The Antichrist

INTRODUCTION

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.

Roth expressed complexities of social reality through his carefully chosen words. His novels are characterized by a knack for capturing details and painting verbal pictures that themselves serve as his pointed commentary. His novels are replete with attention paid to details such as the sound of rainfall, the croaking of frogs or the stultifying atmosphere of a stuffy room. Many of these descriptions ring true not only because they capture an essence but because they are the right details, the sounds or sights that we as readers need described. Roth saw with the eyes we as readers wish to have; he answers our questions before we even know we will want to pose them.

Journalism and fiction went hand in hand for Roth. Even as he experienced growing success with his fiction he kept writing newspaper articles. In a 1934 letter to a friend Roth insisted that The Antichrist was a Christian work and not a journalistic work, but the convenient device Roth utilized to send his protagonist around the world happens to be his employment by a newspaper editor. The malevolence of the book’s ‘Master of a Thousand Tongues’ is likely a mirror of Roth’s feelings about the power wielded by Fascist and Communist newspaper editors. Perhaps Roth’s refusal to call The Antichrist a journalistic work was his acknowledgement that it was not objective but subjective. While it was written with journalistic sensibilities, it presents the blunt philosophical observations and pointed accusations of an essayist, wrapped together with a loose fictional plot.

In The Antichrist the multiple and often contradictory realities of modern life are presented primarily through the use of dialogue. The more subtle use of targeted descriptive passages was more or less discarded (with a few exceptions); instead, Roth employed his reporter’s knack for asking the right questions and then switching viewpoints to answer them. In fact, some sections of dialogue read rather like interviews or political debates.

The protagonist of The Antichrist editorializes freely through the use of these dialogues with an army of characters representing opposing (and quite often malignant) points of view. These characters, either blindly ignorant or outright malevolent, argue with Roth’s standpoint and counter his propositions with their own views of the world. In some ways Roth found within the open structure of The Antichrist a means to tackle within a few pages the types of issues that took the entire length of one of his conventional novels.

Roth also served up equal parts of irony and cynicism to help dispatch various subjects more quickly. The multiple realities of Roth’s world were quite conducive to irony, and The Antichrist is filled with a cynical yet lyrical irony when confronting the modern condition. When the hero of The Antichrist joins the army during the Great War he describes the events one morning thus: ‘We had halted, that is to say, in the parlance of war, that we could rest before beginning once again to shoot and to die.’

At times in Roth’s work his irony amounts to a simple literary nod or a sarcastic wink; at others it is a grand and eloquent undercurrent that swells until the plot reaches a crescendo. For literary works to evoke such strong irony implies that the author has developed an excellent sense of perspective. In part through his keen powers of observation and in part to his well-developed overview on European history, much of Roth’s work is highly prescient. It is no coincidence that it was Roth who was the first European writer to mention Adolf Hitler in a work of fiction, all the way back in 1923. Another example of his startling ability to foresee the future is the pre-Holocaust The Wandering Jews, a surprising read today not only because it captures the mid-1930s tension and uncertainty of European Jewish life so perfectly but because it loudly signals the cataclysmic events to come.

The Antichrist, too, is amazingly visionary because it both predicts and laments the course of the rest of the twentieth century. Fortunately for us as readers of Joseph Roth, his writing career spanned one of the most interesting and turbulent times in modern history, including the First World War and the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the end of Imperial Russia, the Russian Revolution and Communism, the Weimar Republic and the rise of Fascism and Hitler. The litany of problems that Roth cites within the book — racism, unchecked capitalism, socialism, religious persecution, revolution and social upheaval — would plague the world of the late 1930s and far beyond. What might have seemed a bit paranoid to some readers of the day comes across today as amazingly insightful. How else to describe a chapter called ‘The Iron God’, in which a Nazi, in conversation with the protagonist, described how it is through the swastika that they will conquer the world, not only vanquishing other peoples but also their gods.

The thematic thread through Roth’s fiction is generally nostalgia for the ‘old days’. Although his fatherless youth may not have been idyllic, Roth experienced and enjoyed life in a pre-war frontier-town Galicia, an existence he would describe in many of his books, notably Weights and Measures. His benevolence towards the Austro-Hungarian monarchy stemmed from a deep-seated belief that what came after was far crueller and much more unstable than the autocratic empire-building of the Habsburgs. The same might be said of his feelings towards Imperial Russia (Roth’s brief romance with Communism ended after he visited the Soviet Union). Roth’s post-war world, as seen in Hotel Savoy, Rebellion and several other novels of his, is one of chaos, social unrest and cynicism. In these books Roth presented the aftermath of the First World War through the lens of one or more characters who are decidedly pre-war in their philosophy. In The Antichrist, however, nostalgia for the past is brushed aside and replaced by alarm at the course the present was taking towards the future. If Roth’s other books detail the agonizing transition from the old ways of Europe to the new world that existed after 1918, The Antichrist looks past the transition to focus on the stark realities of the modern world.

Sadly, in The Antichrist Joseph Roth is also foreshadowing his own premature demise, explaining and lamenting his growing inability to fit into the new world that was rapidly taking shape around him. Part of his profound melancholy during the middle and later 1930s was a product of what he viewed to be the gullibility of many people and, further, their powerlessness in the face of evil. His rather blunt assessment in The Antichrist that everyone contains the seeds of hatred for the Jews sprang equally from his awareness that a very dark hour had come for European Jews and from his understanding that people could easily be swayed more easily to hate than to love. Similarly, his admonition that people were given feet so that they might leave a country where injustice is done to them was a warning for German Jews to follow his lead and leave before it was too late.

