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.’