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 that reason you might also question if his references to esoteric traditions are to be taken wholly seriously or rather are to be seen as motifs in the hands of a quite self-indulgent novelist.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. That aside, it is reasonable to argue that his foremost interest, as an author of fiction, was to tell us a good and interesting story. I would like to discriminate between effect and function and maintain that Meyrink takes advantage of Gothic effects in order to convey his spiritual vision of the world. The novel also has been both referred to, and rejected, as a story of horror or Gothic fiction, and described as purely fantastic. In The Golem Meyrink transforms the Prague legends of Rabbi Loew’s creature of clay into a book of esoteric wisdom putting into play Kabbalistic and alchemist thinking, tarot cards and metempsychosis. Jorge Luis Borges praised his works, while Ernst Pawel, in his Kafka-biography, dismisses The Golem as »a shlock novel«. Controver- sial in his lifetime, his reputation as an author is still disputable. In some circles, he still has a reputation as a man with deep insights in the true nature of being and has even been seen as a man with prophetic gifts. He joined about every esoteric society available, attended séances, experimented with diets and drugs, and practiced alchemy and yoga. Gustav Meyrink lived in a time when the interest in spiritism, theosophy and occult phenomena was widespread.

The golem meyrink