that arises at medical consultations, for I was actually standing at the sickbed of a terminally ill world that could not be allowed to die. There was a stench of camphor and iodoform, and just as real doctors speak in Latin so did these doctors of the world, and the sick patient could understand only every tenth word of what they said.
    I came to this peaceful place upon the instruction of my employer, the Master of a Thousand Tongues, and as I could understand Latin I knew what the doctors were talking about. I was prepared to report everything I had heard and understood, and so I wrote it down and sent it to my employer. But he then took one of the numerous red, blue and green pencils that lay on his desk not so he might write with them but only that he could strike with them, and he thus struck out all the truths from my reports so that the world didn’t learn it was terminally ill and was simply not being allowed to die. And thus he acted like the anxious relative of a deathly ill patient. The terminally ill patient is not told that he is dying. He might in that case die sooner, and it would be claimed that the doctors were incompetent.
    Among these doctors of the world I found some whose appearance was such that I was tempted to believe I had seen them before. Sometimes, when one or another of them gave me a cigarette, I got the feeling that at the next moment he would also offer me chocolate. He did not do this, however, for he believed I would then recognize him. And these were the most gentle of the convened doctors. And they were so affable and they knew their patient so well that they understood exactly in which of its limbs and body parts the world was weakest. And it was towards theweakest limbs and organs that they were the most gentle, almost gentler than they were by nature.
    So, for example, they discussed in a special commission, although here also they spoke Latin, in what way one might assist the coloured races.
    The coloured races – that is to say, in the language of this world, those people whose skin colour is not white but brown, black, yellow or reddish. And, although it should be clear and obvious to everyone that the colour of the human skin is as much intended by God as is the human face or the human form, people still believe that whatever their own colour might be, it is just through this colour that God has distinguished them from people of other colours. Whereas it is clearly written that God created man in His image: man, not his colour. He created grey, black, greenish and reddish trees and plants, and they are all trees and plants. He created grey, brown, red and yellow animals; silvery and golden fish; greenish, reddish and bluish waters; blue, green, silver and gold stars; clouds in all colours that our human eye can recognize and distinguish – yet they are all clouds, stars, waters, animals, fish and birds. And if the black raven could speak with reason and not only with its tongue it would not deny that the reddish-green parrot, although it is not black, is a bird like he, the black raven. This is because the animals, waters, clouds and plants are not delivered up to the Serpent, the First Serpent, the Antichrist. We humans, however, are delivered up to him, and thus a white man says he is superior to a black man and vice versa; whereas anyone of any colour would think it insanity if he heard someone say that a green room is better than a red one –
is
better and not that one person or another
likes
it more. Or if someone were to say the red leaves of autumn
are
better than the green ones of spring – and not that he
likes
them more.
    And instead of thanking God for creating man in His image, and truly with the divine magnanimity that we praise in Him, in