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The Golem (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation Series)

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I will do my utmost to complement Esther Nebenhzal's critique which has considerable merit and covers a lot of ground I do not wish to tread once over. I here wish to provide some insights into the making of The Golem by Meyrink so as to deepen our appreciation for the author and his most read novel.

The Golem was originally titled "The Eternal Jew" but later changed so as to highlight the mystical elements and gothic stirrings of the tale. ustav Meyrink wrote the book book while working on a project that sought to translate all of Dickens into German (The Czech republic was part of the Austrio-Hungarian empire). However, spurred by a deliberate desire to go beyond the surface of reality, he was to become subject to visionary experiences that led to a dialogue with the spirit world which is exposed to us in his novels and short stories. The Golem is the most widely read and successful, and to my knowledge the most lyrically urgent one as well. He tells us in his journals that the moment that he passed from thinking in words to thinking in pictures he became a writer. He has the prophetic depth of a William Blake, although the different traditions strain this parallel, they do converge at several points and in a variety of overlapping sensibilities.

Meyrink often experimented with hashish, yoga, sleep-deprivation, fasting and breathing rituals. He also drank gum arabic twice a day, a sap derived from the acacia tree which is sacred to the Jews and allegedly was used to build the Ark of the Covenent and the Sacred Tabernacle.
Meyrink studied the Cabala of course, but he was also well versed in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy in addition to having dabbled into Muslim meditative rituals. He devoured anything that could possibly offer him a peek into the eternal unknown. He was to become the founder of the Theosophical Order of the Blue Star. If the esoteric slant portrayed in the commentary deters you from reading the book it would be very unfortunate. The tale is written in a style that is firmly grounded in a social landscape and a graphic expressionism descriptive of late 19th centuray Prague: It stirs not so much because of its darkness but due to a stark clarity that transpires amid the auratic haze.

A list of amusing and prophetic characters run the full gamut of the fantastical and the melodramatic: the doppleganger and the Eternal Woman, the marionetteer and the hemaphrodite, the prostitute and the amnisiac, the deaf-mute silhouette artist and the pawnbroker. Lovers and criminals abound and the plot holds the strings to a puppet show whose marionettes pull away until they are no longer controlled by the hand that gave them life.
In essence The Golem is an exploration of the problem of identity. "A painful quest for that eternal stone that in some mysterious fashion lurks in the dim recesses of memory in the guise of fat". Poetic in its melodramatic allegorical purpose and perverse in its evocation of a feel for the metaphysical in everyday experiences, the reader finds himself before an artificial monster that has all the quirks of bourgouis values
and the indeterminacy of its stalemate.

The Golem is a folkloric trademark of Yiddish literature. A manlike monster of clay created by a rabbi, who also happens to be a student of the Cabala, whence by his inscribing the word EMETH on its brow (truth) gives life to it. By simply removing the first of these letters EMETH (truth) becomes METH (Death) and the negotiating is brought to a dense expanse. We can easily draw a connecting link with the myths of Paracelsean homunculus, the Sorcerer's apprenticeship and Frankenstein.

Today it ought to bewilder to edigy a mythic paradigm for students of cyborg literature and the techno-human state of nature we've virtually manufactured in our benighted postmodern reality.
If one looks for solace in this tale, it may be found in its satirical overexposure, its expressionistic distortions and colorful panoply of characteristics that make humans clueless ceatures that run away from their fate so as to take refuge in fate's lap.
The nightmarish atmosphere of mystical intuition stares at the reader in a soft yet penetrating picture that by fantastical adumbrations reveals itself to be more of a mirror than a canvas: such a looking-glass has a beyond that intimates a communion with the hyperreal.
In the words of Jorge Luis Borges "the Cabala found in the ghettos a suitable home for its strange speculations on the nature of God, the magical powers of letters and the possibility for initiates of creating a man in the same way that God created Adam. The homunculus was called the Golem...Gustave Meyrink uses this legend...in a dream like setting on the other side of the Mirror and he has invested it with a horror so palpable that it has remained in my memory ever since my first encounter with it."

