Book cover: Der Golem

Der Golem, by Gustav Meyrink, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1915, cover by Hugo Steiner-Prag

The Golem was a kind of Frankenstein's monster figure. Created from the mud of Prague to protect its Jewry from persecution, the monster gets out of control and ransacks the city, setting it alight.

The myth became one of the cornerstones of expressionism. Director Paul Wegener made two films about the Golem; the latter, dating from 1920, survives and has become, along with FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), the defining image of a spiky, shadowy, nightmare world which still influences everything from pop videos to architecture.

Gustav Meyrink, the author and populariser of the Golem myth, was an odd character, who turned to the occult after a failed suicide attempt. Born in Vienna, he lived in Prague and portrayed - in a kind of proto-psychogeography - its dark atmosphere.

Hugo Steiner-Prag's cover and extraordinary, haunting illustrations inside the book conjure a world of shadows and horrible homunculi, faceless figures, the influence of which can be traced in perennial child scares from the Roswell aliens to the blank masks of slasher movies. The Golem seems to emerge from the dark alleys of the Prague Ghetto, a grim blend of earth and shadow.

Born Hugo Steiner in Prague in 1880 (he added the "Prag" when he moved to Germany), he was the son of a bookseller but his mother claimed to be a descendant of Rabbi Loew, who was believed to have created the mythical Golem in 17th-century Prague.

Steiner-Prag's Golem on the cover is fire red; the old gothic German 'G' like a flame emerging from the Satanic head. The city from which the Golem rises is crystalline; the spires of old Prague turn to jagged splinters at their base.

You can see traces of Steiner-Prag's Golem in not just Wegener's film but in Aleister Crowley's depiction of himself as the Great Beast, Georg Grosz's seedy Weimar-era Berlin or Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi's Hollywood emigre versions of expressionist horror.

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