The Green Face (34 page)

A breathless hush …

Then the cry of a baby …

Hauberrisser looked around, disorientated.

Finally he found his bearings

He clearly recognised the plain, bare walls of his room, and
yet at the same time they were the walls of a temple decorated
with a fresco of Egyptian deities. He was standing in the middle,
and both were reality: he saw the wooden floorboards and at the
same time they were the stone flags of the temple, two worlds that interpenetrated before his very eyes, fused together and yet
separate. It was as if he were awake and dreaming in one and the
same moment. He touched the whitewashed wall with his hand,
could feel its rough surface and yet at the same time knew
without mistake that his fingers were stroking a tall, gold statue,
which he believed he recognised as the Goddess Isis sitting on
a throne.

In additionto his previous, familiarhuman consciousness, he
had acquired anew consciousness, which had enriched him with
the perception of a new world, which touched the old world,
enveloped and transformed it, and yet in some miraculous way
let it continue the same.

Each sense awoke doubled within him, like blooms bursting
from their buds.

Scales fell from his eyes. Like someone who forhis whole life
has only known two dimensions and suddenly finds he is seeing
rounded forms, he could for a long time not grasp what had
happened.

Gradually he realised that he had reached his goal, the end of
the path that is the hidden purpose of every human being. His
goal was to be an inhabitant of two worlds.

Once more a baby cried.

Had Eva not said she wanted to be a mother when she came
to him again? The thought was a sudden shock to him.

Did not the Goddess Isis have a naked, living child in her ann?

He lifted his eyes to her and saw that she was smiling.

She moved.

The frescos were becoming sharper, clearer, more colourful,
and all around were sacred vessels. Everything was so distinct
that Hauberrisser forgot the sight of his room and only had eyes
for the temple and the red and gold paintings round the walls.

Lost in thought, he gazed at the face of the goddess and
slowly, slowly a dull memory rose to the surface: Eva! That was
Eva and not a statue of the Egyptian goddess, the Mother of the
World!

He pressed his hands against the sides of his head, he could
not believe it.

“Eva! Eva!” he cried out loud.

Again the bare walls of his bedroom appeared through the
temple walls; the goddess was still there on her throne, still
smiling, but close in front of him was her earthly likeness, a
young woman, the picture of living beauty.

“Eva! Eva!” with an ecstatic cry of boundless rapture, he
clasped her to him and covered her face with kisses: “Eva!”

For a long time they stood entwined at the window, looking
out at the dead city.

He felt a thought speak within him, as if it were the voice of
Chidher, “You are united to help the generations to come, as I
do, to build a new realm from the ruins of the old, so that the time
may come when I, too, may smile.”

The room and the temple were equally distinct.

As if he had the double head of Janus, Hauberrisser could see
both the earthly world and the world beyond at the same time,
and clearly distinguish all details, all objects:

He was a living man
Both here and beyond.

by Franz Rottensteiner

The locale of Gustav Meyrink’s second novel The Green
Face (Das griine Gesicht, 1916) is Amsterdam, but this Amsterdam is Prague by another name. The place of the Jewish
ghetto of his first novel The Golem has been taken over by
Amsterdam’s disreputable harbour quarter and is populated by
a blend of grotesque, mysterious and sinister characters; disaffected Austro-Hungarian emigrants waiting, bored and without
hope, to be transported to a new world.

Meyrink’s The Green Face is second in visionary power only
to The Golem and while it was not quite as successful as the
latter, it nevertheless sold some 90,000 copies in its first year.
Indeed the structure of the novel is very similar to his earlier
masterpiece. This should come as no surprise since the two
novels were written in parallel during the years 1910 to 1916 and
its tentative title Der ewige Jude is sometimes mistaken for an
alternate title for The Golem. Meyrink had employed a myth
from the Jewish-Christian tradition to powerful effect inhis first
novel and he does so again in his second. This time the central
motif is that of The Wandering Jew; but just as the legend of the
Golem that dominates his first novel is not a mere faithful retelling of lore from the Cabala but freely incorporates Buddhist
and Hinduistic elements, so Chidher Gran, the Green Face, is
a vision that is unmistakably Meyrink’s own. Chidher Green,
who never appears in person, visible as he is only in fragments
of old manuscripts, visions and fevered dreams, is an amalgam
derived from various immortal beings and symbols of re-birth,
including but certainly not exhausted by, Ahasverus, John the
Baptist and the Phoenix.

