Golem

Modern Wars and Their Monsters

Maya Barzilai

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479811557
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jewish Literature and Linguistics Honorable Mention, 2016 Baron Book Prize presented by AAJR A monster tour of the Golem narrative acrossvarious cultural and historical landscapes

In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies.

In the twentieth century the golem became a figure of war. It represented the chaos of warfare, the automation of war technologies, and the devastation wrought upon soldiers’ bodies and psyches. Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters draws on some of the most popular and significant renditions of this story in order to unravel the paradoxical coincidence of wartime destruction and the fantasy of artificial creation. Due to its aggressive and rebellious sides, the golem became a means for reflection about how technological progress has altered human lives, as well as an avenue for experimentation with the media and art forms capable of expressing the monstrosity of war.

New Books Network interview with Maya Barzilai on Golem

1

The Face of Destruction

Paul Wegener’s World War I Golem Films

Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live.

—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

The soldiers who served in the trenches of World War I inhabited a world of clay. As Eric J. Leed writes, the trenches rendered the landscape seemingly empty, yet all the while it was “saturated with men”: “The earth was at once one’s home and the habitat of a hidden, ever-present threat.” Both the invisible enemy with its formidable technology and the trenches themselves, which could collapse on the soldiers hiding inside them, posed threats to the combatants of World War I. Leed quotes the reaction of an Italian soldier after he finally encounters the flesh-and-blood enemy: “Those strongly defended trenches . . . had ended up seeming to us inanimate, like desolate buildings uninhabited by men. . . . Now [the enemy soldiers] were showing themselves to us as they really were, men and soldiers like us, in uniform like us.”1 While the trenches filled with living men could appear inanimate, the dead sometimes seemed to be alive. According to Allyson Booth, the bodies of the dead, whether interred in the battlefield or left unburied, became part of the muddy surroundings and were “simultaneously understood as both animate subjects and inanimate objects.”2 Likewise, because of the soldiers’ immobility and sensory deprivation in the trenches, the bodies of the living, often covered in mud, also came to resemble those of the dead.

Presciently, it was in the summer of 1914, just prior to the outbreak of World War I, in which these trenches played such a central role, that the German theater actor Paul Wegener (1874–1948) conceived and produced his first film concerning that creature of clay, Der Golem (The Golem).3 Its first screening in January 1915 took place when its star was already serving on the muddy battlefield, and the U.T. Lichtspiele in Berlin prefaced Der Golem with newsreels depicting the “newest reports from the war.”4 It was an uncanny coincidence that the film concerned the animation of an inanimate clay sculpture, a figure that hovers between life and death. Der Golem ends, as both the screenplay and a restored segment reveal, with a quotation from the seventeenth-century German mystic and religious poet Angelus Silesius: “Nature always works profoundly, / inside as out. / And all things live in death, / and dead they are alive.” The film promoted a sense of the continuum between life and death reminiscent of the conditions in the trenches. In this way, viewers on the home front indirectly experienced the blurring of the boundaries between bodies and mud, between animate subjects and inanimate objects. Even when the golem comes to life, it retains its clay constitution, reminding viewers of its connection to earth and death.

As mentioned earlier, Wegener had experienced the clay of war firsthand. At the age of forty, in October 1914, he volunteered for the Landsturm, where he served first as a corporal and later as a lieutenant.5 He marched through the city of Diksmuide, in West Flanders, arriving at the front lines in mid-October. On December 4, his company came under heavy bombardment near the Yser River in Belgium. Out of his own squad of forty-nine, only he and three others survived. Following this harrowing experience, Wegener received the Iron Cross, first class. He remained in Ypres until February 1915, when he fell ill, returning in April to Berlin. Audiences of the period were aware of Wegener’s choice to volunteer for the war at the height of a flourishing acting career. The Berlin Börsen-Courier, for example, reported prominently in September 1915 on Wegener’s first postservice acting role, commending his Iron Cross.6

