Schnitzler's medical drama - he would most certainly wind up in jail before supper

If you are rummaging around in that Dedalus anthology of Meyrink, do not miss “The Clockmaker” (1926), which is not one of the Bats but is still quite good.  It replaces poisonous blue flowers and time-leeches with baroque descriptions of clocks.  I was planning to write about it, but I fear I would just be repeating myself, as Meyrink was, aside from all the fine descriptions of clocks (“they seem to be drunk and asleep, for sometimes they snore loudly or rattle their chains”).

Instead, then, onwards and sideways to Arthur Schnitzler.  I have read a few more of his works recently, let’s see.  How about I start with the boring one, which is the 1912 play Professor Bernhardi.

It is deliberately boring; boring is a strategy.  The play at first appears to be about the petty bureaucratic struggles at a private Viennese hospital.  Office politics, personality clashes, budget maneuvering.  Near the end of the first act, Dr. Bernhardi, one of the hospital’s founders, commits either an error or an act of integrity or both.  He refuses to let a priest give extreme unction to a dying woman, the victim of a botched abortion.  The medical reason for barring the priest never made sense to me, but it seems to be taken seriously within the play.

Bernhardi is Jewish.  He is accused of the crime of interfering with the Catholic religion, is tried, and jailed for two months.  Surrounding this bare plot is a lot of office politics, etc.  Act III is set in a conference room!  How dull.  But of course the central conflict, the collision between professional duty and an increasing vehement and angry anti-Semitic politics, is not dull at all.  Bernhardi is made a martyr.

To what, though?  To a cause or to pride?  I will give away the ending:

WINKLER (a friend of Bernhardi’s):  That precisely was your mistake.  If one were always to do the right thing, or rather, if one simply began one morning, without any further thought, to do the right thing and simply continued without interruption to do the right thing all day long, he would most certainly wind up in jail before supper.

BERNHARDI:  And shall I tell you something, Councillor?  In my position you would have done exactly the same thing.

WINKLER:  Possibly.  Then I would have been – I’m sure you’ll forgive me, Professor – just as unreasonable an ass as you were.

It was a pleasure to read a thoughtful Schnitzler story that was about something other than the battle of the sexes, about a meaningful ethical debate in an interesting social setting.  A sort of debate or reconciliation between Bernhardi and the priest in Act IV is even something like an Important Scene, and is probably what I should be writing about.

Look, Professor Bernhardi  is a period piece, but I am a student of the period.  Tomorrow, something more exciting by Schnitzler, with a duel and gambling and rape and other awful stuff.  No conference rooms.

I read the translation in Professor Bernhardi and Other Plays, tr. G. J. Weinberger, Ariadne Press, 1993.

Lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands - Meyrink's symbolizing

Jorge Luis Borges once edited a series of little books that have tantalized later readers.  One of them contained three stories by Gustav Meyrink, all from Bats.  St. Orberose discusses the project; he led to Grant Munroe’s piece at The Rumpus, who in turn relied on this Spanish-language site.  Borges picked “J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches,” “Cardinal Napellus,” and “The Four Moon Brethren.”  When Munroe wrote his piece none of these stories were available in English, but here they are in the 2010 Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

Borges shared Meyrink’s gnosticism and love of esoteric systems, although the former took it all a lot less literally than the latter.  Or such is my understanding, but perhaps I overstate Meyrink’s credulity.  This outstanding paragraph of “Cardinal Napellus” might have some symbolic relevance:

Giovanni Braccesco tried to strike up a conversation by describing our unusual methods of catching the ancient, moss-grown giant catfish that lived in the permanent darkness of the unfathomable depths of the lake.  They never came up to the light and spurned any natural bait; the only things that could get them to bite were the most bizarre forms anglers could think up: lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands which made swaying movements as they were pulled through the water, or others like bats made of red glass with cunningly concealed hooks on their wings.  (57)

The main character, a lapsed monk, spends his days on the lake, not fishing but plumbing its depths with “an egg-shaped ball of glittering metal on long, fine silk threads” (55).  His friends believe that this is some form of science, but he corrects them:

The intensity brought red blotches to Radspieller’s face and his voice cracked with the emphasis he put on each word: ‘If I could just have one wish’ – he clenched his fists – ‘it would be to let down my plumbline to the centre of the earth, so that I could shout out to the world, ‘See: here, there, see, nothing but earth!’  (64)

So Radspieler is, however strangely, deliberately avoiding a search for secret knowledge, even denying its existence.  A half page later it catches up with him, though.  The characters of H. P. Lovecraft, Meyrink’s literary cousin, are always destroyed by their quest for hidden truths, while this poor sap is punished for not looking.  He would have been happier learning about C’thulu.

