The Golem

The Golem (German: Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, "The Golem, How He Came into the World") is a 1920 German silent horror film directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, telling the old rabbinical legend of a clay monster created by Rabbi Loew to save the Jews of medieval Prague from persecution.¹ It was the third and last Golem film made by Wegener, who also played the title creature, and it is regarded as a landmark of early German Expressionist cinema and a cornerstone of the horror genre.^{2 • 3}

Wegener's three Golem films

The actor, screenwriter, and director Paul Wegener returned to the Golem legend three times within five years, releasing films in 1915, 1917, and 1920, and he played the Golem himself in all three, fixing the popular image of the clumsy, robot-like creature with its distinctive hairstyle.² The 1915 film, a well-received version set in modern times, already emphasized the threatening, monstrous side of a golem that gets out of control; the 1917 film, The Golem and the Dancing Girl, was conceived as a comedy.^{2 • 10} Wegener had wanted from the start to film the original legend set in Prague, but producers of the first film refused to finance a high-budget costume epic and pushed him into a modern drawing-room drama; only in 1920 did he shoot the Prague story as intended.¹¹

Neither of the two wartime films survives in its entirety; only brief portions of the 1915 film are known. The 1920 film is the only one that survives complete, and it functions as an origin story, going back to the beginning of the tale rather than continuing it.² The dating of the first film varies across reference works: filmportal.de lists "Der Golem" as a 1914 film by Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener, while the German History in Documents and Images project and the Jewish Museum Berlin give 1915.^{9 • 1 • 2}

Production and design

The sets. For the 1920 film Wegener commissioned his friend, the architect Hans Poelzig, to design the film sets. Poelzig, working with Marlene Moeschke, developed in rapidly drawn sketches a new, expressive, anthropomorphic formal language for the scenery. Wegener said that what Poelzig's "city poetry" created was "not reality, but the atmosphere in which the Golem breathes."¹² The sets, erected in the studios at Berlin-Tempelhof, do not reproduce the Prague ghetto but construct an environment of narrow lanes, crooked houses, and pointed gables in the Expressionist style, and the Jewish Museum Berlin credits them as the first three-dimensional film set in film history that actors could actually enter and stand upon.^{5 • 2} The Golem's own distinctive figure was designed by Wegener together with the sculptor Rudolf Belling.⁵

Cinematography. The camera work was by Karl Freund, who later filmed Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and went on to work in Hollywood on classics such as Dracula (1931) and The Mummy (1932). The film set its golem plot within a lyrical exploration of light and shadow, and contemporary critics praised its inventive lighting and effects.^{13 • 14}

Cast. Albert Steinrück played Rabbi Loew, Lyda Salmonova his daughter Mirjam, Ernst Deutsch the rabbi's assistant, and Otto Gebühr the emperor; the little girl was played by Loni Nest.⁵

Reception and significance

Thanks to its action-driven plot and visual artistry, the film played to sold-out theaters for months after its premiere on 29 October 1920 at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin.^{1 • 6} The Murnau Foundation describes it as one of the greatest artistic and commercial successes of German silent film production, whose expressionist image and decor design has lost none of its suggestive effect, and notes that its Poelzig sets were pathbreaking for film architecture.⁴ Contemporaneous viewers and critics declared that Germany had finally succeeded on the film front, if not on the battlefield.¹³

The film is widely treated as a precursor of the Frankenstein myth on screen and a forerunner of the classic monster movies produced by Universal in the 1930s.^{3 • 14} Like the Frankenstein tale, the story of a created being that escapes its maker's control suggested the unpredictable nature of innovation, a cautionary theme in an era of accelerating technological and social change. Its theme of Jewish persecution also had a contemporary resonance: the post-1918 wave of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in central and eastern Europe was then arriving in Germany, and audiences might have connected the film's medieval ghetto with neighborhoods where refugees concentrated, such as Berlin's Scheunenviertel, which became the site of violent antisemitic attacks just three years after the film's release.¹

Survival and restoration

No contemporary German release version of the film survives. From the exposed negative material, two original negatives with differing camera positions were assembled; the A-negative, cut from the best takes, is preserved at Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. For the American release in 1921 the film was heavily altered through re-editing and cuts.⁴ Running times of surviving versions differ accordingly: the Murnau Foundation records a length of 1,961 meters, about 72 minutes, while restored presentations run from 76 to 89 minutes depending on the version and framing.^{4 • 3 • 15}

A 4K restoration, intended as a close approximation of the lost German version, was completed in 2018 by L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna from the film's original negative, which had been thought lost, under the supervision of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and Cinematek. The restoration premiered at the 75th Venice International Film Festival and has since been shown in cinemas and released on home video.^{7 • 14 • 16}

References

1. Paul Wegener, The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), German History in Documents and Images
2. Martina Lüdicke (2016), Horror and Magic. Chapter 5 of the Exhibition Catalogue GOLEM, Jewish Museum Berlin
3. The Golem, Jerusalem Cinematheque – Israel Film Archive
4. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung
5. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. Film von Paul Wegener und Carl Boese, Kunsthalle Emden
6. Der Golem, Wie Er in Die Welt Kam, Shot in Berlin
7. Der Golem (1920), Arnolfini / South West Silents
8. The Golem, Rotten Tomatoes
9. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, filmportal.de
10. From the golem to the robots: a visual evolution of a myth, Open Cultural Studies
11. Between Text and Text: The Hermeneutics of Intertextuality in Ancient Cultures and Their Afterlife in Medieval and Modern Times
12. Der Golem – von Mystik bis Minecraft, Jüdisches Museum Berlin
13. The Golem, How He Came into the World, JSTOR
14. Der Golem (4K Restoration), Eureka Video
15. Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam, Eye Filmmuseum
16. The Golem: Kino Restores a Silent Horror Classic, Cinapse

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent genre and exploitation features

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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