The Golem (2 page)

But if this were all, then the novel could only have a limited interest for us today. More importantly,
The Golem
, like Meyrink’s earlier and shorter satirical pieces, was written to be an assault on the dubiously ‘safe’ values of the bourgeoisie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its last days. In an expressionist and melodramatic mode it anticipates the anxieties of Karl Kraus’s
Die Letzen Tage der Menscheit
(1919) and Robert Musil’s
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(1930–43). It must be admitted though that Meyrink’s intellectual position was a great deal more eccentric than Kraus’s or Musil’s and his mode of expression willfully distorted and bizarre, for
The Golem
is, before all else a masterpiece of fantasy. It and Meyrink’s later novels and short stories were to serve as sources of inspiration for the fantastic and expressionist movement in the German cinema – most notably, of course, for Paul Wegener’s two film versions of
Der Golem
. Equally Meyrink’s haunted visualisation of the Prague ghetto – a sunless quarter where architecture and action alike are distended, fragmented and exaggerated for expressive effect – was to inspire artists like Hugo Steiner-Prag and Alfred Kubin.

The sources of Meyrink’s fantasy do not lie in whimsy or in self-reflective literary jokes. Rather he drew upon the experiences of his own life (and here the reader is referred to the chronology at the beginning of this volume). His life was a great deal stranger than fiction, though his fictions were in all conscience strange enough. In particular he drew upon his own active involvement in the intellectual and occultist movements – cabalistic, masonic and theosophical – which secretly fermented in central Europe at the beginning of the century. The Great War was to throw all into turmoil. Artists and occultists dispersed and recombined in new centres after the War and, within a few decades the world which had given birth to
The Golem
would be annihilated by the Third Reich. This book then leads us back into a world we have lost. Indeed it has passed away so utterly that we have not even been conscious of its passing.

What is the Golem? What is a Golem? In Old Testament Hebrew the word seems to have meant the unformed embryo. In medieval Jewish philosophy the term designated
hyle
or matter which had not been shaped by form. More curiously Hassidic mystics in twelfth-thirteenth century Germany are known to have practised an obscure ritual which aimed to use the Cabalistic power of the Hebrew alphabet and manipulate the material form of the universe to create a ‘golem’. It was from these philosophical and mystical usages that a group of legends about the golem evolved to become one of the stock themes of Jewish folklore and Yiddish literature. In these legends a man-like monster of clay is created by a rabbi or other student of the Cabala and is given life by inscribing
EMETH
(Truth) on its brow. The creature can be deactivated by removing the first letter, leaving it immobilised under the power of
METH
(Death). In some stories the attraction of this primitive Jewish version of the robot is that it can labour in the synagogue on Saturdays, though in the golem story attached to the sixteenth-century Rabbi Loew of Prague the Rabbi is careful to remove the crucial letter every Saturday evening. In most of the tales there comes a point where the rabbi or occultist forgets to remove the letter of power and the creature grows in power and goes on the rampage. In some stories it is only disabled at the cost of its creator’s life as the monstrous thing of clay tumbles down upon its master. There are clear affinities in the legend of the golem with tales about the Paracelsean homunculus and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and with Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
– and for that matter with stories of Tibetan
tulpas
who escape their mystic masters’ control.

However in yet other legends the golem operates as the defender of the ghetto against anti-Semitic libels and pogroms. Tales about the golem and anti-Semitic libels both enjoyed a vogue at the turn of the century. The Russian monk Nilus published his version of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in 1905. More locally anti-semitism and accusations of ritual murder were rife in Bohemia from the 1890s onwards. It is possible that Meyrink, whose mother was Jewish, suffered in some measure from the revival of this prejudice. Certainly his Golem has been seen by some as the embodiment of the spirit of the Jewish ghetto.

Perhaps. But Meyrink’s Golem has distinctive features. It manifests itself in Prague, in a room with no doors, once every thirty-three years. The novelist has gone back to older Jewish sources to transform them and create a spirit figure which seeks materialisation. It emerges that the Golem’s features are those of the artist Athanasius Pernath, who is the novel’s protagonist. The Golem is Pernath’s
doppelganger
and it manifests itself in a room with no doors – that is, in an area of the mind which is inaccessible to normal consciousness.
The Golem
is before all else 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 a lump of fat’.

Exploration of consciousness … deep currents of European thought! It is not compulsory to be so serious about it all.
The Golem
is also the glittering farrago of a master of charlatanry in which all the props of melodrama are skillfully deployed. Besides the artificial monster or doppelganger, we have the mysterious murder, the one woman who is all women – the Eternal Woman –, the puppets, the hermaphrodite, the tarot cards, revenge for love, the secret of criminals and much else besides. The plotting is all wild and preposterous. Some of the characters wear rags, others wear shiny opera hats and white gloves but they all – Pernath the amnesiac hero, Jaromir the deaf mute silhouette artist, Wassertrum the pawnbroker, Zwakh the marrionetteer, Rosina the prostitute, Hillel the Cabalist, Charousek the poor student, Habal Garmin ‘Breath of Bones’ – they all are driven through dark and narrow streets of Prague like playing cards before the wind.

