Der Golem
1915
The novel opens in the labyrinthine streets of Prague's Jewish ghetto, where the air itself seems weighted with centuries of persecution. Athanasius Pernath, a jeweler with no memory of his past, moves through this underworld of grotesque figures, a red-haired prostitute, a scheming trinket dealer, a deaf-mute silhouette artist, each more unsettling than the last. Their lives intertwine around a presence that haunts the ghetto's collective unconscious: the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth said to awaken every thirty-three years in a room without a door. When Pernath finally glimpses the creature, the revelation shatters what remains of his fractured identity: the Golem wears his face. Meyrink's masterpiece operates less as supernatural horror than as psychological nightmare, the Golem as the embodiment of a community's accumulated suffering, rising from the weight of its own history. The city of Prague becomes a character unto itself, its landmarks rendered in expressionist distortion: the Street of the Alchemists, the Castle, the cramped courtyards where reality dissolves into fever dream. This is gothic fiction transformed by modernist disorientation, where identity is porous and the past bleeds constantly into the present. It is essential reading for those who found Kafka unbearable and wished for something even more claustrophobic.
Editions
X-Ray
“The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of 'instinct' indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“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.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“I have not let myself be stultified by science, whose highest goal is to furnish a `waiting room', which it would be best to tear down.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“A brief rustling that broke off short, as if startled at itself, then deadly silence, that agonising, watchful hush, fraught with its own betrayal, that stretched each minute to an excruciating eternity.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“Each thing in earth is nothing but an eternal symbol clothed in dust.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“Everyone says its a myth until one day something happens in the streets that brings it back to life.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“You told me that a doctor used hypnotism to treat you, with the result that for a long time you lost the memory of your childhood and youth", he continued. "That is the characteristic”
— Gustav Meyrink
“There is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is only magic and sorcery--kishuf--that frighten men; life itches and burns like a hairshirt, but the rays from the sun of the spiritual world are mild and warming.””
— Gustav Meyrink
“Разве не может быть, что невидимый, непостижимый «ветер» бросает и нас то туда, то сюда, определяя наши поступки, тогда как мы, в нашем простодушии, полагаем, что мы действуем по своей свободной воле? Что если жизнь в нас не что иное, как таинственный вихрь?!””
— Gustav Meyrink