That the war was a threat to the live actor but not to his preserved cinematic double underscored the peculiarities of the new medium of film. The Swiss critic Eduard Korrodi noted in 1915 that one might see Wegener “under strange circumstances” at the movie theater while “he is sacrificing his body and soul and his human voice to his fatherland far away from us as lieutenant.”7 Korrodi here conflates the “strange” human replication in cinema—which, unlike theater, does not require the onstage presence of the flesh-and-blood actor—with the “strange circumstances” of a war, in which actors and filmmakers fought while their films were screened in their absence. In other words, even while cinema resurrected the figure of Wegener, who by his very service on the front lines literally wavered between life and death, this resurrection, for Korrodi, could only be partial and unreal. Wegener returned from the front to star in two further golem productions and so reaffirmed his physical presence precisely through a medium that could both animate the dead and portray the living as ghosts. The artificial golem whose existence and actions are controlled by others served as a reminder of the mortality of the veteran actor embodying this monster.

In 1917, after directing and acting in Rübezahl’s Wedding (1916) and The Yogi (1916), both movies also featuring larger-than-life protagonists, Wegener used the golem story to produce an uplifting, romantic comedy, Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancer), aimed at female spectators on the home front. Friedrich Kittler and Susanne Holl write that the 1917 film “treats cinema, takes place in the cinema, and films cinema-actors and spectators and the outcomes of their adaptation into film.”8 Wegener, playing himself, attempts to seduce a variety dancer, acted by the Czech actress and dancer Lyda Salmonova, Wegener’s off-screen partner at the time. At the film’s beginning, the dancer attends a screening of the “much-discussed” film Der Golem of 1914 and subsequently requests a copy of the clay statue of the golem. Wegener pretends to be this statue, masking himself in “real life” as the golem in his film (see figure 1.5). So disguised, he manages to enter the dancer’s home, only to fake his own animation and pursue the shocked woman. If the 1915 screening coincided with Wegener’s dispatch to Flanders and underscored the disparity between the preservation of bodies on film and their vulnerability on the battlefield, the 1917 film, screened after Wegener’s return from the front, represented Wegener as “himself,” thus securing a sense of the actor’s presence and distracting the audience from any consciousness of mortality.

As Wegener’s diaries and unpublished letters indicate, he returned from the battlefield highly critical of the defeated German nation and its wartime conduct. While his 1917 film was a product of wartime escapism, in the 1920 film, Wegener gives voice to his criticism and contends, albeit indirectly, with the war and its aftermath.9 A discussion of the 1914 film sets the stage in this chapter for my interpretation of the famous Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, How He Came into the World), the only film of the three that exists in its restored entirety.10 I show how the shifts in Wegener’s approach to the golem story and its Jewish subject matter were both a product of his wartime experiences and his attempt to forge a postwar aesthetic. In 1915, the animated clay sculpture had served unwittingly as a reminder of the deadly trenches, whereas by 1920, Wegener and his cofilmmakers consciously rendered the entire visual surface of the movie more expressive, striving to convey the animation of inanimate matter.

To contemporary critics, the film also marked the development of German cinema from a “small film industry . . . [into] a great power [Großmacht].”11 Wegener successfully harnessed the progress made by film technology between 1914 and 1920 for the sake of his expressive aesthetic, which was more tactile and physiognomic than the expressionist aesthetic most prominently exhibited in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, screened earlier that year.12 Expression or expressivity refers here to the Hungarian film critic and writer Béla Balázs’s sense of communicating psychological and spiritual content through external, visual means. Such expressivity could be achieved through artificial manipulation of the visual field, so that while in the earlier film the camera (and audiences) marveled at the ability to capture outdoor scenery, the atmosphere of the 1920 film was a product of the constructed studio sets.13 One contemporary critic noted that the film was a “milestone” in the history of cinema because it forged a new relationship to modern art, particularly to fantastic architecture and symbol-ridden sculpture (rather than expressionist painting).14 The discovery, via film, of the human “face” of all things, whether animate or inanimate, served to re-create the battlefield, the expressive “landscape of mud and object.” But it also transformed the battlefield experience into a narrative of national redemption that stressed the individual and irreplaceable “soul” of all things, human and nonhuman.

