Gustav Meyrink

The novelist and storyteller Gustav Meyrink, born in Vienna in 1868, was a contemporary of Kafka. He was the illegitimate son of Carl Freiherr von Varnbüler, a state secretary in Württemberg, and the Bavarian actress Marie Meyer. After studying at a college of commerce in Prague, Meyrink was joint founder of a bank that, however, collapsed amid hostility and after a trial. His Prague novel, The Golem, which was published in 1915, ensured him a wide readership. This gave clear expression to his penchant for the Kabbalah and occult fantasy. Unlike his friend Max Brod, Kafka could make little of Meyrink’s mysticism, or his propensity for the bizarre and the sensational. Imitating Meyrink’s style, he once wrote to Milena Jesenská about the story The Curse of the Toad (Czech: Kletba ropuchy): “Ropucha is good – good, but not very good – not very good, the story is like the centipede [a character]; once it’s been pinned down by the joke it can no longer move, also causing the rest of it to dry up retrospectively: all the freedom, the movement of the first half is lost.”  

Once a generation a psychic epidemic sweeps through the Jewish Town with lightning speed, gripping the souls of the living for some purpose which remains hidden to us, bringing forth like a mirage the silhouette of a characteristic being which may have lived here centuries ago and thirsts for form and features.

 Gustav Meyrink, The Golem