According to the Talmud, Adam was the original golem, created from mud and "kneaded into a shapeless husk". 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.Īlthough 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. He also fought, at this time, a series of duels with officers from a Prague army regiment. 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 suffered a nervous breakdown in 1891, attempting suicide, and became obsessed by occultism, alchemy, Kabbalah and eastern mysticism.
The plot is slight and often nonsensical, with diversions into philosophy and mysticism which only enhance Pernath's sense of dislocation.īorn in Vienna in 1868, Meyrink spent 20 years as a bank director in Prague. 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. 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. There follow a series of encounters, some confusing, some macabre, some frightening. He tries on a mysterious hat belonging to one Athanasius Pernath and is plunged into Pernath's story, and head. 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.
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.
Meyrink began writing it in 1907, so The Golem cannot really be read as an allegory for the first world war. When the final instalment of The Golem was published in August 1914, war had just broken out. 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.
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