HEIMAT'S SENTRY: IMAGES OF THE GOLEM IN 20TH CENTURY AUSTRIAN LITERATURE A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German By Jason P. Ager, M.A. Washington, DC December 18, 2012 Copyright 2012 by Jason P. Ager All Rights Reserved ii HEIMAT'S SENTRY: IMAGES OF THE GOLEM IN 20TH CENTURY AUSTRIAN LITERATURE Jason P. Ager, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Peter C. Pfeiffer , Ph.D . ABSTRACT In his collection of essays titled Unheimliche Heimat , W.G. Sebald asserts that, "Es ist offenbar immer noch nicht leicht, sich in Österreich zu Hause zu fühlen, insbesondere wenn einem, wie in den letzten Jahren nicht selten, die Unheimlichkeit der Heimat durch das verschiedentliche Auftreten von Wiedergänger und Vergangenheitsgespenstern öfter als lieb ins Bewußtsein gerufen wird" (Sebald 15-16). Sebald's term "Gespenster" may have a quite literal application; it is unheimlich to note, after all, how often the Golem makes unsettling appearances in twentieth-century Austrian-Jewish literature, each time as a protector and guardian of specific communities under threat. These iterations and reinventions of the Golem tradition give credence to Sebald’s description of Heimat as an ambivalent and often conflicted space, even in a relatively homogenous community, because these portrayals of Heimat juxtapose elements of innocence and guilt, safety and threat, logic and irrationality. In the face of the Holocaust's reign of death and annihilation, it seems fitting that Austrian-Jewish writers reanimated a long- standing symbol of strength rooted in religious tradition to counter destruction and find meaning in chaos and unexampled brutality. Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem (1915); Leo Perutz's Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke (1953); Friedrich Torberg’s short story Golems Wiederkehr (1968); Doron Rabinovici’s collection of short stories Papirnik (1994); and his novel Suche nach M (1997) all draw on the Golem in distinctly individual ways, but always in the role of protector and deliverer. By drawing on the Golem in the twentieth century these authors create a shift in the meaning and iii function of the Maharal and his clay creature. Their act of reinvention evinces the importance of the Golem as a protector, one that uses the cultural memory of the Jewish people to raise a defender who in turn operates as a vehicle of memory construction, a memory-preserving figure that protects a perspective on Heimat , which in its dialectic depiction is uniquely Austrian. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.................................................................................................................. 1 The Golem from anti-Semitic Projections of Difference to 20th Century Austrian Iterations of Protection and Dichotomous Belonging Chapter I....................................................................................................................... 36 The Golem's New Messianic Form: Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem (1915) and its ramifications for the 20th Century Austrian Golem Chapter 2....................................................................................................................... 74 The "Protective" Austrian Golem in the Wake of the Holocaust: Austrian-Jewish notions of Belonging in Leo Perutz's Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke (1953) and Friedrich Torberg's Golems Wiederkehr (1968) Chapter 3....................................................................................................................... 108 Questioning Retribution and Responsibility: Visions of the Austrian Golem in Doron Rabinovici's Papirnik (1994) and Suche nach M (1997) Conclusion..................................................................................................................... 138 Bibliography.................................................................................................................. 148 v Introduction - The Golem from anti-Semitic Projections of Difference to 20th Century Austrian Iterations of Protection and Dichotomous Belonging The Golem in 20th century Austrian-Jewish literature is an ambiguous figure. On one hand it embodies familiar, traditional notions of identity while on the other hand it simultaneously represents concepts of the alien and foreign. In these depictions, the Golem occupies a place that is equally dichotomous, both idyllic and threatening. I argue that 20th century Austrian-Jewish representations of the Golem employ this figure to address a conflicted conception of identity that is intrinsically bound to notions of belonging and manifests through the reconstruction of memory. In these 20th century depictions, the Golem operates as a memory-laden sentry, acting non-violently to protect a community aware of its perpetually indeterminate state. The threat imposed on Jewish communities in the first half of the 20th century was unparalleled, with deep-rooted European anti-Semitism reaching catastrophic levels during the Holocaust. In the face of such a raging torrent of death and destruction it seems fitting that Austrian-Jewish writers longed and grasped for an ancient symbol of strength and religious tradition to stem the tides of annihilation and to cope in the wake of destruction. In 20th century Austrian Jewish literature, the Golem makes numerous appearances, each time as a messianic protector and guardian of specific communities under threat. Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem , Leo Perutz's 1953 Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke, Friedrich Torberg’s 1968 short story Golems Wiederkehr , Doron Rabinovici’s 1994 collection of short stories Papirnik and his 1997 novel Suche nach M each draw upon the Golem in unique ways, but always in a protective and redemptive fashion. These texts not only demonstrate the persistent interest in the Golem in Austrian-Jewish literature, but were selected to articulate the consistent trend of Golem 1 representation over the course of the 20th century in Austrian-Jewish literature.1 In the following, I will explore these portrayals and seek to elucidate the common thread connecting the Austrian-Jewish Golem tradition. Recent scholarly investigations seek to provide overarching analyses of this literary figure across larger communities. Elizabeth Baer's 2012 The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction as well as Cathy Gelbin's 2011 study The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808-2008 , both strive to trace the Golem in literature across broader networks of authors and communities. Baer's work provides insight into the tradition and gives context to works outside of the German language Golem representations especially Jewish-American iterations from the 1970s onward. Gelbin, on the other hand, limits her work to the German realm of Golem representations. Baer's investigation provides textual analyses of recent Jewish-American Golem representations, and grapples with the question of imaginative, fictional production after the Holocaust in the American literary landscape. Gelbin's broad focus on the other hand lacks in-depth textual analyses of individual works, instead emphasizing the larger context of Golem representations in a more global setting. Other scholarly investigations of the Golem tend to paint it in a scientific light, focusing on the automaton as it pertains to scientific strivings to create artificial intelligence as Harry Collins' and Trevor Pinch's 1993 study The Golem: What You Should Know About Science and Norbert 1 Hillel Keival argues that "the story everyone knows about the Maharal and the Golem (reproduced in film and in plays and even in contemprary Czech anthologies) is the newest of them all. [...] it was penned by a Polish Rabbi named Yudel Rosenberg [...] In Rosenberg's version, the Golem is created in order to defend the Jewish community against the antisemitism of the outside world" (Kieval 15). Following Kieval's argument, I contend that Rosenberg's 1907 depiction of the Golem heralds a change in Golem representation, with Gustav Meyrink's 1915 Der Golem standing as the most widely known literary usage of the Golem figure. For this reason, two Austrian-Jewish texts concerning the Golem were excluded from this study, Rudolf Lothar's 1901 short story "Der Golem" and Arthur Holitcher's 1908 drama De r Golem . Both texts tend to portray the Golem in a fashion consistent with 19th century representations, a clay creature that creates havoc on the creator and threatens the community. In both texts the Golem is destroyed in order to save the community, a feature that is quite inconsistent with the iterations following Rosenberg's, and ultimately Meyrink's, seminal text. 2 Wiener's God and Golem Inc.: A Comment on a Certain Point Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion . In an attempt to provide a critical framework for this dissertation, let us briefly look closer at Gelbin's recent publication, which focuses on German literature in the broadest sense. Gelbin’s approach to the Golem figure and its numerous iterations is one informed by the work of sociologists and globalization theorists like Ulrich Beck, Roland Robertson, as well as the post-colonial work of Homi Bhabba. Her examination focuses on the Golem as a cultural text, encompassing film along with literature. This cultural text is one that plays an integral role in defining Jewish identity, both from within the Jewish community and from external, and at times anti-Semitic,