Cinematic Animation in Der Golem (1914)

Paul Wegener, a successful stage actor who transitioned to film acting and directing, rapidly became a central figure in the nascent film industry. According to Thomas Elsaesser, he made “fantastic film a mainstay of the German cinema” for at least a decade. His 1913 doppelgänger film, The Student of Prague, inaugurated a new phase in German cinema, combining “romanticism and technology,” while appealing both to the educated middle class and to the urban masses. This particular Wegener combination entailed the application of new film techniques to stories that blended a “middle-class concept of national literature with a pseudo-folk culture as the well-spring of the popular.”15 In a discussion of the first golem film’s genesis, Wegener himself claimed that “everything revolves in this film around the image, around a merging of a fantasy world of past centuries with present life.”16 Even more than the folkloric dimension of the story, the fantastic potential of fairytales and stories of mythic import was vital for Wegener’s attempt to establish aesthetic standards for film, to ground it as an independent art form even while providing entertainment for the masses.17 He relied on supernatural tales to showcase film’s capacity to create previously unimaginable effects—the animation of the golem, for example, or the appearance of doubles or ghosts through superimposition. The first golem film of 1914 involved a high degree of cinematic experimentation and privileged the work of the movie camera and its “kinetic lyricism.” Wegener’s aim—even when not fully executed with the technologies of 1914—was to do away with factual images, with realistic lines and forms, and instead to enter a “new visual fantasy world.”18

In Der Golem, Wegener enacted “the golem role interchangeably with a puppet made of plaster and papier-mâché” (see figure 1.1). The transitions between actor and puppet were so “subtly arranged” that it appeared to the critic Adolf Behne as though “the animated puppet opens its eyes, breathes, moves.”19 In addition to the presence of this puppet double in the film, viewers were made aware of the fact that the film itself created a double of the actor; the day after Der Golem was first screened, on January 14, 1915, Wegener’s essay “Acting and Film” was printed in the daily newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, with the following illuminating preface: “Paul Wegener, Lieutenant and Knight of the Iron Cross first class is at the moment importantly occupied in Flanders, although yesterday he gave a guest performance in effigy as author and actor in a Berlin film theater. . . . The short essay that he left behind with us before departing for the battlefield reveals his own thoughts about this matter.”20 Through film technology, one could exist “in effigy,” and Wegener could appear in two places at once: both serving in Flanders and giving a performance “by means of his image” on the screen in Berlin.

While Wegener stressed in his essay the differences between theater performance and acting in front of the camera, he brought to the golem role his well-known stage persona. Both Korrodi and Behne pointed out the similarity of Wegener’s cinematic role to his past stage roles. Wegener was capable, they noted, of effectively conveying both the “animalism” of the golem and his “good-naturedness and meekness.”21 Such descriptions of Wegener as golem match up with his image as an instinctive, forceful, and manly actor rather than a refined and intellectual one. When playing major roles (Richard III, Mephisto, Shylock) in Max Reinhardt’s Berlin theater, Wegener enjoyed “allowing the grimace of a barbaric primal drive [Urtrieb] to leer out from behind the mask enforced by conventions and habits,” according to Walter Turszinsky. Both his “Eastern,” or “Slavic,” facial features and his actor persona lent themselves particularly well to the role of the golem, imagined, with the help of Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrations for Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, as a racialized Mongolian prototype. With Wegener’s “Mongol head,” “Moorish mouth,” “wide-nasal flat nose of a Hun,” and Slavic cheekbones, he had, in Turszinsky’s view, no equal “in the realm of the human beast.”22

Figure 1.1. Paul Wegener (right) next to golem statue from the 1914 film. (Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)

Already in 1934, Beate Rosenfeld claimed, in her major study on the golem in German literature, that Wegener, as a “Mongolian” type, was particularly well suited to play the “primitive” and “exotic” golem, a figure that appealed to the public’s taste at that time period. She also mentions that the aesthetics of the primitive golem requires a “prehistoric” costume, and Wegener used the term Urmensch in his description of the golem, claiming that his costume resembled outfits worn by people “1,000 years ago.”23 The...