If you click on the Spanish-language link above, you will see the cover of the Borges edition of Meyrink, which features a monk emerging from a blue flower.  That is almost accurate, almost in the story.  The “poisonous blue flower” is monkshood.  Any mention of a blue flower in German literature has been permanently poisoned by Novalis.  In “Cardinal Napellus” the Romantic longing for transcendent meaning leads not to bliss or escape or nirvana but to insanity and horror.

While I am making connections – I mean, Novalis and his blue flower, that one is obvious – in Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer the dedicated scientific protagonist makes a detailed multi-year study of the topography of a lake bottom (that does not sound right).  I had so many other unnovelistic parts of that novel to deal with that, when discussing Stifter’s novel recently, I did not even mention the scenes where he plumbs the lake and makes maps, leading to discoveries, I guess, about how the seasonal hydrology changes the lake.

So Novalis’s non-rational blue flower is poisonous and Stifter’s rational empiricism is completely useless.  What is left?  I wonder, to what work of German literature do those fishing lures refer?

And the world isn’t real, anyway - Gustav Meyrink's visit to the time-leeches

The book at hand is Gustav Meyrink’s 1916 short story collection Bats.  I love that title.  As in “Meyrink is completely ___ .“  Fledermäuse.  The cover* is perfect, too, a copy of “Lied in der Dämmerung (Song in the Twilight”, 1931) by my new favorite painter, Franz Sedlacek.

That is Meyrink in oil, right there.

No, the painting is too simple.  It is more like E. T. A. Hoffmann, Meyrink’s great precursor.  It omits Meyrink’s esotericism, his interest in tarot and kabbalah and secret knowledge.  I will disclose that I think all of that is in and of itself nonsense, but it serves two purposes for Meyrink beyond whatever belief he might have in it; first, many writers have done interesting, artful things with this or that esoteric system, the pre-built symbols allowing for all sorts of fun, and second, the mysticism stands in for a more universal gnostic impulse, a yearning for a glimpse of the reality behind reality, a momentary lifting of the earthly veil.

Hoffmann’s stories, full of dreams and hallucinations, use the idea, too.  For followers of Schopenhauer, this would be some sort of direct experience of Will; other systems use other terms.  The protagonist of “Herr Kuno Hinrischen, Businessman, and the Penitent Lala Lajpat-Rai,” for example, “managing director of the firm: General Charitable Works, ‘Wholesalers of fat, lard and oils,’” has a dream in which he becomes a Hindu ascetic.  Unfortunately the lesson he learns by becoming one with the universe is to become a more effective embezzler, since the victims are, after all, also him, so he might as well have the money as them.

“’And the world isn’t real, anyway.  I’d never’ve thought there was so much in this Indian philosophy’…  From then on Herr Kuno Hinrischen, businessman, was ‘master’ of even the most difficult situations and a convinced follower of the Indian doctrine of the Vedanta to the end of his days.  (100-1)

Not every mystic has Meyrink’s sense of humor.

In “J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches” – no, I will stop there.  No story can be as good as that title.  It promises too much.

In “Amadeus Knödlseder, the Incorrigible Bearded Vulture” – same problem, right?  It is almost disappointing to learn that Knödlseder is actually a vulture, who escapes from the Munich zoo and sets up a neckwear shop which is in fact a front for the murder and devouring of marmots, “[j]ust like Cardillac, the jeweller in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fräulein von Scuderi!” (44)

I start with Meyrink’s esotericism but then go straight to his satire.  And I have gotten nowhere near what I think is most interesting about him, that he is often a fine writer.

*  Bats is to be found, almost, in The Dedalus Meyrink Reader, translated and assembled by the dedicated Mike Mitchell.  One story, “Meister Leonhard,” can only be found in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy 1890-2000, so strictly speaking I have not read all of the Bats.  Close enough.

Heaven forbid anyone should spend his life in perpetual expectation of meeting the Golem - Gustav Meyrink's The Golem

The golem story is so flexbile. Gustave Meyrink's novel The Golem (serialized 1913-4, published as a book in 1915) somehow manages to omit the golem entirely. Or else it's narrated by the golem. Whichever way, this golem is not the big clay fellow we've grown to love - see left.


