Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, that great novel in which a figure in history, the Austrian monarchy, is snatched from transience through the poet's language, is given a strange addition by the novel The Dumb Prophet: the swan song not to a figure of the past history, but melancholic resignation in the face of a powerful utopia of the kingdom of justice, in which all men are brothers, which has appeared in history. The mute prophet was written in 1929. Roth's dream of the rise of the kingdom of great peace had already expired at this point in time.