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A single work of Gustav Meyrink is well known to the English-speaking world, the novel Der Golem (1915; translated as The Golem, 1928). After the appearance of a translation, Howard P. Lovecraft was moved to praise the book in his Supernatural Horror in Fiction (1973), speaking of "its haunting shadowy suggestion of marvels and horrors just beyond reach" and its description, "with singular mastery," of Prague's "ancient ghetto." Meyrink is also repeatedly mentioned in connection with the Golem films of Paul Wegener; the films, however, have little to do with the novel, in which the clay giant given life by the legendary Rabbi Löw plays only a subsidiary role. (Wegener's first film [1914] was based on a 1908 play by Arthur Holitscher; the second, Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam [The Golem: How He Came into the World, 1920], takes the name of one of its characters, but almost nothing else, from Meyrink's text.)
In France a wave of translations in the 1960s and 1970s won Meyrink a following among devotees of the occult.
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