Gustav Meyrink
Il Golem

The Golem (Der Golem – 1915 -) by Gustav Meyrink was serialized between 1913 and 1914 in the magazine Die Weißen Blätter and was published in book form the following year. The book was his greatest success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Originally, the text was to be illustrated by his friend Alfred Kubin, but the project was later abandoned. Kubin's drawings were then used to supplement the illustrations for his novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side), which shares some affinities with The Golem. In particular, the description of the city of Perla, with all its burden of decay and occult terror, brings to mind the Prague ghetto evoked by Meyrink's pen. The Golem skillfully exploits the Jewish legend of the Golem (a clay giant artificially shaped by man through magic) and is imbued with the culture of Kabbalah doctrine. Meyrink evokes an incubus-like atmosphere in which Prague is masterfully depicted with its magical culture heritage and its unhealthy ghetto full of sordid figures. The city of Prague is seen by Meyrink as a sort of "threshold," a crack opening between the real world and the beyond. The inhabitants of Prague themselves are seen as puppets, automatons subject to a supra-individual force that determines all their actions. The narrative style progresses through "images" and succeeds in transporting the reader into a delirious vortex of dreams. The alternation of oneirism and wakefulness gives the story an unreal and nightmarish atmosphere: it narrates the story of a man (whose name is never revealed) who exchanges hats with the gemstone carver Athanasius Pernath and relives his life as if in a dream. He awakens in an apartment in the Jewish ghetto. A stranger commissions him to restore a book that will make him aware of the surrounding reality. We meet characters such as Aaron Wassertrum, the junk dealer, a sort of negative symbol, and Hillel, an employee of the Jewish municipality, a source of positive energies. The legend of the Golem looms over all, used heterodoxically compared to Jewish traditions. The puppeteer Zwahk describes the manifestation of the Golem: "Every 33 years or so, an event recurs in our alleys that in itself is not particularly alarming, yet it manages to propagate a terror for which no explanations or justifications can be found. It happens every time an absolutely unknown man, beardless, with a yellow face and Mongolian features, coming from the Old School street, dressed in faded, outdated clothes, with a stumbling gait so particularly consistent and uniform as if at every moment he should fall forward, crosses the Jewish quarter and suddenly becomes invisible. Usually, he turns into an alley and disappears. Only once, they say, did he trace a circle with his path, returning to the point from which he started: a very old house near the synagogue. The impression he made 66 years ago must have been particularly profound, for I remember that people ransacked that house on Old School Street from top to bottom. It was also found that there is indeed a room in that house with a barred window and no access." It is in this infamous room (where the Golem is supposed to be found and which is accessed through an underground passage) that Athanasius Pernath will face his personal demons. There he will find old rags and a deck of tarot cards and will have "visions." Finally, he "succeeds" by finding himself near the Old School. The disturbing detail is that the rags he wears are the same as those of the enigmatic figure described as the Golem. Ultimately, the Golem represents the protagonist's double and dark side.

This interpretation has been criticized by Gershom Scholem, as the figure used by Meyrink is more of a specter (patterned after the Wandering Jew) than a being molded from clay. In reality, Scholem himself appreciated The Golem, as he wrote: "But, with all its impure and tangled disorder, Meyrink’s The Golem is enveloped in an inimitable atmosphere, where elements of uncontrollable depth, and indeed greatness, combine with a rare sense of mystical charlatanry and a singular capacity to échapper le borgeois." In retrospect, the novel, therefore, works and is still modern today: as Manfred Lube says, "By using the figure of the Golem as a doppelganger for his novel’s hero, Meyrink undoubtedly created a symbol corresponding to the problems and centers of interest of his era, so precisely oriented towards psychology…" Even H.P. Lovecraft, in his famous essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, spoke of it in extremely flattering terms. Lovecraft praised, in particular, Meyrink's ability to describe the spectral atmosphere of Prague (just like Kafka). However, curiously, HPL based his judgment on the film by Paul Wegener and, when he read the novel, could not help but notice the differences, as documented by his correspondence. Nonetheless, that judgment remained flattering as the Golem does not manifest concretely but remains a kind of specter feeding the population's fears in an atmosphere of looming threat.

From this novel, as many as four films have been made, two of which by director Paul Wegener in 1915 and 1920. Wegener's film adaptations and collaboration with Kubin are among the reasons why Meyrink's figure is often placed in the context of German Expressionism. In Italy, it was first published in 1926 by Campitelli. The best edition is perhaps the one published by Bompiani in 1966, in the meritorious series "Il Pesanervi," with an introduction by Elemire Zolla – a cultured intellectual and scholar of esotericism – which was sadly removed in subsequent reprints by this publisher. The Golem has recently had 2 reprints, one splendidly curated by Tre Editori (2015) with Hugo Steiner Prag’s magnificent and unsettling illustrations (that embellished the original edition) and another (2018) by Skira, frankly anonymous and careless. A new reprint has just been released in RBA’s newsstand series I maestri del fantastico (the cover is very beautiful), while the translation is the one by Gianni Pilo released by Newton Compton in 1994.

Italian bibliography:

The Golem (Der Golem, 1915), translated by Enrico Rocca Franco Campitelli, Foligno – 1926

In Frankenstein & Company, edited by Ornella VOLTA The Golem, translation by Otto Comici- 1965, Sugar, Milan -[Vº chapter]

The Golem – CDE – LACCIO NERO — 1965

The Golem, translated by Carlo Mainoldi – 1966, Il Pesanervi. The Masterpieces of Fantastic Literature, Bompiani, Milan – introduction by Elémire Zolla

The False Adams: History and Myth of Automata, Gian Paolo CESERANI – The Golem, translated by Carlo Mainoldi – 1969, Feltrinelli Universal Economics 574, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan

The Golem – translated by Carlo Mainoldi – 1977-Paperback Bompiani 30, Bompiani, Milan – introduction by Ugo Volli

The Golem and Other Stories – Newton – 1994 – introduction by Gianni Pilo – translation by Gianni Pilo

In Monsters & Co. Frankenstein – Dracula, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, The Mummy, The Werewolf, The Golem, I Big Newton 94, Newton & Compton – translation by Gianni Pilo

The Golem – edited by Anna Maria Baiocco – with original illustrations by Hugo Steiner Prag – Tre Editori – 2015 – translation by Anna Maria Baiocco

The Golem – Skira – 2018 – translation by Carlo Mainoldi

The Golem – RBA I maestri del fantastico – -2021 – translation by Gianni Pilo