The Golem Read online

  Dedalus European Classics

  General Editor: Mike Mitchell

  The Golem

  Gustav Meyrink

  The Golem

  translated by Mike Mitchell and with an introduction and chronology by Robert Irwin

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

  24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

  Email: info@ dedalusbooks.com

  www.dedalusbooks.com

  ISBN 978 1 873982 91 4

  Kindle e-book ISBN 978 1 907650 08 6

  e-Pub e-book ISBN 978 1 907650 09 3

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  Publishing History

  First published in Germany in 1915

  First English translation in 1928

  Mike Mitchell’s translation in 1995

  Reprinted in 2000, 2005, 2008, 2010

  First e-book edition in 2010

  The right of Mike Mitchell to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Printed in Finland by W.S. Bookwell

  Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

  Books by and about Gustav Meyrink which are available from Dedalus:

  The five novels translated by Mike Mitchell:

  The Golem

  The Angel of the West Window

  The Green Face

  Walpurgisnacht

  The White Dominican

  A collection of short stories translated by Maurice Raraty:

  The Opal (and other stories)

  A sampler for Gustav Meyrink’s complete works edited and translated by Mike Mitchell:

  The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

  The first English language biography of Gustav Meyrink written by Mike Mitchell:

  Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for Dedalus translation programme.

  His publications include The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: the Meyrink Years 1890–1932; Harrap’s German Grammar and a study of Peter Hacks.

  Mike Mitchell’s translations include the novels of Gustav Meyrink and Herbert Rosendorfer, The Great Bagarozy by Helmut Krausser and The Road to Darkness by Paul Leppin.

  His translation of Letters Back to Ancient China by Herbert Rosendorfer won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.

  His current projects include a new translation of The Other Side by Alfred Kubin.

  Contents

  SLEEP

  DAY

  I

  PRAGUE

  PUNCH

  NIGHT

  AWAKE

  SNOW

  GHOSTS

  LIGHT

  CARE

  FEAR

  URGE

  EVE

  RUSE

  RACK

  MAY

  MOON

  FREE

  END

  CHRONOLOGY

  1868

  19 January. Gustav Meyer born (Meyrink will be his nom de plume), illegitimate son of Baron Karl Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen, minister of state for Wurttemburg, and Maria Meyer, a Bavarian actress. Born in Vienna and baptised and raised as a Protestant. Education in Munich, Hamburg and Prague.

  1882–1902

  One of the directors of the Meyer and Morgenstern Bank in Prague. Becomes well known as a man about town.

  1891

  Nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. Interests himself in occultism and becomes a founder member of the Theosophical Lodge of the Blue Star.

  1892

  Marries Hedwig Aloysia Certl.

  1893–6

  Investigates Cabalism, freemasonry, yoga, alchemy and hashish.

  1896

  First meeting with Philomena Bernt, a banker’s daughter.

  1901

  While convalescing in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Dresden, he begins to write. The first short story ‘The Burning Soldier’ is published in Simplicissimus on 29 October.

  1902

  Fights a series of duels with officers of a Prague regiment. Rumours that he was directing the bank’s affairs according to spirit guidance. Accused of fraud and imprisoned. Temporarily paralysed. Freed after two and a half months, but financially ruined. Recovers his health through the practice of yoga.

  1903

  His first anthology of grotesque and satirical short stories published under the title ‘The Burning Soldier’.

  1904

  Moves to Vienna. Orchids (more short stories) published.

  1905

  Divorces first wife and he and Philomena Bernt travel to Dover where they can get married out of the reach of scandal.

  1905–6

  His anti-militarist writings make it necessary for him to exile himself in Switzerland for a while.

  1906

  Moves to Bavaria.

  1907

  The Cabinet of Wax Figures published (short stories). Begins writing The Golem.

  1908

  His son Harro born.

  1909–10

  Translates the works of Dickens.

  1911

  Settles by Lake Starnberg in Bavaria.

  1913

  The Enchanted Horn of the German Petit Bourgeois published (short stories).

  1913–14

  The Golem appears in serial form in Die Weissen Blatter.

  1914

  Paul Wegener’s first film version of The Golem.

  1915

  The Golem is published in book form by Karl Wolff, Leipzig. It is Meyrink’s first novel.

  1916

  His second novel The Green Face published.

  1917

  Meets Bô Yín Râ. Official change of name to Meyrink. Walpurgisnacht published. Allegedly requested by German government to write a novel showing that the freemasons started the Great War, but refused under pressure from the freemasons.

  1920

  Wegener’s second film version of The Golem. (It is the only one which has survived.)

  1921

  The White Dominican, a novel.

  1921–5

  Edits a series of alchemical, occult and mystical works.

  1925

  Tales of the Gold Seekers (short stories about alchemists).

  1926

  Translates Kipling.

  1927

  The Angel of the West Window (a novel about Elizabeth I and John Dee, the sorcerer). Money and health problems.

  1928

  Pemberton translation of The Golem.

  1932

  Harro, his son, commits suicide. 4 December Gustav Meyrink dies in The House of the Last Lamp looking east over Lake Starnberg.

  1936

  Duvivier film version of The Golem.

  1971

  French television version of The Golem.

  1985

  Dedalus republishes Pemberton’s translation of The Golem.

  1991–4

  Mike Mitchell’s
first English translation of The Angel of the West Window; Walpurgisnacht; The Green Face and The White Dominican published by Dedalus.

  1994

  A selection of Meyrink short stories translated by Maurice Raraty published by Dedalus as The Opal (and other stories).

  1995

  New translation of The Golem by Mike Mitchell.

  GUSTAV MEYRINK AND HIS GOLEM

  The Golem has been generally acknowledged to be Meyrink’s masterpiece. In it 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. Kafka and Meyrink were contemporaries in Prague in the years before World War I. Max Brod knew and admired them both. By the time Brod met him, Meyrink was already a published writer with a life of mystery and scandal behind him, an eerie presence among the chess players and political dabblers of the city’s café society. (Two of Meyrink’s drinking companions, Teschner the puppeteer and Vrieslander the painter appear in The Golem – Teschner as Zwakh, Vrieslander under his own name.) Meyrink’s novel powerfully evokes the physical presence of Prague three quarters of a century ago – Hradcany Castle, the Street of the Alchemists, the Charles Bridge, the Jewish Quarter. As Kafka acknowledged, Meyrink brilliantly reproduced the atmosphere of the place.

  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 ex
crement 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.