The Antichrist by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk Page B

assignments. You are to get to know the world and describe it for me. I am sending you to a foreign land. A revolution is going on. A true hell seems to have broken out there, and because you have an eye for this hell, you will go there.’
    â€˜You have a better eye yourself!’ I said.
    â€˜No,’ said he, ‘I will first learn of hell only after my death. However, let us forget the various departments of the next world so long as I live. I shall give you money and you will go, and you will report to me everything that you have seen.’
    Since I was now driven by curiosity as I had previously been driven by vanity, I took the money and went to the country in which hell had broken out.
    I wrote from there about everything that I saw. And I saw much.
    I lived in one of the great houses that are called hotels. TheHotel Excelsior was its name, so clearly it was a greatly important hotel. I had money.
    Across from my windows stood an old, venerable church, and from my elevated vantage point I could see directly into the belfry of this church.
    At a time when cannon were being fired in the town against those of its inhabitants who were deemed rebels, I heard the bells tolling loudly, and I watched from my window as the heavy bells swung.
    So I went into the church and asked the sexton, who was pulling the ropes, why and for what purpose he was ringing the bells.
    â€˜The minister gave me the order,’ said the sexton.
    I went to the minister, who was sitting in his room reading the Bible.
    It was already night-time. On the priest’s table a lamp was burning under a green shade. I heard the booming of the bells near by and the cannon thundering in the distance.
    He was a gentle man, the minister. He had a smooth face, kindly eyes and a pleasant voice.
    â€˜I can’t hear the sound of the cannon,’ he told me. ‘I’ve ordered that the bells are to be rung whenever they begin to fire the cannon.’
    â€˜Your Reverence,’ said I, ‘are you perhaps the brother of my master, who has sent me here? For I believe that he would have acted the same way as you!’
    â€˜No,’ said the minister, ‘I don’t know your master.’
    And he began once more to read the Bible.
    I remained in the service of the master who ruled over the thousand-tongued messengers, whose tongues themselves manufactured thenews. And he sent me here and there in many directions wherever anything happened and there was unrest. There was unrest everywhere in the world.

THE PLACE OF PEACE
    From now on, his love is to be found wherever culture and books rule; no longer does he divide the cosmos by countries, rivers, and seas, no longer according to race and class; he recognizes only two classes now: the aristocracy of learning and the mind as the upper world and the plebs and barbarism as the lower. – Stefan Zweig,
Erasmus of Rotterdam
    But I also came to a peaceful place in a peaceful town. Here delegates from all the restless nations in all the restless parts of the world had convened to consider in what way the tranquillity of the world might be restored. That is to say, they did not mean the actual tranquillity of the world but the state of unrest that ruled the world, which seemed to them to be a state of peace and tranquillity. These delegates of the various peoples did not wish to bring real peace into the world but, rather, to make the conflict that dominated the world feel so natural that the world would begin to believe it was actual peace. This demonstrated to me that their minds were truly confused. The Antichrist had so confused their minds that they mistook conflict for peace and strove to consolidate it. They resembled doctors who cannot let a terminally ill man die because law and conscience forbid them to do so, and they persuade the sick man that, because he hasn’t died, he must therefore be healthy. The world, however, is like a sick man who imagines hemust be healthy