Afigure from Jewish tradition seized upon by Christian writers during the early nineteenth century and only later adopted by Jewish authors, the Golem has since embodied the ambivalent in- and outside perspectives on Jews in the German-speaking lands. Its recent revival in German and Austrian culture reflects the shifting political and cultural constellations in post-1989 Europe, and exemplifies the Golem's heightened popularity during periods of radical change. The following exploration of the Golem in contemporary literature and film will show how this abject figure has come to embody the competing and overlapping discourses around the Nazi and GDR past, and serves to configure Jewish and German identities in the New Europe.

The term “Golem” first appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Psalm 139:16 it connotes a shapeless mass, perhaps an embryo, while a derivative of the root in Isaiah 49:21 indicates female infertility. Medieval Jewish mystics adopted the term to describe an artificial man created from clay and brought to life by a cabbalistic ritual of words. By the nineteenth century, Jewish folk-tale traditions featuring an ever-growing Golem animated by an amulet had entered German literature. A century later, the Golem had metamorphosed into a figure of haunted memory. Following the large number of renditions of the Golem and related figures of the uncanny during the early twentieth century, including Paul Wegener's 1920 film Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into the World), Jewish writers adopted the Golem's association with haunted memory during the first two decades after the Shoah in order to commemorate the destroyed prewar Jewish life and the Shoah itself.