Books blogFiction This article is more than 10 years oldMeyrink's The Golem: where fact and fiction collide
This article is more than 10 years oldA century after its first serialisation, Gustav Meyrink's expressionist horror of the Prague ghetto still occupies a singular nicheGustav Meyrink's The Golem, which is celebrating its centenary, is one of the most absorbing, atmospheric and mind-boggling slices of fantasy ever committed to print.
Part dream-like expressionist melodrama, part creepy horror, part eerie evocation of the magical city of Prague and its shadow-haunted ghetto, The Golem occupies a singular niche in fantastika. And it is hard to re-read without placing the narrative against the clouds of war which were gathering over Europe during the book's initial serial publication.
For the duration of its first publication in serial form from December 1913, the political manoeuvring that led to the Great War was rumbling along in the background of European life. When the final instalment of The Golem was published in August 1914, war had just broken out.
Meyrink began writing it in 1907, so The Golem cannot really be read as an allegory for the first world war. But as its main character, Athanasius Pernath, a gem-engraver living in the Jewish ghetto, is plunged from one nightmarish scenario to another at the behest of shadowy powers, unknowable bureaucracy and individuals with covert agendas: perhaps his is the story of the Jews of the Prague ghetto and their centuries of subjugation at the hands of others.
The Golem begins with an unnamed narrator who is unsettled by bizarre dreams and seems disjointed from his existence in the Jewish ghetto of Prague. He tries on a mysterious hat belonging to one Athanasius Pernath and is plunged into Pernath's story, and head. There follow a series of encounters, some confusing, some macabre, some frightening. Not all of it makes sense as Meyrink's dreamlike prose weaves around the citry's narrow cobbled streets, with Pernath attracting grotesques as a candle flame does moths. Pernath seems to have no memory of his earlier life, and drifts through the ghetto becoming embroiled in plots and patterns over which he has no control. The plot is slight and often nonsensical, with diversions into philosophy and mysticism which only enhance Pernath's sense of dislocation.
Born in Vienna in 1868, Meyrink spent 20 years as a bank director in Prague. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1891, attempting suicide, and became obsessed by occultism, alchemy, Kabbalah and eastern mysticism. Following rumours that he was running the bank's affairs "according to spirit guidance", Meyrink was accused of fraud and imprisoned for two-and-a-half months. He also fought, at this time, a series of duels with officers from a Prague army regiment. Moving to Vienna and then to Bavaria, Meyrink began his writing career with a book of short stories, The Cabinet of Wax Figures, before beginning work on The Golem.
Although Meyrink's Golem is part of a long line of Prague golem stories which begins with Rabbi Loew in the 16th century, the legend of the golem goes back to Biblical times, the word appearing in Psalms to mean an "unshaped form" in God's eyes. According to the Talmud, Adam was the original golem, created from mud and "kneaded into a shapeless husk". The myth of the golem was prevalent in the Middle Ages, and Jakob Grimm of the fairytale brothers fame also wrote on them.
In Meyrink's hands, the Golem becomes a strange recurring presence, a being which manifests in Prague every 33 years. It appears with the face of Pernath, a doppelganger who adds to the increasingly unreal quality of the story. There is the sensation of secret machinations in the darkness; of being watched by persons unknown and for reasons unknowable. Events are being directed and shaped by powers beyond our perception.
Pernath is accused of murder and is released from incarceration into a ghetto that he finds unrecognisable, just as the final instalment of The Golem was published in a world that had irrevocably changed due to the outbreak of war.
The Golem had a magnificent reception, and the collected volume published in 1915 sold 200,000 copies. Meyrink went on to write several more books, including The Green Face, Walpurgisnacht, the White Dominican and The Angel of the West Window. All have been published in English by Dedalus Books since the mid-1980s, and Mike Mitchell's excellent 1995 translations are definitely worth seeking out.
Meyrink was, of course, a contemporary of Kafka, and his novels have a lot in common with Prague's better-known fantasist. As Robert Irwin says in the introduction to the Dedalus edition of The Golem: "We have the Castle which is not Kafka's Castle, the Trial which is not Kafka's Trial, and a Prague which is not Kafka's Prague." HP Lovecraft was more succinct, calling The Golem "the most magnificent weird thing I've come across in aeons!"
According to Mitchell, Meyrink was approached by the German government in 1917 asking him to write a novel blaming the Freemasons for the start of the war, but refused – apparently because of pressure from the Freemasons themselves. Meyrink died in December 1932, six months after his son committed suicide at the age of 24 – the same age that Meyrink himself had attempted to end his own life.
A century after its first publication, The Golem endures as a piece of modernist fantasy that deserves to take its place alongside Kafka, from an author whose life was almost as fantastic as his fiction.
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