According to Christian lore Ahasverus was a cobbler who
refused Christ a rest on his way to Golgotha, and for this was
damned to wander over the Earth until he was redeemed by the
second coming of Christ. The English term wandering stresses the homelessness and restlessness that is the curse of this figure.
In German the emphasis is on the ewige, the Eternal Jew. It is
this aspect that is stressed by Meyrink’s symbolic use of the
figure: his Wandering Jew is not a soul in need of redemption,
but a being that has already been redeemed, and one who can
therefore act as a spiritual guide for others; a sort of mid-wife
in the spiritual re-birth that is the mystic theme of Meyrink’s
novel.

The Wandering Jew, who became a folktale in the German
countries in the 16th century, has been preserved and kept alive
in the fantastic literature of many countries. He makes a brief
and somewhat more traditional appearance in Leo Perutz’s
fantasy novel The Marques de Bolibar, written four years after
The Green Face. Perutz and Meyrink were contemporaries;
both Jewish writers from Prague who wrote in German, they
were two of the most potent writers of the German fantastic
revival that flourished from the turn of the century until the late
twenties (or, more precisely, the Nazi take-over in 1933, when
the real world caught up with fantasy).

Indeed, there was a whole movement of German fantasy
writers after the turn of the century. Among the first of these
were the `three musketeers’ of German fantasy, Harms Heinz
Ewers (1871-1943), Karl Hans Strobl (1877-1946) and Meyrink himself. Although not quite in Meyrink’s league, Ewers
and Strobl did enjoy wide popularity for a time. Also circulating
at this time was a beautifully illustrated and well produced
magazine of fantasy literature, Der Orchideengarten (19191921), edited by Karl Hans Strobl. Its famous illustrator, Albert
Kubin (1877-1959), also wrote the classic fantasy The Other
Side (Die andere Seite, 1909), a novel of apocalyptic vision for
which he used some of the pictures originally intended for
Meyrink’s The Golem.

In the opinion of Herman Hesse, what distinguished Meyrink
from other fantasy writers of the time was the power of his
personality. Other commentators have not always been so generous. It has been said that after the visionary power of The
Golem, Meyrink’s later novels deteriorated into the quagmire
of occult indoctrination, and served more as a vehicle for the exposition of secret doctrines than as literature. This argument
is given credence by the fact that Meyrink is widely read in
esoteric circles and studied more as a teacherthan a novelist. On
the other hand, this same belief may have contributed, in part,
to Meyrink’s success. For some, Meyrink’s work was itself a
‘highertruth’, it transcended the realm of ‘mere’ literature, and
conveyed insights that were hidden to the multitude. Certainly
this was the aspect that his enthusiastic biographer, critic, and
sometimes editor Paul Frank chose to emphasize; for him,
Meyrink’s art was far removed from the school of 1’art pour
l’ art, not for him the aesthetic games that other writers engaged
in, rather his books are `eruptive blocks, thrown up from depths
in which seldom a human eye dares to penetrate’. A recent
biography (Frans Smit, Gustav Meyrink, In Search of the
Extra-Sensory, 1988) also stresses this image of Meyrink as the
seeker after the paranormal.

