Joseph Roth - The Antichrist

Joseph Roth’s least-known yet most autobiographical novel begins with a dire warning: ‘The Antichrist has come; so disguised that we … cannot recognize him.’ He is in our very midst, cleverly disguised as one of us. It is a race against time as the Antichrist seeks to spread his trickery and to poison the minds of the innocent masses.

Roth takes us on a whirlwind journey around the world as he attempts to expose the Antichrist at every turn, in every corner of the globe. Set between 1905 and 1933, the novel begins with the protagonist’s first encounter with the Antichrist and then recounts his exploits during World War I and his subsequent employment as a newspaper reporter for the mysterious and malevolent ‘Master of a Thousand Tongues’. As our hero J.R. travels on assignment to the Soviet Union, the USA, Germany and elsewhere he encounters delicious ironies and unspeakable evils. Over the course of the book Roth skewers countless aspects of the contemporary condition: communism, fascism, capitalism, atheism, architecture, Hollywood, the League of Nations, journalism and bigotry of many sorts.

Originally published in 1934 and available again in English for the first time in more than seventy years, The Antichrist is startling in its prescience and clarity. Arguably Roth’s most powerful work, The Antichrist reveals his deep understanding of twentieth-century world dynamics and his justifiable fears for the future of civilization.

JOSEPH ROTH was born in Brody, Galicia — then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in the Ukraine — in 1894. He served in the Austrian Army between 1916 and 1918 and worked as a journalist from 1923 to 1932 in Vienna and Berlin. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he emigrated to Paris, where he drank himself into an early grave in 1939. Roth also wrote Weights and Measures, Flight Without End, The Radetzky March, String of Pearls, The Silent Prophet and The Legend of the Holy Drinker.

Joseph Roth, from a cigarette card, c. 1930

I do not think that man can save man. I am a believer: man cannot be saved except by Heaven. — Joseph Roth

The prodigious output of Joseph Roth (1894–1939) included numerous novels, novellas, short stories and newspaper articles in the space of only sixteen years between 1923 and 1939. While much of Roth’s fascinating oeuvre has been made available to the English-speaking world in recent years, Der Antichrist (The Antichrist) has remained out of print in English for seventy years. This is unfortunate because, although it is perhaps his least-known work it is also one of his most interesting, certainly his most intense and densely packed, offering, as it does, valuable insight into the persona of Joseph Roth.

Born Moses Joseph Roth of Jewish parentage in the town of Brody, Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Ukraine), about eighty-seven kilometres (fifty-four miles) north-east of present-day Lviv (then called Lemberg), Roth’s own accounts of his background were often misleading. He claimed to have been born in a town called Svaby to a Christian father and Jewish mother. In one 1934 interview he said his mother was a ‘Russian Jew always close to the ghetto’ and his father a Viennese employed by the Minister of Finance, an amateur artist, painter, sceptic and alcoholic who died before Roth was even born. In truth, both parents were Galician Jews; and the mentally unbalanced Nachum Roth left under the spell of a so-called ‘wonder rabbi’ even before Joseph was born and died in 1910. Joseph was raised by his mother and her relatives, although in adulthood he was friendly with some members of his father’s family.

Just as fact and fiction are confused in Roth’s telling of his own story, so they are commingled in The Antichrist. Is it a novel or a work of non-fiction? At first glance one may be inclined to call it non-fiction, a series of interconnected essays — it is true that some of the material is more or less recycled from Roth’s non-fiction, articles he wrote during the 1920s and early 1930s. For example, the chapter on oil drilling is apparently based on a 1928 article he wrote about oil wells in Poland for the Frankfurter Zeitung. However, whatever of his own earlier journalistic work Roth borrowed here, he rewrote, refocused and fictionalized for use in The Antichrist. Although it has not typically been classified as fiction, Roth himself referred to The Antichrist as a novel. The most fictional aspect of the work is certainly the narrator’s trip to Hollywood; Roth never set foot in the United States.

When compared to Roth’s non-fiction, such as The Wandering Jews or the series of brief newspaper sketches (known in French as feuilletons) that have since been compiled and published as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin and Reports from a Parisian Paradise, it becomes clear that The Antichrist is more novel than essay, although it may more realistically be seen as a hybrid of the two genres. While it is ostensibly a work of fiction, The Antichrist may also be the closest thing to autobiography that Roth ever wrote.

The Antichrist is like nothing else in Roth’s canon. It is more overtly political, more dogmatic, more thematically broad, more emotionally charged and more blatantly cynical than either his other novels or his non-fiction. The reviews for The Antichrist were mixed but were consistent in their agreement that the book was unique. The New York Times liked it; the British critic Frank Swinnerton found Roth’s take on Hollywood ‘bewildering’; the Wiener Zeitung called it a ‘prophetical treatise’ with ‘apocalyptic’ scenes; and a French review called it ‘one of the most vehement protests of human conscience against that which reduces and destroys it’.

The ‘vehement protests’ in The Antichrist present Joseph Roth in a raw state, stripped bare of any pretensions, with the more intricate plots of his other books sacrificed here for the sake of message. The book’s focus is trained on Roth’s present — the state of the world between the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the Nazis coming to power in Germany in 1933, one of the most fateful periods in human history. Everything that ‘reduces and destroys’ human conscience is traceable to the Antichrist, whose long-expected arrival in the world has finally come during the early twentieth century.

Of course, the whole concept of the Antichrist as a theme for a Joseph Roth book is especially interesting considering Roth’s Jewish background. Although his Jewishness was largelyconcealed in his writing, and he attempted to mask it or minimize it when asked about his background, neither was he a true convert to Christianity. He tried to identify himself with Catholicism at times, yet some of his books were heavily infused with Jewish sensibilities and culture, depicted through sympathetic characters. Joseph Roth, like many European Jews of the early twentieth century, could not simply be pigeon-holed into a particular religion. He sought to be treated as an assimilated citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire rather than as a member of a particular religion.

As usual with his books, Roth’s various life experiences — as university student, journalist, soldier, traveller, philosopher and Catholic-leaning Jew — inform much of The Antichrist. It is his extensive experience as a journalist that may well be the single strongest influence on all his fiction. Roth’s urge to expose the multiple layers of truth on any given subject seems to be a driving force behind all of his writing. And, after all, any writer emerging from the confusion of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War had to confront and then reconcile multiple identities and alternate truths.