“The walls of Jericho have fallen”, he heard the quivering voice of Chidher Green say aloud in the room. “He has awakened from the dead:’
A breathless hush …
Then the cry of a baby …
Hauberrisser looked around, disorientated.
Finally he found his bearings
He clearly recognised the plain, bare walls of his room, and yet at the same time they were the walls of a temple decorated with a fresco of Egyptian deities. He was standing in the middle, and both were reality: he saw the wooden floorboards and at the same time they were the stone flags of the temple, two worlds that interpenetrated before his very eyes, fused together and yet separate. It was as if he were awake and dreaming in one and the same moment. He touched the whitewashed wall with his hand, could feel its rough surface and yet at the same time knew without mistake that his fingers were stroking a tall, gold statue, which he believed he recognised as the Goddess Isis sitting on a throne.
In additionto his previous, familiarhuman consciousness, he had acquired anew consciousness, which had enriched him with the perception of a new world, which touched the old world, enveloped and transformed it, and yet in some miraculous way let it continue the same.
Each sense awoke doubled within him, like blooms bursting from their buds.
Scales fell from his eyes. Like someone who forhis whole life has only known two dimensions and suddenly finds he is seeing rounded forms, he could for a long time not grasp what had happened.
Gradually he realised that he had reached his goal, the end of the path that is the hidden purpose of every human being. His goal was to be an inhabitant of two worlds.
Once more a baby cried.
Had Eva not said she wanted to be a mother when she came to him again? The thought was a sudden shock to him.
Did not the Goddess Isis have a naked, living child in her ann?
He lifted his eyes to her and saw that she was smiling.
She moved.
The frescos were becoming sharper, clearer, more colourful, and all around were sacred vessels. Everything was so distinct that Hauberrisser forgot the sight of his room and only had eyes for the temple and the red and gold paintings round the walls.
Lost in thought, he gazed at the face of the goddess and slowly, slowly a dull memory rose to the surface: Eva! That was Eva and not a statue of the Egyptian goddess, the Mother of the World!
He pressed his hands against the sides of his head, he could not believe it.
“Eva! Eva!” he cried out loud.
Again the bare walls of his bedroom appeared through the temple walls; the goddess was still there on her throne, still smiling, but close in front of him was her earthly likeness, a young woman, the picture of living beauty.
“Eva! Eva!” with an ecstatic cry of boundless rapture, he clasped her to him and covered her face with kisses: “Eva!”
For a long time they stood entwined at the window, looking out at the dead city.
He felt a thought speak within him, as if it were the voice of Chidher, “You are united to help the generations to come, as I do, to build a new realm from the ruins of the old, so that the time may come when I, too, may smile.”
The room and the temple were equally distinct.
As if he had the double head of Janus, Hauberrisser could see both the earthly world and the world beyond at the same time, and clearly distinguish all details, all objects:
He was a living man Both here and beyond.
by Franz Rottensteiner
The locale of Gustav Meyrink’s second novel The Green Face (Das griine Gesicht, 1916) is Amsterdam, but this Amsterdam is Prague by another name. The place of the Jewish ghetto of his first novel The Golem has been taken over by Amsterdam’s disreputable harbour quarter and is populated by a blend of grotesque, mysterious and sinister characters; disaffected Austro-Hungarian emigrants waiting, bored and without hope, to be transported to a new world.
Meyrink’s The Green Face is second in visionary power only to The Golem and while it was not quite as successful as the latter, it nevertheless sold some 90,000 copies in its first year. Indeed the structure of the novel is very similar to his earlier masterpiece. This should come as no surprise since the two novels were written in parallel during the years 1910 to 1916 and its tentative title Der ewige Jude is sometimes mistaken for an alternate title for The Golem. Meyrink had employed a myth from the Jewish-Christian tradition to powerful effect inhis first novel and he does so again in his second. This time the central motif is that of The Wandering Jew; but just as the legend of the Golem that dominates his first novel is not a mere faithful retelling of lore from the Cabala but freely incorporates Buddhist and Hinduistic elements, so Chidher Gran, the Green Face, is a vision that is unmistakably Meyrink’s own. Chidher Green, who never appears in person, visible as he is only in fragments of old manuscripts, visions and fevered dreams, is an amalgam derived from various immortal beings and symbols of re-birth, including but certainly not exhausted by, Ahasverus, John the Baptist and the Phoenix.
According to Christian lore Ahasverus was a cobbler who refused Christ a rest on his way to Golgotha, and for this was damned to wander over the Earth until he was redeemed by the second coming of Christ. The English term wandering stresses the homelessness and restlessness that is the curse of this figure. In German the emphasis is on the ewige, the Eternal Jew. It is this aspect that is stressed by Meyrink’s symbolic use of the figure: his Wandering Jew is not a soul in need of redemption, but a being that has already been redeemed, and one who can therefore act as a spiritual guide for others; a sort of mid-wife in the spiritual re-birth that is the mystic theme of Meyrink’s novel.
