The Antichrist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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