Montalbán/Golem/DerGolem

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. This is the section of the novel where I began to feel that Montalbán is overstaying his welcome. The subplots continue to proliferate (here it is mostly a storyline involving the boxer Boom Boom Peretti, who is being blackmailed by Loaiza, a former friend of his. Peretti hires Carvalho to find out exactly what Loiaza wants) and they mostly seem to serve as a way to bring together the main players in the drama in ever closer proximity. The boxing match that Alma, Carvalho, Muriel, and the Captain all attend reminded me irresistibly of the boxing match in Hammett’s Red Harvest, but it main purpose is to give Carvalho a clue that the Captain and Muriel may be related to each other. In other words, Carvalho is inching ever closer to a solution of what seems to have become the novel’s main mystery (what happened to Alma and Raúl’s daughter, or more precisely, will they find out what happened to their daughter?) but the progress is at a snail’s pace. This may be Montalbán’s way of emphasizing that his detective can do very little in this kind of environment other than wait for the pieces to fall into place and recognize the resulting pattern when they do, but it does not make for an exciting read.

I also read the first fifty pages of Elizabeth R. Baer’s 2012 book The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. Building on previous surveys of the golem’s presence in literature and culture, Baer aims to analyze why this figure remains so prevalent in post-Holocaust and contemporary literature and culture. With Adorno’s famous prohibition against the writing of poetry after Auschwitz in mind, Baer argues that “the golem serves in several ways to provoke readers to consider the viability of imaginative works about the Shoah” (emphasis in original). Contra Adorno, Baer argues that the golem’s presence constitutes a defense of the continued relevance of the imagination and imaginative literature in the post-Holocaust period. Baer’s other main contribution in this book is her emphasis on the importance of intertextuality (in the Kristevan sense) in understanding the character and importance of the golem legend. “No wonder he has been adopted, adapted, appropriated, and riffed upon in so many post-Holocaust fictions: intertextuality is an approach to writing devoted to instability, multiplicity, and correction.” This first section of the book, after providing this framework, establishes the (literary) origins of the golem legend before going to examine its twentieth-century incarnations, including Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem (1915) Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam.

Inspired by Baer’s book, I also watched Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into the World)  . Wegener was so fascinated by the figure of the Golem that he made three films featuring him; this is the only one to have survived. It tells the story of how Rabbi Loew saves the Jewish community of 16^th century Prague by bringing the Golem to life and using him to change the Holy Roman Emperor’s mind about expelling the Jews from the city. Baer discusses the issue of whether or not the film is anti-semitic at length in her book. My own view is that it reflects the default anti-semitism of its time but that this fact alone does not define the film. In other words, the film is also an important example of the sympathetic dramatization of Jewish mythology and a key example of the German Expressionist school of filmmaking. The sets and cinematography are both absolutely extraordinary and Wegener, who plays the Golem, is wonderfully effective at showing the evolution of the Golem’s personality in the short time that he is alive. David Bordwell hits the nail on the head when he says “But putting aside Der Golem’s minor weaknesses, it has marvelous moments that summon up what cinematic Expressionism could be.” Bordwell’s essay can be found here and the film itself here.