The Wandering Jew, who became a folktale in the German countries in the 16th century, has been preserved and kept alive in the fantastic literature of many countries. He makes a brief and somewhat more traditional appearance in Leo Perutz’s fantasy novel The Marques de Bolibar, written four years after The Green Face. Perutz and Meyrink were contemporaries; both Jewish writers from Prague who wrote in German, they were two of the most potent writers of the German fantastic revival that flourished from the turn of the century until the late twenties (or, more precisely, the Nazi take-over in 1933, when the real world caught up with fantasy).
Indeed, there was a whole movement of German fantasy writers after the turn of the century. Among the first of these were the `three musketeers’ of German fantasy, Harms Heinz Ewers (1871-1943), Karl Hans Strobl (1877-1946) and Meyrink himself. Although not quite in Meyrink’s league, Ewers and Strobl did enjoy wide popularity for a time. Also circulating at this time was a beautifully illustrated and well produced magazine of fantasy literature, Der Orchideengarten (19191921), edited by Karl Hans Strobl. Its famous illustrator, Albert Kubin (1877-1959), also wrote the classic fantasy The Other Side (Die andere Seite, 1909), a novel of apocalyptic vision for which he used some of the pictures originally intended for Meyrink’s The Golem.
In the opinion of Herman Hesse, what distinguished Meyrink from other fantasy writers of the time was the power of his personality. Other commentators have not always been so generous. It has been said that after the visionary power of The Golem, Meyrink’s later novels deteriorated into the quagmire of occult indoctrination, and served more as a vehicle for the exposition of secret doctrines than as literature. This argument is given credence by the fact that Meyrink is widely read in esoteric circles and studied more as a teacherthan a novelist. On the other hand, this same belief may have contributed, in part, to Meyrink’s success. For some, Meyrink’s work was itself a ‘highertruth’, it transcended the realm of ‘mere’ literature, and conveyed insights that were hidden to the multitude. Certainly this was the aspect that his enthusiastic biographer, critic, and sometimes editor Paul Frank chose to emphasize; for him, Meyrink’s art was far removed from the school of 1’art pour l’ art, not for him the aesthetic games that other writers engaged in, rather his books are `eruptive blocks, thrown up from
depths in which seldom a human eye dares to penetrate’. A recent biography (Frans Smit, Gustav Meyrink, In Search of the Extra-Sensory, 1988) also stresses this image of Meyrink as the seeker after the paranormal.
Meyrink did nothing to discourage the belief that he had mastered the paranormal and had access to hidden knowledge. In the introduction to his novel, Der weif3e Dominikaner (1921, The White Dominican) Meyrink’s claim that his was ‘inspired literature’ and that his book had been dictated to him from other spheres further intensified the legend that had grown around him. The story of the alleged suicide attempt, from which he was saved when a bookseller’s apprentice threw some occult advertisements and the sample issue of an occult magazine through his door and thus set him on his occult path, has all the features of a conveniently apocryphal story. His failure as a banker in Prague in the 1890s may owe as much to the airs of occult experimentation that he liked to give himself than to the plottings of his enemies: for this is a quality not exactly trust-inspiring inabanker! and ifhe was accused ofusing spiritual guidance in his banking business, this sounds exactly like a Meyrink satire.
Meyrink’s contacts with various occult orders and organizations are fairly well documented. As early as 1891 a theosophical brotherhood of `The Blue Star’ was founded in Prague. Among Meyrink’s acquaintances were various mystics in Vienna and Prague, such as the Viennese polyhistor Friedrich Eckstein. He read H. P. Blavatsky (whom he later despised) and corresponded for three months with Annie Besant, met Rudolf Steiner (but didn’t get along with him, although Steiner later wrote favourably of Meyrink’s work). Meyrink also had contacts with French and British Freemasons, various circles with grandiose sounding names such as `Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry’, and was acquainted with the German guru of the occult J. Schneiderfranken, who called himself To Yin Ra’. In 1897 he became a member of the Order of Illumination, as well as a’Brotherhood of the Old Rites of the Holy Grail in the Great Orient of Patmos’. In 1923 he wanted to become a member of the ‘Old Gnostic Church of Eleusis’, and in 1926 he became a member of an ‘Aquarian Foundation’ and a ‘White Lodge’. Eduard Frank quotes a document that Meyrink received from ‘Mandale of the Lord of the Perfect Circle’ which reads:
‘It is ordered, that Brother Gustav Meyer of Prague be constituted one of the seven Arch-censors. And in virtue of this Mandale Gustav Meyer receives the Spiritual and Mystic name Kama.’
And in 1895 he received a letter from a member of a brotherhood in Manchester, in which Meyrink is given his new name: ‘Theravel. This Name, when translated into English, would be expressed thus: I go; I seek; I find. This is therefore the Motto of your future life.’ Whether or not this was indeed the motto of Meyrink’s personal life it is certainly the theme that dominates all of his major texts.
It is interesting to note that Meyrink, who translated Charles Dickens (a translation praised by Amo Schmidt), and also some supernatural stories of Lafacadio Heam and Rudyard Kipling, apparently had no knowledge of English fiction of the supernatural; he was not familiar with Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen, to say nothing of Aleister Crowley who might conceivably have been of interest to him.
All this testifies to a considerable interest in the occult, but what did Meyrink actually believe? His fictional works are not so much eruptions of the unconscious but literary works with a strong ludistic component that is not absent even in his occult novels. Meyrink first made a name for himself as a writer of the sharply satirical, irreverent tales (later collected in The German Philistine’s Wonder) that bitterly attacked the shibboleths ofthe German bourgeoisie and the pillars of the state, the bureaucracy, the military, patriotism and the church. These stories derive their special impact from an often savage satirical distortion and exaggeration of specific features of German life. Some stories are biting parodies of nationalist writers. Typical of these early stories is ‘ Wetherglobin’, in which apes are inoculated with a new serum and begin to exhibit all the behaviour of fanatically patriotic soldiers. His story ‘Die Ersturmung von Serajewo’ (‘The Storming of Sarajevo’) was forbidden in Austria-Hungary during the First World War, for in this broad satire the Austro-Hungarian army, whose officers are described as cretins, heroically conquer the wrong city (one of their own), and in 1917 in Germany there raged a press campaign against the unpatriotic Meyrink. In other stories Meyrink showed a preference for the occult, for Indian mysteries and the wisdom of the East, and for frightening and grotesque happenings. The great Austrian satirist Karl Kraus summed him up as combining ‘Buddhism with a dislike for the infantry’.
It would appear that there was a certain dichotomy in Meyrink, that can, perhaps, be reconciled: on the one hand there was the satirist, the scoffer, the sceptic, the liberal writer with a preference for the eccentric and the bizarre, for whom little was sacred, and under whose scrutiny not even the occult was spared; on the other the believer in occult wisdom, the seeker after hidden knowledge, the propagator of occult doctrines. But how to make sense of these different selves? His occult essays are as polemical and ambiguous as his fictions, with elements of playfulness and strategic opposition ever present. At times Meyrink gives the distinct impression that he was better at formulating what to dislike than what he believed in. He especially raged against astrology which he considered a baleful poison, and while he believed in ghosts, he considered spiritualism a poor cousin of genuine insight, and expended much energy trying to debunk mediums. He believed in parapsychological phenomena, but considered them extremely rare, and the whole field fraught with swindlers and charlatans; perhaps there were four true yogi in all of India, he once declared. In the descriptions of spiritual voyages of his novels, his heroes are beset at every turn by pitfalls, traps, false paths of which they must constantly be wary. While debunking charlatans he continued to believe in the existence of a deep and true occult knowledge.
What emerges from the plethora of contradictory evidence that exists by and about him is the image of a man who longed to believe in a realm of higher spiritual reality that opposed the petty materialism of the everyday world. But a man who at the same time was too much of a sceptic, perhaps not a thorough sceptic, but certainly a methodical one, whose strong bent for the grotesque and the playful led him to probe even that in which he wanted to believe. So he tried one system after another, one teacher of wisdom after another, always willing to invest a good deal of enthusiasm, but again and again he came away disappointed, finding only fraud, showmanship and false pretences. And on he went with his search.
This sceptical attitude, combined with his ability to laugh at himself and a penchant for polemics and satire, proved an advantage in his fiction, where ambiguity is a virtue, giving the impression of manifold meanings, leaving the reader room for his own interpretations, and providing the dialectical interplay and tension on which intellectual drama thrives. Nor is the satiric component incompatible with Meyrink’s mystic goals, they are rather supplementary. An essential element of Meyrink’s novel is dualism; a conflict between a material world of appearances, and a higher, spiritual world of true causes. The world of appearances is one of alienation, spiritual decline and despair, an eccentric world of the criminal demi-monde: a kind of gigantic curiosity shop enlarged to city-size and populated by the rejects of mankind. This world has to be rejected, and like Athanius Pemath in The Golem, the engineer Hauberrisser, the nominal hero of The Green Face has to be educated for and initiated into a higher world, helped along by various colourful figures who offer him assistance (like Swammerdam or Sephardi). But the rejection of the material world is not total, rather he has to become a citizen of both worlds, truly alive in this world and the other. This goal is to be achieved not after death, but in this world; only citizens of both worlds may survive the fall of this one and help create the real one.
Who is to say of this labyrinthine structure where fictional reality ends and dream and vision begins? What is sanity and what madness? The hero has to experience both, he is forced to split an
d to double his ego and meet himself. By creating an all-pervading atmosphere of kafkaesque mystery and uncertainty, Meyrink succeeds in suggesting inexhaustible depths and heights of meaning.
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