The Antichrist

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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.

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