THE VIVID IMAGES of the Puch von dem Entkrist, their simplicity and starkness, are mesmerizing. The colors leap off the pages, and before even reading the text, one is drawn into the story that they tell. What must have been the emotional reaction of a fifteenth-century reader? Someone immersed in the religious background of the Final Enemy? The Puch von dem Entkrist is part of a series of German blockbooks that detail the life of the Antichrist and the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday. Along with it, there is the Frankfurt edition that is a full print and the earlier chiro-xylographic Antichrist. All three are fascinating, but they contain one particular set of images that puzzle scholars to this day.

The German blockbooks detailed the life of the Antichrist and combined his legend with the popular countdown of the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday. In the first part, the Antichrist performs three miracles in front of an enthralled audience of followers. His goal is to blind and seduce them so that they believe his lies and deceit. But why would he conjure a giant from an egg, suspend a castle by a thread in the air, and draw a stag from a stone? They do not belong to the established eschatological tradition. Before and after this set of images, he performs other miracles as well; those miracles are drawn from eschatological tradition, but these are not. Their particularity must be explained in the cultural context of the fifteenth century. Therefore, the discussion has to turn to the question of how apocalyptic texts were used in the fifteenth century and how far the blockbooks reflect that culture. Christoph Peter Burger states in his introduction to the Frankfurter Blockbuch: