Gustav Meyrink
1868–1932
Biography
Gustav Meyrink was born Gustav Meyer in Vienna on 19 January 1868. He was an Austrian novelist, dramatist, translator and banker, and he is known by the pen name he took. He spent much of his early adult life in Prague, where he worked as a bank manager until 1902, when he was charged with fraud and spent a short time in jail. After that he turned to writing, and in 1911 he moved to the Bavarian town of Starnberg, where he spent most of the rest of his life.
He wrote satirical stories, supernatural tales and novels steeped in the occult, and he translated a great deal, including fifteen volumes of Dickens into German, along with work by Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn. His most famous novel, Der Golem, appeared in 1915. It follows Athanasius Pernath, a Prague gem cutter, and leaves open whether he is recording his own visions or turning into the clay creature of Jewish legend. The book was a great commercial success and made Meyrink one of the leading German-language writers of supernatural fiction.
The site holds Der Golem, the book most readers know him by. Its Prague setting and its blend of dream, legend and the occult show the interests that ran through the rest of his fiction. Meyrink's own study of mysticism, which he pursued from the early 1890s, helps explain why the novel reads as more than a ghost story.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Der Golem
by Gustav Meyrink
A narrator drifts into a dream in which he is Athanasius Pernath, a gem carver in the old Jewish ghetto of Prague who has lost his memory. A mysterious stranger, an old book and the legend of the Golem, said to reappear every thirty-three years, draw him into the secrets of the…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.