Joseph Roth
L'Anticristo

Central Station (Milan), April 18, 2014
Good Friday, an hour left before the train to Brescia, what to do? I enter a bookstore with three or four floors, I wander among the books, I'm in the mood to read something new. Section “R”, I glimpse some publications by Joseph Roth. I absolutely love his dry yet very sharp style, his cutting and ironic sentences, his decadent yet very lucid prose. I find “Job. The Story of a Simple Man” (already read, marvelous), “The Emperor’s Tomb” (already read, spectacular), “The Legend of the Holy Drinker” (already read, legendary), “The Antichrist” (...oh my God, never read, I want it, I buy it).

Paris, 1930s
Joseph Roth is forty years old and wanders around Paris, Berlin is now behind him, he had to run away, a Jew is not very well regarded in those parts. Hitler has come to power, the supreme evil has become Man. In his Parisian refuge, he writes "The Antichrist," a strange book, outside his normal narrative schemes. He is no longer the bard of the end of the great Austro-Hungarian empire, he abandons his simple and direct writing, brilliant and melancholic at the same time. He decides to mount the pulpit and rail against the Evil that seems to spread like wildfire across the entire world. The Antichrist is everywhere. Evil and chaos are the work of the devil who inevitably tends to deceive people. Evil lies in the sick politics that transforms the sacred cross into a cursed hooked symbol (Nazism) or even forbids religious worship (communism). The devil hides in the U.S. economy, a malevolent horde that stifles any other necessity. The Antichrist hides in the written word (in journalism) used only to sell lies. The "Lord of the Thousand Tongues" has a false truth for each of us. Evil is in the cinema that has taken away the shadow (the soul) from men who sell themselves for money. The Antichrist is underground, not in hell, but in oil deposits. It is in people, among the Jews, in Joseph Roth, everywhere. Joseph's vehemence in writing is exemplary, it's a frontal attack on everything that is not good. The chapters of the short pamphlet unfold by topic, rich with pathos, visual suggestions, apocalyptic expressions, drunken thoughts. It is not easy, on this Dantean journey through the circles of evil, to keep up with Joseph Roth. In his hotel, we can imagine him bent over a sheet of paper, with a pen in his right hand, a glass of wine in the left, and a stack of empty flasks behind him. It is a mad book, at times absurd, prophetic and pessimistic, indignant and nihilistic, to be read in "altered" mode because two drunks have no trouble understanding each other.

Now, wherever you are
Evil is everywhere, is each of us a bit of the Antichrist? It can be frightening, but without the seed of evil, how could goodness emerge? Evil is a halo that surrounds you while, calmly in front of the computer screen, you are reading this page. Look behind you, your shadow might have already been stolen by the Antichrist. Have you by any chance ever been caught on camera? Oh my goodness, H-E-L-P…..

...the Antichrist had caught me while speaking with me, as an enemy of the Antichrist. Among the shadows of skiers, rowers, tennis players, boxers, actors, politicians, criminals, he also showed my shadow. He had robbed me of my shadow. And I left the theater....(Joseph Roth)