Vienna Secrets

52

FROM THE JOURNAL OF Dr. Max Liebermann

I spent the remainder of the afternoon browsing in the secondhand bookshops of the Jewish quarter. The booksellers-shriveled old men with white beards, all of whom were almost blind from reading too much-were as erudite (and eccentric) as university professors.

The legend is an old one. Golem stories have been told for centuries. Even Jacob Grimm mentions the Polish Jews making a man from clay and mud; however, since the sixteenth century, the golem has become particularly associated with the name of Rabbi Loew. Orthodox Jews have many tales about the Maharal of Prague, which typically involve him outwitting a vindictive Christian adversary (most notably an evil priest called Thaddeus). In most of these, his supernatural assistant, the golem, ensures that the enemies of Jewry are punished.

Mankind has always been preoccupied with the idea of aping the creator, stealing fire from the gods. In literature the tradition extends from ancient times to the present. (I am reminded of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a work that I have discussed with Miss Lydgate.) It is a didactic tradition that alerts mankind to the dangers of hubris. A golem can be created, but not necessarily controlled. When men act like gods, danger follows.

Prague is a dark place, a city that has always welcomed astrologers, kabbalists, and animators. One has only to stroll around the Stare Mysto and Mala Strana, looking up at the relief door signs-numbers, stars, devils, compasses, and occult symbols-to see evidence of Prague’s magical past. There is even a narrow lane called the Street of the Alchemists up by the castle.

But now, it seems, the golem is no longer confined to the Prague ghetto: neither the physical ghetto nor the imaginary ghetto of Hasidic folktales. It has broken free of its own myth and now haunts the broad avenues of Vienna. Prague! I have already been here too long. These archaic places, which make an appeal to the deepest levels of the unconscious, corrode reason. I find it all too easy now to imagine a monstrous hulk lurking in the shadows, the magic holding its form against the laws of nature, the spell occasionally weakening, and the supernatural flesh transmuting back into mud. The great expenditure of energy as it rips the head off its victim producing a momentary dissolution-clods on cobbles-and then the creature rising, its bulky body impossibly fleet, returning to the kabbalist’s lair above the Alois Gasse Temple.

Yes, it comes all too easily, as though the wellspring of dreams has been unstopped. The images spout up and spill into the real world. I can’t stop thinking about the conversation that I had with Kusevitsky: dreams, myths-a racial unconscious. Professor Freud: “When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” But not just any wish-a forbidden wish, a wish unacceptable to the censoring agency of the mind.

A golem is the embodiment of a forbidden wish, a wish to unleash unconscionable violence on the enemy-an abrogation of civilized values and the triumph of the primitive unconscious. A people who have endured persecution for millennia would have necessarily repressed the urge to strike back at their tormentors. Such a reservoir of anger and resentment must be fathomless. Regiments unite behind a standard and nations behind a flag. Who are they, I wonder, who are now uniting behind the figure of this terrifying mythic avenger?