Meyrink did nothing to discourage the belief that he had
mastered the paranormal and had access to hidden knowledge.
In the introduction to his novel, Der weif3e Dominikaner (1921,
The White Dominican) Meyrink’s claim that his was ‘inspired
literature’ and that his book had been dictated to him from other
spheres further intensified the legend that had grown around
him. The story of the alleged suicide attempt, from which he was
saved when a bookseller’s apprentice threw some occult advertisements and the sample issue of an occult magazine through
his door and thus set him on his occult path, has all the features
of a conveniently apocryphal story. His failure as a banker in
Prague in the 1890s may owe as much to the airs of occult
experimentation that he liked to give himself than to the plottings of his enemies: for this is a quality not exactly trust-inspiring inabanker! and ifhe was accused ofusing spiritual guidance
in his banking business, this sounds exactly like a Meyrink
satire.

Meyrink’s contacts with various occult orders and organizations are fairly well documented. As early as 1891 a theosophical brotherhood of `The Blue Star’ was founded in Prague.
Among Meyrink’s acquaintances were various mystics in Vienna and Prague, such as the Viennese polyhistor Friedrich
Eckstein. He read H. P. Blavatsky (whom he later despised) and
corresponded for three months with Annie Besant, met Rudolf
Steiner (but didn’t get along with him, although Steiner later
wrote favourably of Meyrink’s work). Meyrink also had contacts with French and British Freemasons, various circles with
grandiose sounding names such as `Ancient and Primitive Rite
of Masonry’, and was acquainted with the German guru of the
occult J. Schneiderfranken, who called himself To Yin Ra’. In
1897 he became a member of the Order of Illumination, as well
as a’Brotherhood of the Old Rites of the Holy Grail in the Great
Orient of Patmos’. In 1923 he wanted to become a member of
the ‘Old Gnostic Church of Eleusis’, and in 1926 he became a
member of an ‘Aquarian Foundation’ and a ‘White Lodge’.
Eduard Frank quotes a document that Meyrink received from
‘Mandale of the Lord of the Perfect Circle’ which reads:

‘It is ordered, that Brother Gustav Meyer of Prague be constituted one of the seven Arch-censors. And in virtue of this
Mandale Gustav Meyer receives the Spiritual and Mystic name
Kama.’

And in 1895 he received a letter from a member of a brotherhood in Manchester, in which Meyrink is given his new name:
‘Theravel. This Name, when translated into English, would be
expressed thus: I go; I seek; I find. This is therefore the Motto
of your future life.’ Whether or not this was indeed the motto of
Meyrink’s personal life it is certainly the theme that dominates
all of his major texts.

It is interesting to note that Meyrink, who translated Charles
Dickens (a translation praised by Amo Schmidt), and also some
supernatural stories of Lafacadio Heam and Rudyard Kipling,
apparently had no knowledge of English fiction of the supernatural; he was not familiar with Algernon Blackwood or
Arthur Machen, to say nothing of Aleister Crowley who might
conceivably have been of interest to him.

All this testifies to a considerable interest in the occult, but
what did Meyrink actually believe? His fictional works are not
so much eruptions of the unconscious but literary works with a
strong ludistic component that is not absent even in his occult novels. Meyrink first made a name for himself as a writer of the
sharply satirical, irreverent tales (later collected in The German
Philistine’s Wonder) that bitterly attacked the shibboleths ofthe
German bourgeoisie and the pillars of the state, the bureaucracy,
the military, patriotism and the church. These stories derive
their special impact from an often savage satirical distortion and
exaggeration of specific features of German life. Some stories
are biting parodies of nationalist writers. Typical of these early
stories is ‘ Wetherglobin’, in which apes are inoculated with a
new serum and begin to exhibit all the behaviour of fanatically
patriotic soldiers. His story ‘Die Ersturmung von Serajewo’
(‘The Storming of Sarajevo’) was forbidden in Austria-Hungary during the First World War, for in this broad satire the
Austro-Hungarian army, whose officers are described as cretins, heroically conquer the wrong city (one of their own), and
in 1917 in Germany there raged a press campaign against the
unpatriotic Meyrink. In other stories Meyrink showed a preference for the occult, for Indian mysteries and the wisdom of
the East, and for frightening and grotesque happenings. The
great Austrian satirist Karl Kraus summed him up as combining
‘Buddhism with a dislike for the infantry’.