I hope this story finds as many readers as Kafka, because it has just as much to teach us, and possibly the nightmares may shake us out of a slumber that has become lulled by the snoring of our collective imaginary oblivion. Credit to Robert Irwin who has divulged a sensible foray into the literature of Gustav Meyrink and in this Dedalus edition provides a succint and thorough introdution.

The legend of the "Golem" had its origin in Jewish folklore and mysticism, and its reading ranges from a methaphysical interpretation to a child's tale. From the first perspective the Golem is seen as a mystical attempt to experience "imitato dei," God's power of creation and the transcendental nature of the ritual; on a more legendary perspective the Golem is seen as a man-like creature who was created by rabbi Loew from Prague, to protect the ghetto community from persecution and injustice. In Meyrink's novel, the Golem is used as a symbolic device, in an exploration of the problem of identity.

Considered a masterpiece of fantasy and expressionism, Meyrink's "The Golem" is an oneiric novel with a strong religious gothic tone, a mirror of Meyrink's intellectual pursuit and involvement in occultist movements. The main character and narrator, Athanasius Pernath drifts in a state of hypnagogia, his memory blocked from the past, desperately in search of his own identity -- "Who am I?" In his quest, the Golem will take Athanasius into an inner journey, in a shift from consciousness to unconsciousness. Meyrink also introduces the mystic and cabbalist concept of the "secret of intercalation" (Ibbur), a combination of God's determinative and guiding hand and of man's freedom of choice and responsibility.

It is a novel with a phantasmagorial plot and visionary settings, where characters are drifted by a reality outside their understanding. Some readers might find the journey altogether weird, abstract and surrealist. However, the magic of Meyrink resides exactly in an artistic vision which embodies infinite interpretations. His own words best illustrates his own perspective of life: "when men arise from their beds, they think they have shaken off sleep and they know not that they have fallen victim to their senses and are in the grip of a much deeper sleep than the one they have just left."

I spent last several days comparing Mitchell's and Pemberton's translation to the German original for a project I'm working on and I strongly recommend Mitchell's version. Pemberton's is quite inaccurate and contains many errors which dull the impact of Meyrink's prose. There is not enough space here for a detailed comparison but as an example just try to figure out the layout of Pernath's and Savioli's apartments (that iron door!) based on Pemberton's translation: "if one unlatched the iron door to the basement - quite easy from above - it was possible, through my room, to reach the staircase..." In fact the door is quite easy to unlatch not from above but from the other side (that is, inside Savioli's studio) and then it is possible to reach the staircase by walking a corridor along (or past) Pernath's room, not through it.

There's much to give away about this book, but it is hard to get the plot straight once you've finished. Although the prose itself is quite straightforward and not experimental, the first-person narration seems to jump from the conscious to the under- or sub-conscious. It tells the myth of the Golem, an artificial creature created in the XVI century by Rabbi Loew in the ghetto of Prague to protect the Jewish community from destruction and injustice, but the myth is told from a very original perspective. Athanasius Pernath is a jeweler and restorator with faint memories of his past, who lives in the ghetto and experiences a series of strange (very strange) adventures involving crime, romance, estranged relationships and contact with the Golem himself. The most wonderful thing about this book is the atmosphere, the dark, tense environment and the beautiful depictions of Prague and its different neighborhoods, especially the ghetto.

The characters are all strange and enticing, but the plot is superbe, difficult and mysterious. It is a fascinating book even if could not be considered strictly a literary masterpiece. It is gloomy, spooky and enigmatic, indeed very gothic, and lovers of literature with strange, mystical situations will enjoy it.

... ay there's the rub!" Prince Hamlet, that Man of Rationality, knew that his logic was no match for the inexorable irrationality of dreams: "I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." There are no allusions to Shakespeare in Gustav Meyrink's unique masterpiece "The Golem" -- all the obscure lore of the book is drawn from Jewish folk tales and Kabbalistic esoterica -- but the narrator, Athanasius Pernath is troubled by the baddest of bad dreams. Like Hamlet, the rationalist reader will get nowhere by striving to order and make sense of Pernath's dreams, as even the dreamer himself is tormented by his uncertainty about his own reality, about the conundrum of whether he is merely dreaming, or in fact dreaming that he is dreaming.

