Gustav Meyrink - Fame

Fame

During 1915 the first and most famous of Meyrink's novels, The Golem, was published, though its drafts may be traced back to 1908. The novel is based on the Jewish legend about a Rabbi who made a living being known as a golem (גולם) out of clay and animated it with a Kabbalistic spell, although these legends have little to do with the story's plotline. The main character is Athanasius Pernath, a contemporary lapidary from Prague. It is left to the reader to decide whether Pernath is simply writing down his hallucinations or gradually becoming a real golem. Frenschkowski describes the Golem as both "a deep-footed initiatory tale and an urban fantasy". The novel was a great commercial success and many copies were published. During 1916 one more compilation of short stories, Bats, and soon a second novel, The Green Face, was published. The next year his third novel, Walpurgis Night, was written. The success of these works caused Meyrink to be ranked as one of the three main German-language supernatural fiction authors (along with Hanns Heinz Ewers and Karl Hans Strobl ).

Meyrink was opposed to World War One, which caused him to be denounced by German nationalists; the German "Völkisch" journalist Albert Zimmermann described Meyrink as "one of the cleverest and most dangerous opponents of the German nationalist ideal. He will influence-- and corrupt-- thousands upon thousands, just as Heine did". During 1916 Des deutschen Spießers Wunderhorn was banned in Austria.

By 1920 Meyrink's financial affairs improved so that he bought a villa in Starnberg. The villa became known as "The House at the Last Lantern" after the name of the house from The Golem. There he and his family lived for the next eight years and two more works – The White Dominican and Meyrink's longest novel The Angel of the West Window – were written.

In 1927 Meyrink formally converted to Mahayana Buddhism.