Still it is necessary to insist that however weird or supernatural the events of this novel may seem, the novelist has simply taken his lived experience and transformed it into art. At the beginning of 1891 we find that Meyrink was a bank manager in Prague; his interests boating, flirtations and social climbing. Before the end of the year he has suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide and been saved from further attempts by the providential appearance of an occultist pamphlet under his door. The flirtation with suicide appears in this novel. In 1891 also Meyrink becomes a founder member of the Theosophical Order of the Blue Star. The years of esoteric research had begun. He became a disciple of Bo Yin Ra (a German humbug who taught bogus oriental wisdom), corresponded with Annie Besant and had a chilly encounter with Rudolf Steiner. He exposed fraudulent mediums. He made textual and practical researches into alchemy. Later under the influence of sixteenth century Paracelsean ideas about the ‘Filthy Dispensary’ he was to become convinced that the key to the Philosopher’s Stone was to be found in the excrement that flowed through the sewers of Prague.

Meyrink studied the Cabala of course, but also Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, and the fruits of those studies are to be found in
The Golem
. He experimented with hashish, yoga, sleep deprivation, fasting and breathing rituals. He took to drinking gum arabic twice a day in the hope of inducing visions. He had visions. All his novels and short stories were based on visionary experiences. It was probably in 1901 that he had his first great visionary experience. At Moldau one winter’s night he was sitting with his back to a church clock tower when he saw that same clock tower in perfect but magnified detail with its clock face floating suspended before him in the sky. It was at this moment he reports that he passed from thinking in words to thinking in pictures and he became a writer. A little later, in a T.B. sanatorium in Dresden, he wrote his first story, ‘The Burning Soldier’. It was published in the famous satirical periodical
Simplicissimus
.

The following year he became involved in a mysterious sequence of scandals. While still married to his first wife, his affection for Philomena Bernt, who finally became his second wife in 1905, drew him into a series of duels with the officer corps of one of Prague’s smart regiments. Then there was scandal at the bank. Meyrink was rumoured to be relying on advice from the spirit world to direct the bank’s affairs. There was also talk of money having been misappropriated. He was thrown into prison and, perhaps as a result of rough treatment was temporarily paralysed. (The author’s experiences in prison are also fed into
The Golem
.)

A few months later he was cleared of the charges and he resumed his writing and his esoteric researches. He was haunted by horrific apparitions of a green face – and these visitations surfaced in a later novel,
Das grüne Gesicht
. He also took to travelling on the astral sphere and, it is said, that he or rather his astral double actually manifested itself to his wife one evening. So the Golem is in every sense the artist’s double. The original title for the book, however, was
The Eternal Jew
and it seems that work on it may have been started as early as 1907. In the same year he and Richard Teschner were working together on an unsuccessful project to establish a puppet theatre. This too is in the novel, this fascination with puppets, moving figures with human shapes but no human life.

Writing was by now a matter of financial necessity for him. Though he had been exonerated, the scandal of 1902 had ruined him. He moved away from Prague and the bulk of
The Golem
must have been written in Bavaria. At the same time he laboured on a translation of the complete works of Dickens into German, Dicken’s taste for city life, for grotesque characters and heightened sentiment was Meyrink’s too and is patent in
The Golem
. The final version of the story was related by Meyrink into a dictaphone and transcribed by a secretary. It was first published as a serial in
Die Weissen Blatter
and then sold to the publisher Kurt Wolff in Leipzig for a lump sum. When the novel appeared in 1915 it was received with immediate acclaim and rapidly sold 200,000 copies.

‘Lurking and waiting … waiting and lurking … the terrible perpetual motto of the Ghetto.’ Cabalism is literary occultism par excellence. The Cabalist and the novelist are jointly committed to the magical creation of a world through the manipulation of words. Some novels – and the novels of David Lindsay and Charles Williams are examples – achieve an effect which is not a purely literary one and an effect which lingers on in the mind of the reader long after the reading of the book has been concluded.
The Golem
is one of these novels. ‘The path I am pointing out to you is strewn with strange happenings: dead people you have known will rise up and talk with you! They are only images!’.

Robert Irwin

1985
  

Y. Caroutch (ed.) Gustav Meyrink =
Cahiers de l’Herne
, vol. 30 (1976)

E. Frank,
Gustav Meyrink
(1957)

P. Mariel (ed.)
Dictionnaire des Sociétés Secrètes en Occident
(1971)

L. Pauwels and J. Bergier,
The Morning of the Magicians
(1963)

P. Raabe,
The Era of Expressionism
(1974)

G. Scholem,
Kabbalah
(1974)

J. Webb,
The Occult Establishment
(1981)

L. Eisner,
The Haunted Screen
(1969)

The moonlight is shining on the foot of my bed, lying there like a large, bright, flat stone.

Whenever the disc of the full moon begins to shrink and its right-hand side starts to wither – like a face approaching old age, in which one cheek becomes hollow and wrinkled first – that is the time when at night I am seized by a dark and agonising restlessness. I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.

I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept on running through my mind in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:

“A crow flew to a stone which looked like a lump of fat, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow found that it was not good to eat, it flew off. Like the crow that went to the stone, so do we – we, the tempters – leave Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our pleasure in him.”

And the image of the stone that looked like a lump of fat grew in my mind to enormous dimensions:

I am walking along a dried-up river-bed, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulphurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.

I want to throw them away, these pebbles, far away from me, but they keep just falling out of my hand, and I cannot banish them from my sight.

All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me. Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-coloured crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, in order to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message.

At times I emerge with a start from the half-light of this reverie and see again for a moment the moonlight lying on the humped cover at the bottom of the bed like a large, bright, flat stone, only to grope my way blindly once more after my departing consciousness, restlessly searching for the stone which is tormenting me, the one which must lie hidden somewhere in the debris of my memory and which looks like a lump of fat.