Meyrink's The Golem: Prague, the ghetto and the soul's double
Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel: the legend of Rabbi Loew, the Prague ghetto, Athanasius Pernath and the symbols of Kabbalah and Theosophy.
In 1915 the Leipzig publisher Kurt Wolff issued in book form Der Golem, a novel that had already begun to appear in instalments in the magazine Die weißen Blätter. Its author, Gustav Meyrink, born in Vienna in 1868, had lived for many years in Prague and knew its streets, legends and occult circles well. The book was an enormous success and became one of the key texts of German-language fantastic literature.
The legend of Rabbi Loew
According to a Jewish tradition found in several versions, a learned man can animate a clay figure through the power of the divine names. In Prague the legend became attached to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, who died in 1609 and is said to have created a golem to protect the community. It is worth remembering that the link between the Maharal and the golem is documented only in much later sources, mostly from the nineteenth century.
Meyrink does not tell this story directly. In the novel the golem is rather a presence that reappears in the ghetto every thirty-three years, a being with a stranger's face who enters a room without doors and embodies the collective soul of the quarter. The legend thus becomes a symbol, not merely a piece of folklore to be told in the evening.
Athanasius Pernath and the dream
The narrator falls asleep while reading and finds himself, in a dream, in the person of Athanasius Pernath, a gem engraver living in the old Jewish ghetto. Pernath has lost the memory of his past and recovers it little by little through enigmatic encounters: the archivist Hillel, a learned Kabbalist, his daughter Mirjam, the junk dealer Aaron Wassertrum and the student Charousek. Each character seems to guard a fragment of truth.
The novel is built as a path of awakening. Pernath meets the golem, who appears to him with his own face, and understands that this being is his double, the part of himself that is still dark and unconscious. Initiation, for Meyrink, does not consist in learning formulas, but in recognising and transforming what each person carries within.
Kabbalah, Theosophy and alchemy
Meyrink had turned to occultism in the 1890s and had frequented Theosophical circles in Prague. In The Golem he freely mixes concepts from Kabbalah, tarot symbols, alchemical images and Eastern suggestions. The result is not a coherent treatise but a personal mosaic: scholars of the Jewish tradition have often observed that the author used those references with great freedom.
The golem on screen
The name of the golem also became famous thanks to cinema. Paul Wegener brought the legend to the screen in several films, the best known of which, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, was released in 1920. Those films, however, are not based on Meyrink's novel: they draw directly on the tradition of Rabbi Loew, with the clay giant animated by a sacred word.
Meyrink died in 1932 in Starnberg, Bavaria, after writing other esoteric novels such as The Green Face and The Angel of the West Window, the latter devoted to the figure of John Dee. The Golem nevertheless remains his most living work, able to turn an old Prague legend into a story about identity and the search for the self.