The Golem [antikvár]

GUSTAV MEYRINK"I know a banker, a grayhaired businessman, who has the gift of writing stories. He does this in his spare time, and his work is often excellent. Despite this ability, however, he is not in very good repute, for he has served time in prison, deservedly so. Indeed, he first became aware of his gift in the prison where he was confined, and his prison experiences form a basis for all his work." From Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann.This is probably a reference to Gustav Meyrink, the Austrian-German satirist and occult novelist, at that time known as Gustav Meyer. Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann's brother, knew Meyrink well, and it is quite possible that Thomas Mann, too, had been acquainted with Meyrink. The paragraph cited may not be correct in all details, but it offers at least a general contemporary opinion about Meyrink.During much of his life Gustav Meyrink was a cause célebre in the Germanic world, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways. During his early life in Prague he delighted in shocking and annoying the bourgeoisie, until he was brought down by legal persecution. During World War One, as a pacifist, un-patriot and scoffer, he was considered an enemy of the Reich, and suffered for it. In 1917 his books were banned in Austria. Later, under Nazi Germany his works were among the first to be burned, probably as a result of his prolonged feud with proto-Nazi litterateurs and historians.From a literary point of view Meyrink was one of the most talented and most annoying satirists to emerge in twentieth-century Germany, an author who had the ability to prick his victims into a frenzy that is now difficult to understand. He was also one of the earliest Expressionist writers, and certainly the foremost twentieth-century novelist of the supernatural. He is now remembered mostly for Der Golem (The Golem), a mystical love story of charm, tenderness and terror.Meyrink, unfortunately, has remained a Germanic phenomenon, a mysterious figure almost unknown in the Enghsh-speaking world, surrounded by some speculation and even more misinformation.Bankier Meyer, as Gustav Meyrink was known around the turn of the century to Mann, was born Gustav Meyer in Vienna, 1868. Hein