Nationalist Voices against Gustav Meyrink’s Wartime Publications: Adolf Bartels, Albert Zimmermann, and the Hetze of 1917–1918

Abstract

In 1917 the writer Gustav Meyrink was the target of attacks in the German media. Nationalist critics, dismayed by the skyrocketing success of Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, had reexamined his pre-war literary output and condemned the author as undeutsch and antinational. An extensive examination of newspaper articles and other documentation from this two-year debate reveals that anti-modernism and antisemitism are the true issues at the heart of the so-called Gustav Meyrink Hetze. (AB)