Nothing I've ever read captures the harrowing, inescapable irrationality of a nightmare as authentically as The Golem. That's its transcendent accomplishment. It's one of the most bizarre books ever published, and much of its strange atmosphere is due to the reader's constant uncertainty about the border between 'reality' and dream. Pernath is an aging gem-cutter, perhaps a gifted craftsman, perhaps a madman released from an asylum after a cure by hypnosis, ostensibly the scion of a family of wealth but stricken with almost total amnesia. Pernath lives in the ancient ghetto of Prague, amid Jews of the oddest racial/cultural traits. Pernath himself doesn't seem to be Jewish. He can't read Hebrew, yet he is obsessed with Hebraic, especially Kabbalistic, symbolism and myth. Particularly, he is obsessed with the image of the Golem, the artificial man made of clay, the created servant who runs destructively amok. Pernath thinks/dreams that he is himself the Golem ... or not. But Pernath is also the observer, or the dreamer, of other people's lives, or dreams. The nightmarishly disjointed 'plot' of the Golem includes murders, patricide, infidelity, rape, revenge, and Faustian quests for magical powers. The aging Pernath falls into an idyllic platonic love, or a dream of love, and eventually is jailed on false charges of murder. He shares his cell for a single night with a 'holy sinner', a young man condemned for the rape/murder of a woman whom Pernath begins to fear to be his own beloved, yet the young murderer convinces Pernath that he is fulfilling a mystical course toward redemption.

Author Gustav Meyrink was an illegitimate child of a German Baron and an actress. He was raised as a Protestant. In his early twenties, he suffered a "nervous breakdown", attempted suicide, then threw himself into occultism, beginning with theosophy. He progressed to alchemy and Kabbalah, stimulated by use of hashish. Meanwhile, almost implausibly, he conducted the affairs of a major bank and was known as a dashing 'man about town'. Eventually he was accused of fraud, imprisoned, financially ruined, and partially paralyzed. He recovered his health, he said, by the practice of yoga. He turned to writing to support himself, beginning The Golem in 1907 and publishing it in serial form in 1913. His later life was almost as disjointed and dreamlike as his writing.

Younger readers of The Golem might well be tempted to compare it to the Harry Potter novels, delighting in its tingle-inducing fantasy, or to The Hobbit, for its vivid evocation of a world of dark forces. But The Golem is far more earnest, profoundly rooted in actual historical beliefs in super-rational forces of good and evil than all the fantasy literature of later decades. Some readers might see The Golem as a Middle European antecedent of "magical realism". Borges, in fact, acknowledged Meyrink as an influence. But the magic in The Golem transcends literary manipulation and artifice. One can't help feeling that Meyrink tapped a deeper aquifer of cultural memory; if ever a book made Karl Jung's claptrap psychology plausible, it would be The Golem. The closest comparison to The Golem, in my mind, would be the supernatural tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Imagine the creepy atmosphere of "Tell-tale Heart" or "The Masque of the Red Death" extended to the full length of a novel, and replete with even more haunting revenants of one's own worst dreams....

Meyrink was not a master stylist in the German language. His syntax was often crabbed and awkward. None of his other works -- forgive me please, members of the fantasy fan club -- approach The Golem in power. But translator Mike Mitchell is a genius in his vocation. His translations of German classics like Simplicius Simplicissimus and The Golem are unaffected, unostentatious, plain-English wonders of readability. You won't lose much by reading The Golem in this translation. But don't try to rationalize it!

