More importantly, The Golem, like Meyrink’s earlier and shorter satirical pieces, was written to be an assault on the dubiously ‘safe’ values of the bourgeoisie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its last days. In an expressionist and melodramatic mode it anticipates the anxieties of Karl Kraus’s Die Letzen Tage der Menscheit (1919) and Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–43). It must be admitted though that Meyrink’s intellectual position was a great deal more eccentric than Kraus’s or Musil’s and his mode of expression willfully distorted and bizarre, for The Golem is, before all else a masterpiece of fantasy. It and Meyrink’s later novels and short stories were to serve as sources of inspiration for the fantastic and expressionist movement in the German cinema – most notably, of course, for Paul Wegener’s two film versions of Der Golem. Equally Meyrink’s haunted visualisation of the Prague ghetto – a sunless quarter where architecture and action alike are distended, fragmented and exaggerated for expressive effect – was to inspire artists like Hugo Steiner-Prag and Alfred Kubin.

The sources of Meyrink’s fantasy do not lie in whimsy or in self-reflective literary jokes. Rather he drew upon the experiences of his own life (and here the reader is referred to the chronology at the beginning of this volume). His life was a great deal stranger than fiction, though his fictions were in all conscience strange enough. In particular he drew upon his own active involvement in the intellectual and occultist movements – cabalistic, masonic and theosophical – which secretly fermented in central Europe at the beginning of the century. The Great War was to throw all into turmoil. Artists and occultists dispersed and recombined in new centres after the War and, within a few decades the world which had given birth to The Golem would be annihilated by the Third Reich. This book then leads us back into a world we have lost. Indeed it has passed away so utterly that we have not even been conscious of its passing.

What is the Golem? What is a Golem? In Old Testament Hebrew the word seems to have meant the unformed embryo. In medieval Jewish philosophy the term designated hyle or matter which had not been shaped by form. More curiously Hassidic mystics in twelfth-thirteenth century Germany are known to have practised an obscure ritual which aimed to use the Cabalistic power of the Hebrew alphabet and manipulate the material form of the universe to create a ‘golem’. It was from these philosophical and mystical usages that a group of legends about the golem evolved to become one of the stock themes of Jewish folklore and Yiddish literature. In these legends a man-like monster of clay is created by a rabbi or other student of the Cabala and is given life by inscribing EMETH (Truth) on its brow. The creature can be deactivated by removing the first letter, leaving it immobilised under the power of METH (Death). In some stories the attraction of this primitive Jewish version of the robot is that it can labour in the synagogue on Saturdays, though in the golem story attached to the sixteenth-century Rabbi Loew of Prague the Rabbi is careful to remove the crucial letter every Saturday evening. In most of the tales there comes a point where the rabbi or occultist forgets to remove the letter of power and the creature grows in power and goes on the rampage. In some stories it is only disabled at the cost of its creator’s life as the monstrous thing of clay tumbles down upon its master. There are clear affinities in the legend of the golem with tales about the Paracelsean homunculus and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and for that matter with stories of Tibetan tulpas who escape their mystic masters’ control.

However in yet other legends the golem operates as the defender of the ghetto against anti-Semitic libels and pogroms. Tales about the golem and anti-Semitic libels both enjoyed a vogue at the turn of the century. The Russian monk Nilus published his version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1905. More locally anti-semitism and accusations of ritual murder were rife in Bohemia from the 1890s onwards. It is possible that Meyrink, whose mother was Jewish, suffered in some measure from the revival of this prejudice. Certainly his Golem has been seen by some as the embodiment of the spirit of the Jewish ghetto.

Perhaps. But Meyrink’s Golem has distinctive features. It manifests itself in Prague, in a room with no doors, once every thirty-three years. The novelist has gone back to older Jewish sources to transform them and create a spirit figure which seeks materialisation. It emerges that the Golem’s features are those of the artist Athanasius Pernath, who is the novel’s protagonist.