Roth’s malaise only increased over time as the influence of Fascism and Communism threatened to take over the world. He was clearly disturbed by the German concordat with the Catholic Church in 1933, and this event forms the basis of the concluding chapter of The Antichrist. The exiled Roth’s Angst over the state of the world continued to increase after that and reached a crescendo in 1938 with the German annexation of Austria, after which he told a friend sadly: ‘I have lost my country. I have nothing left.’

Roth’s growing unease about the world around him is reflected in The Antichrist; even as he wrote it the situation deteriorated. The confident protagonist of the beginning of book, who says he is not afraid of the Antichrist, later gives way to a wary protagonist who admits he is afraid. Fortunately, while a sense of despair haunts each page, it is tinged with the wry humour of one who has the upper hand. One gets the sense that in unmasking the Antichrist at every turn Roth prevails. He saw the truth and was spreading the word, telling us to be wary of the trappings of our modern lives — of newspapers, of Communism, of corporations, of religion or atheism, of racist thoughts. He was clearly outraged at the trickery and inequality of the modern world — not so much at the technological wonders themselves as at their shameless uses for manipulation and deception. Exposing the Antichrist in his various guises was Roth’s best weapon against him. In revealing the evils lurking among us Roth hoped to prompt people, corporations and nations towards ruthless self-examination and propel them to action, evicting the Antichrist from their presence.

Some of Roth’s perceived evils are more obviously insidious than others. One of the more controversial and perhaps bizarre stances throughout the book is that taken against Hollywood and the film industry, especially in the chapter titled ‘Hollywood, the Hades of Modern Man’. Wary of our dependence on the technological advances of the early twentieth century, Roth realized their immense power to control people. At the start of the chapter he writes how ‘the false heart of a false friend’ thousands of miles away can only be magnified over the telephone. Here Roth correctly predicted the influence of radio, microphones and loudspeakers (and later television) as propaganda, foreseeing their growing use by Hitler, Goebbels and Mussolini as tools to control the masses. One can only imagine what Roth might say about the dangers of today’s technology — email, text messages, mobile phones and the internet. What seems bizarre at first becomes less outrageous as one realizes the scope of Roth’s prescience.

As regards actors and the public fascination with them, Roth was again spot on with observations that seem especially true in today’s celebrity-crazed culture of paparazzi stalkers and tabloid newspapers paying millions for photographs of celebrity babies. In describing how the actor sells out and provides his shadow on screen for all eternity Roth wrote: ‘Yes, one could say that he is even less than a shadow of himself, since the shadow is actually his true existence.’ Yet Roth’s true feelings about the cinema may not have been so harsh; the same year the first English translation of The Antichrist was published Twentieth Century Fox was busy making a film based on his novel Job.

The Antichrist was not only a product of its turbulent times but also the turbulence of Roth’s own personal situation. After his reluctant flight from Germany in 1933, what had already been a life of questionable happiness and stability took a drastic turn into a downwards spiral from which escape would be impossible. While Job sold about 30,000 copies and Radetzkymarch sold a very respectable 40,000 copies in Germany, after Hitler took power Roth’s future in Germany was over. The blunt force of The Antichrist’s arguments demonstrate a raw and emotional side of Roth that was usually not evident in his books, as if he was releasing some of the tension and anger that had accompanied his involuntary relocation. Roth never did find a permanent home during his exile, living out of hotel rooms in Paris and the many places he visited.

Between 1933, when he wrote the book, and 1935, by which time The Antichrist had been published first in German and then in English and other languages, Joseph Roth had a great many concerns weighing on his mind. Besides the rapidly crumbling stability of his beloved Europe he had an array of personal worries. He fretted constantly about his precarious financial situation, when he would be paid and how much he was owed. Although several of his books met with substantial critical and commercial success, he was nevertheless in need of funds. He complained that the Nazis had taken 30,000 marks of his money after he left in 1933. Whatever level of comfort and success he had achieved during the German years, by 1934 Roth was desperate for cash. At one point during his exile Roth sent money to his French translator for safekeeping for fear he himself could not be trusted with it.

While in exile Roth worked hard to keep track of the various foreign rights that had been sold and the translations of his works that were under way, a formidable task in itself. He also worried about the legal status of the children of his girlfriend, Andrea Manga Bell, a half-Cuban half-German woman whose husband had abandoned her.

During this time Roth often complained to friends about the poor state of his health. He sometimes signed his letters ‘old Joseph Roth’ and wrote frequently of being drained after working exhausting ten- or twelve-hour days on his various projects. These long days of work were his ‘Waterloo’, as he explained. He was often physically and mentally spent after writing, yet he hardly took a break, continuing to churn out new books one after another. He described himself in one letter as depressed, with ‘mountains of chagrin’, and in another letter said: ‘I work in a great anguish, a true panic.’

Although only forty years old when The Antichrist was published, Roth was by this time a physically ruined man. Excessive amounts of alcohol, chronic worry, overwork and a generally weak constitution had irreparably taken their toll. By the time of his death in May 1939 Roth had lived to see the world enveloped in a growing darkness that he had warned against six years earlier when writing The Antichrist. The last line of his book rings all too true. For just as his protagonist of the same name did, when Joseph Roth had seen enough he ‘left the theatre’, so to speak.

Although his pen was stilled so many decades ago, at long last Roth’s warning to the world can finally be read again in English.