Golem and Mirjam

In turn, Wegener’s golem exemplifies the fin de siècle idea of the “Muscle Jew,” a new Zionist warrior type who would till the soil and defend his people, which reimagined the anti-Semitic stereotype of the weak, effeminate ghetto Jew. This type is suggested in Rabbi Loew’s Famulus, who has been unsuccessful in vying for Mirjam’s attentions. Instead, Mirjam has entertained a liaison with the Christian Knight Florian, an act of transgression against the implied norms of a bounded female sexuality on the one hand, and the racial discourse against miscegenation on the other. Famulus thus calls on the golem to destroy the knight. This unleashes a violent desire in the golem, who overpowers Mirjam and drags her away. Mirjam will now succumb to Famulus’s advances as he promises to forgive her wrongdoing and keep it a secret. The golem, therefore, functions as a narrative tool to restore the patriarchal order and its prescribed boundaries between Christians and Jews.

Wegener’s image of the monster bearing the woman would be borrowed time and again as a staple for the racialized love dramas of 1930s Hollywood horror film, from Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) to Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933). The lasting impact of the film is not simply incidental, for Wegener made the golem and his Jewish creator a sign of the creative powers of the cinematic medium, in which German-speaking Jews played a crucial part. Wegener himself, who also played the golem, was a non-Jew, but his cast included a number of Jewish actors, such as Albert Steinrück in the role of Rabbi Loew and Ernst Deutsch as Famulus, who, like him, were engaged at Max Reinhardt’s famous Deutsches Theater. As Wegener proposed in his 1917 essay “Von den künstlerischen Möglichkeiten des Wandelbildes” (“On the Artistic Potential of the Moving Image”), the essence of film lay in the art of the camera, whose poetry unfolded in the image.¹ Wegener saw in “the silent and mystical golem” the perfect encapsulation of the “purely pictorial presence in film”.² The lasting fascination with Wegener’s Golem no doubt derives from its celebration of the cinematic medium, as well as its enigmatic and ambivalent images of the Jew.

Cathy S. Gelbin is senior lecturer in German studies at the University of Manchester and co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. Her main research is German-Jewish culture from the beginning of the 19th century including questions on gender and sexuality. Other special interests lie in Holocaust representations and contemporary German-Jewish culture in the European and global context.