The Meyrink novel is wild stuff. A gem-cutter, our narrator, lives in an apartment in Prague's Jewish ghetto. He is schizophrenic and has lost all memory of his past due to a hypnosis cure (he doesn't remember that either). A mysterious stranger, who may very well be the Golem, or is the narrator himself, gives him a mystical book to repair (right). A beautiful woman wants his help covering up her affair with a doctor. A young lunatic wants revenge against the sinister Jewish junk dealer, who, it turns out, is his father. Um, there's a saintly rabbi, and his beautiful, miracle-attuned daughter. And, let's see, several murders. Our hero ends up in prison for one of them. But it turns out that it's all a dream, or is it, and although one might be likely to groan at that old chestnut, I didn't, not in this case.

This is pure E. T. A. Hoffmann, in some ways quite derivative. A not-quite-ordinary person gets caught up in some tangled supernatural plot involving characters who constantly transform into other characters and strange powers that somehow set everything right at the end. There must be a dozen Hoffmann stories that work this way. The Golden Pot is the most famous, maybe. The Devil's Elixir is better. Meyrink knew them both, very well, too well.

The Golem has its own originality, though. First, Hoffmann is the great pre-Freudian Freudian fiction writer. Meyrink gets to filter Hoffmann through Freud. The schizophrenic narrator is key - a good part of the effective horror of the novel is that every scrap of reality, every stray phrase or gesture, becomes imbued with significance. The narrator lives in a state of perpetual uncanniness. Readers familiar with Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" will pick this up immediately.

Second, the Prague setting is interesting. The golem story is just one local detail of many. The actual 1890 collapse of the medieval bridge over the Moldau, for example, is inserted into the plot - the narrator thinks he caused it, mentally. The strange ending, with the gem-cutter, disoriented after months in a dark prison, wandering through a Jewish quarter destroyed not by a pogrom but by modern urban renewal, ironically invokes the golem without even mentioning it.

Finally, sometimes Meyrink's prose is really good, even aside from the horror-story atmosphere business:*

"For answer came a sound as though a rat had scampered over the keys of a piano." (36, Dover edition)

"The snowflakes sped like regiments - little miniature soldiers in white furry coats - past the panes of my window, on and on, one behind the other, always in the same direction, as though in universal retreat from a particularly formidable foe." (75)

"A man with a long beard, and official sword, coat, and cap, but with bare feet and trousers tied together at the ankles, stood up, put down the coffee-mill that he was holding between his knees, and ordered me to remove my clothes." (140)

The bare feet and the coffee-mill - to me, that is the stuff.


Meyrink was a genuine occultist, and at times The Golem plunges into a bog of will o' the wisps, strange gases, and mystical claptrap. At its best, the Kabbalistic Buddhist Egyptology or whatever it is provides Meyrink with striking, original images; at its worst, its empty and dull. A reader with more patience for tarot and whatnot may think otherwise.

There are also a fair amount of anti-Semitic stereotypes. E. F. Bleiler, in the introduction to the Dover edition, thinks that the philo-Semitic stereotypes balance things out, and points out that the Nazis agreed, gleefully banning and burning Meyrink's books. The split is consistent with the divide in the mind of the narrator, but an artistically superior book might dispense with the stereotypes completely, no?

The Dover edition includes more of these dramatic lithographs, by Hugo Steiner-Prag. Who is he? Maybe you can find out and let me know. The illustrations do fit the text, exactly.


I'll end golem week with some different illustrations, from David Wisniewski's 1996 Golem, although neither my little thumbnails nor my scanner can do justice to his amazing work with cut-paper. Wisniewski tells the Yudl Rosenberg version of the story, basically, with one amusing amendation. The golem, once de-activated, usually has to be stored somewhere. In Meyrink's version, for example, there is a secret golem storage room, accessible only by tunnels, where the narrator somehow ends up spending the night. I. L. Peretz covers the golem with dust and cobwebs.

Wisniewski buries the golem in books, which I thought was an appropriate metaphor for Golem Week, and, frankly, for everything else I do at Wuthering Expectations:

Actually, click to enlarge - they came out better than I thought.

* Postscript: I forgot another first-rate device, the sculptor theme. The narrator makes cameos; another character is a puppeteer and carves a puppet head that represents either the narrator, or the Golem, or both; wax figures pop up in unexpected places. There's also a "hanged man" theme that links the prison scenes, the tarot cards, and other odds and ends.