Question: I am thinking of an author of novels and short stories, a speaker and writer of German, who lived in a predominately Czech-speaking area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early years of the 20th Century. Probably every one of us carries some mystical fiery sign hidden deep within one's soul… To feel letters, not just read them with my eyes in books, to set up an interpreter within me to translate the things instinct whispers without the aid of words: that must be the key, I realised, that must be the way to establish a clear language of communication with my own inner being. For some time now hidden powers had been germinating within me, of that I was certain the sense was so overpowering that I did not even try to deny it. The vision I had had in the Cathedral, when Charousck’s head had appeared on the monk’s body in answer to my mute appeal for help, was indication enough that I should not reject vague feelings out of hand.
The Golem is a darkly lyrical memorial to the epoch and to the people that lived in it and it is a mysteriously poetic memorial to the city and to the people that lived in it. In the novel Gustav Meyrink managed to create a unique atmosphere of mystique alloyed with Weltschmerz… It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body. But Golem of Gustav Meyrink is a creature that comes in dreams.
“Rabbi Löw, well versed in all of the arts and sciences, especially in the Kabbalah, had fashioned for himself one such servant out of clay, placed in his mouth the magic formula, and thereby brought him to life”. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle. The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. The red-headed prostitute Rosina the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum puppeteers street musicians and a deaf-mute silhouette artist. First published in serial form as Der Golem in the periodical Die weissen Blätter in 1913–14, The Golem is a haunting Gothic tale of stolen identity and persecution, set in a strange underworld peopled by fantastical characters.
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