America Relocated: Karel Čapek’s Robots between Prague, Berlin, and New York

Abstract

The fascination with new technology and science at the beginning of the last century revived old dreams of an artificial human being, an automaton in modern theatre and cinema. The actor and film director Paul Wegener,’ for instance, in Golem, How he Came into the World Z (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920) visualized the story of a golem on screen.3 As in numerous tales and plays, Wegener also shows the revered Rabbi Loew, the “Jewish Faust”,4 who conjured up an assistant to protect the Jewish Ghetto in seventeenth-century Prague.5 Wegener’s Golem is a man made out of clay, brought to life as a hybrid creature with human facial expressions and features, and the movements of a statue.