Subtle, complex and obscure. I lifted these 3 adjectives from another review of this novel on another website, because I couldn't have said it better. That reviewer calls this book a `classic', which makes me wonder about our perceptions. I would associate `classic' in fiction with the 19th century and further back. Meyrink's Golem was published in 1915. Amazingly it was the bestseller of the year in Germany. Imagine, in war times people pick up this dark confused dreamy horror tale. What does that tell us?
There have been 3 movies after the novel, or more. I believe the cover picture on this edition is taken from the first movie, still in silent times.

Can a `bestseller' become a `classic'? Apparently yes. Will we see our contemporary bestsellers as classics in 100 years? I can't quite convince myself of that, but I am probably wrong.
This Golem would be a classic in the same sense as Kafka's Trial and Roth's Radetzkymarsch: `modern classics' about times and worlds that are so far past that we can not think of them as recent.
This novel is not a retold version of the Rabbi Loew legend about the artificial life formed out of a lump of clay. It uses the myth of the golem but transports it into a different setting. We are still in Prague and still in the ghetto, but this golem is something else. It is a vague non-descript ghost which turns up every 33 years and horrifies those who see him without doing any actual damage directly, other than to minds and souls. Murders happen. Bridges collapse.
The protagonists of the story are ghetto dwellers. Main hero is a man who has lost part of his memory and who moves between dream worlds and reality from page to page. Partly he doesn't even dream his own dream, but somebody else does it for him.
The novel has a plot, even though we think at times that there are just loosely connected scenes. Some of them have the quality of `normal' horror stories, others are vague and confusing. Some are of the black humor variety. And the things that happen to our main hero add up to a dramatic esoteric mystery. This is a poetic, mystic, cabbalist, expressionist dream world. Very highly recommendable.

Meyrink was not a born Praguer, but he came from Vienna, of German parents (`illegitimate' -what a word!- child of a Württembergian Minister and a Bavarian actress). His name was actually Meyer. He owned a banking business in Prague around the turn of the century, but failed and finally settled in Bavaria. He was not Jewish, but Protestant, and turned Buddhist in his last years. He died just in time before Nazis came to power and would have told him what they thought of him. This man is not easily accessible. One might need to read the text more than once. I am strongly tempted to look for more of his writings after this.

I love Meyrink. *The Golem* is certainly his best work, but I loved the short stories, and also these other novels-- *The White Dominican*, *Walpurgis Night*, and , *The Green Face*, roughly in that order, all available from Dedalus.

I disagree, for once, with Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a review of Meyrink's *Angel of the West Window*. (It can be found in the nice fat volume of Borges' collected non-fiction.) I agree with Borges' objection to Angel of the West Window--that it becomes doctrinaire in its strict espousal of specific occult traditions. I'm not interested in the occult, I'm interested in development, transformation. In the Golem we get that. In the other novels perhaps the impact is lessened by his becoming increasingly doctrinaire. I disagree with Borges in that I can't dismiss the other works. They're all worthwhile, great fun, really. Perhaps things have gotten so much worse since Borges was writing.

Also, interesting to note that my favorite tastes of Meyrink came from the little excerpts in various Dedalus anthologies. The descriptions and metaphors are so fanciful, wonderful. The lamplighter in the White Dominican.

In one of the short stories (The Opal and other Stories, published by Dedalus), Meyrink creates a proto Hitler. Meyrink later boasted that he got it right decades before Hitler rose to power.

If you like Meyrink, check out Marcel Schwob, another writer that Borges recommends.

I don't know if I've ever enjoyed reading a book this much (different translation) -- certainly not for years. An incredible plot -- thrilling yes, but deeply textured, revealed exquisitely, every page not only extending the plot, but rippling back through everything that came before. The Prague ghetto at the turn of the century is palpable, but clearly a Prague that existed as much in Meyrink's imagination (or soul?) as in the real world. The characters are complex, or better, nuanced, and rendered with a subtlety that I think may be lost forever.

I'm picking up Meyrink's influences on other Eastern European fiction writers -- Gombrowitz in particular, but also Bruno Schulz, just to name a couple. I'm sure some people will not respond to this book as deeply as I have, but if you do, you will experience ecstasy.