The Golem 1920

The story

Prague, in the age of the emperors. Rabbi Loew, who is an astrologer as well as a spiritual leader, reads in the stars that disaster is coming to the Jewish ghetto. It arrives as a decree: the Emperor orders the Jews to leave the city.

The rabbi's answer is a giant of clay. By the film's account he summons a demon who teaches him the word that gives life, and he puts the word in an amulet on the figure's chest. The golem is sent to the palace, where it saves the court when a ceiling gives way. The grateful Emperor withdraws the decree.

Then it goes wrong. The rabbi's daughter Miriam is involved with a young squire, and the golem, no longer under its master's hand, kills him and sets the ghetto on fire. It is stopped by a small girl who takes the amulet from its chest. The golem falls, lifeless clay again.

The legend, and the film's own version

Golem stories are old. The earliest written method for making one dates from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and the first golem-maker described as a historical person is Elijah of Chełm, who died in 1583. The link to Prague is much newer. Historians generally treat the Prague golem as a German literary invention of the early 1800s. Judah Loew ben Bezalel was a real and famous rabbi of Prague in the sixteenth century, but his own writings never mention a golem, and nor do the early accounts of his life.

A Polish book of 1909 helped to fix the tale to him. It presented itself as an eyewitness account, and scholars such as Gershom Scholem took it for fiction. In the best-known versions the rabbi forgets to deactivate the creature before the Sabbath, and it runs amok. Wegener's film keeps the rabbi and the amulet but gives the story its own plot of a threatened expulsion, a court and a love affair. The film is credited as based on Gustav Meyrink's novel.

Wegener's three golems

Paul Wegener, an actor, first heard the legend while making The Student of Prague in 1913, and went on to make three golem films. The first, a modern story, is dated 1914 or 1915 depending on the source. A parody followed in 1917. Both are lost. Wegener is said to have been dissatisfied with the first and wanted a version closer to the legend, which is why the 1920 film carries the subtitle How He Came into the World: it is the story of the golem's origin, set in the past.

He directed with Carl Boese, wrote with Henrik Galeen and played the golem himself. It was shot in May and June 1920 at the Ufa studios in Tempelhof, and shown at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 29 October 1920. It is the golem film that survives whole, which is why it is the one people mean.

A ghetto built in Berlin

The star of the film's look is the set. The architect Hans Poelzig, assisted by Marlene Moeschke, designed a ghetto of 54 buildings, built for real by Kurt Richter at Tempelhof, with narrow alleys and steeply slanted roofs. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, shown earlier the same year, had painted its town on canvas. This one could be walked through.

One reviewer finds the shapes confining, people and things squeezed into squares, triangles and circles, and thinks the sets give the film grandeur more than psychology. The camera was Karl Freund's, who went on to shoot Dracula (1931) and to direct The Mummy (1932) in Hollywood. The golem itself is a grey clay figure in enormous boots. Wegener plays it stiff and expressionless, and the same reviewer says it can look like a giant grey robot, or like Frankenstein's monster. The score was by Hans Landsberger, a Jewish composer, and an orchestral score was an unusual step for a film then. He was deported in 1940 and died in the Gurs internment camp in 1941. His music was long thought lost, and was reconstructed by Richard Siedhoff in 2018 from the surviving piano part and fragments.

The ghetto and its people

The film shows a Jewish community, its rabbi and its ghetto, in a story made in Germany in 1920. Writers differ on what it does with them, and the disagreement is worth stating without softening either side.

The scholar Maya Barzilai, in a book on the film, argues that it restores the story's Jewish identity, which Wegener's first film had nearly removed, and that it answers the antisemitic politics of its day through its Emperor. Even so, she finds that it indulges in ugly Jewish stereotypes. A scholar interviewed by the University of Wuppertal is harsher: for him the Prague Jews of the film are exotic clichés, and a story of a monster made in the ghetto suited those who wanted to stir up fear of another religion.

These are readings by later critics, and they do not agree. What can be said is that the film shows the rabbi as a sorcerer, that its Prague Jews are drawn with the stereotypes of its time, and that its own composer was a Jewish man who did not survive the next war.

Why it matters

It was a success. The film was a major hit in Germany, and by one account it ran for 16 weeks in New York after it opened there in 1921. The New York Times is said to have praised its acting and sets.

It is the golem film that is left. The two earlier films are lost. This one survives in several archives, with restorations made in 1977, 2000 and 2017, and its original score has been heard again since 2020.

It helped to shape the horror film. Its sets, its sorcerer and its lumbering creature are often cited as an early influence on Frankenstein (1931). The link is a critic's, not a documented chain, but few dispute that the clay giant belongs to the same family.

It keeps the argument alive. A film that took a Jewish legend seriously and still drew on the stereotypes of its day is a good reason to look at who tells a story and how. The golem has since passed through many other hands.