While Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920) is today considered part of the canon of German silent film classics, Paul Wegener’s first Golem film made in 1914 is essentially believed lost. Until recently, only two very short fragments – of 20 metres and 77 metres respectively – were known to exist. These fragments survived in private collections and were subsequently preserved by the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR, the state film archive of the German Democratic Republic, in the 1960s and the Bundesarchiv in the 1990s. In addition, the screenplay and a number of stills survive in Paul Wegener’s estate (the Kai Möller collection), held at the Deutsches Filminstitut. The impulse to bring all these materials together in an attempt to reconstruct the film came about when Fernando Peña identified a 16mm duplicate negative held at the Museo del Cine Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires as the second reel of the American version of Der Golem.
Paul Wegener, who became famous as an actor in Max Reinhardt’s theatre company in Berlin, objected from the outset to any attempt “to force stage plays and literary storylines into film’s Procrustean bed” and sought out distinctly cinematic subject matter: “The first thing you must do is forget theatre and literature and learn to create films from filmic ideas. The true poet of the cinema is the camera. The possibility to constantly change the viewer’s perspective, the multitude of special effects (produced via double exposure, mirrors, etc.), in short the technology of film should dictate the choice of the story.” (Paul Wegener, lecture, “The Artistic Possibilities of Film”, 24 April 1916)
The saga of a clay statue magically brought to life, set in a Prague ghetto, was Wegener’s second success after Der Student von Prag, released in 1913. Since the production’s modest budget didn’t allow for expensive period costumes and settings, the story was shifted to the (then) present-day. Shooting took place in Summer 1914, at the Deutsche Bioscop studios in Babelsberg and on location in the historic town of Hildesheim. By the time the film premiered in January 1915, Paul Wegener was serving as a lieutenant in the German army in Flanders. Wartime advertisements promoted Der Golem as a “film for educated people”, and highlighted that Wegener was serving at the front and had been decorated with the Iron Cross.
The “most successful film of its time” ran for four weeks in a number of cinemas in Berlin, and was seen by more than 100,000 picturegoers. The film was also exported to Scandinavia, Poland, Japan, and the U.S. In America, where it was retitled The Monster of Fate, the film’s German origin went unmentioned. Instead, it was advertised as a “Bohemian production”. The only members of the cast mentioned in public announcements were “Lydia Salmonova” and “Henry Galeen”, most likely due to their apparently non-German-sounding names.
Wegener conceived his big-budget 1920 remake of Der Golem as a prequel rather than a sequel to the earlier film. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam is essentially an origin story set in the past, featuring period costumes and Expressionist sets by Hans Poelzig. Although the second Golem film follows the storyline of the first film very closely, going as far as to copy certain shots outright, Paul Wegener is credited as sole writer and director. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam ultimately did not serve as a companion piece to the first Golem film, but as its replacement. There is no indication that Der Golem and Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam were ever screened together on a double bill.

Stefan Droessler