The Golem

Gustav Meyrink

4 ideas

1. The borrowed hat and the Ibbur book

   An unnamed narrator in Prague picks up the wrong hat at a cathedral, then dreams through the life of its owner, the ghetto gem-cutter Athanasius Pernath. In that life a stranger brings Pernath an old book, 'Ibbur', asking him to repair a damaged initial letter. The stranger's face matches the legendary golem, and Pernath soon realises he cannot tell whether the visitor was someone else or himself. When the narrator later tries to return the hat, he finds Pernath alive behind a wall he cannot enter, and the identity puzzle is never closed.

2. The golem as periodic collective psychic outbreak

   It is a condensation of the district's shared mental life, which surfaces roughly every thirty-three years as sightings of the same strange figure. Its appearance behaves like an epidemic: fear and rumour spread, and the figure becomes more real the more people expect it, so belief produces the thing believed in.

3. The monster is your unintegrated double

   The feared outside figure is really a part of the observer that has been split off and not yet recognised. Confronting the apparition therefore means confronting oneself, not defeating an external enemy.

4. Suppressed memory as a sealed room

   Pernath's past was walled off after a breakdown, suggested to have been done by deliberate psychiatric suppression. What remains is a man who functions but cannot enter a whole region of himself. The buried material does not disappear; it returns as dreams, uncanny visitors and fragments of a lost love, much like a room without a door that still exists inside the house.

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