The Creator

by Salomo Friedlaender, Alfred Kubin (Illustrations), Peter Wortsman (Translation)

Billed by its author--the pseudonymous Mynona (German for "anonymous" backward)--as "the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus," "The Creator" tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona's philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as "a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.," when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a great forgotten German fabulist.
Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871-1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of "Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography" and "Kant for Children") and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called "Grostesken." His friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, German Literature, Germany, Novella

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

Reviews

[Lanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

For several years I have been asking people I know in literary circles to pay more attention to Salomo Friedlaender aka Mynona without much success, but finally Wakefield press and Peter Wortsman have stepped up to begin the task, and have produced _The Creator_, a densely seminal work which like a literary archeopteryx reveals a welcome complexity to studies of European modernism. We can only hope this endeavor opens new narrative lines of continuity not only in Grotesque studies, but within contemporary philosophy, literature, and poetry as well. Here is a writer of fiction, poetry, and literary prose every bit as interesting as Kafka, or Christian Morgenstern for that matter, a praised, and unacknowledged inspiration to both Expressionism and Dadaism, and Surrealism, a writer read by both Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin, who, along with a prodigious literary output produced a philosophical oeuvre which at once completes and questions its other! Now that Friedlaender's Collected Works have been brought out in German by Hartmut Geerken and Detlef Thiel and this signal piece has been dropped into our laps, I for one can only hope that _Creative Indifference_ will not be far behind! This volume includes as well as the titular novel, one of Mynona's prose Grotesks as well as a contextualizing biographical essay and a much needed bibliography for works in English translation from Herr Thiel.. To think that Wolfgang Kayser didn't even mention this writer is a scandal! Mr. Wortsman's translation is also to be greatly commended as Mynona even by his own accounting was "Ur-radically deep in the German language," ie, difficult to translate.. Mynona's pen name is the word Anonym in reverse, but let's not have him remain anonymous, let's reverse that fate! Mynona! Mynona! Welcome Back!! Thank you Wakefield Press and Peter Wortsman!

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This weird man's aims are mine: to slip beneath the intellectual hot air, to elude the self-identification with the shallow and transitory, to enter the vast emptiness within where the self is an enormous anonymity, and from there to actively participate in the creation of the continuing universe. Lofty, no? Not really, as he and I both agree it is our natural state; it has only been obscured by innumerable intellectual and emotional accretions. So, yes, for his thought, his ideas, his thrust (and his obsessiveness) I androgynously embrace Mynona deep in the mirror of our mutually anonymous being; but for his literature I merely shake his hand and move on, as the tales, however pulpishly compelling they are, are little more than transparent vehicles for the expedient transmission of his fascinating ideas.

* As with all Wakefield productions this is a very attractive volume that feels solid and substantial in the hands.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

An attempt to express perennialist concepts-- much better expressed via symbolism & poetry-- through a purely rationalistic Kantian crust. Doomed to failure on a metaphysical level right there, but also proves to be a literary dead end as others have noted. To think that this guy mocked Meyrink!

I'm glad I discovered so many other wonderful Wakefield Press books before hitting this clunker.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was originally published at The Scrying Orb.

OK, I’m done. I will no longer be suckered into buying unheralded classics from various points in the 20th century that happened to be suffering in obscurity until, just now, a small press managed the painstaking task of reviving it and translating it into english.

The inside flap of The Creator says

Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender was a–

Let’s stop here for a second with this wonderfully ambiguous sentence. Mentioned in the same breath as Kafka? I’m sure such breaths were:

Salomo Friedlaender and Franz Kafka are both writers.

or

Salomo Friedlaender is not nearly as good a writer as Franz Kafka.

Anyway, on with the blurb:

Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day and a literary absurdist by night.

A serious 19th century German philosopher who wrote satirical fantasy tales by night? Sounds fun! But this Jekyll &Hyde description is pure fraud. The Creator is barely fiction — it’s just a short tale to promote the philosophy of a Kant disciple named Ernst Marcus. To wit, here’s a monologue from one of the professor characters in the story:

Consider the work of the Kantian Ernst Marcus! This estimable epistemological theorist proves with convincing acuity that sensory perception does not only ensue as a consequence of the inward-directed affect of external objects on our brain, but also emanates with equal force from the brain outward toward those objects. An ethereal sensory stream surges from our body, our brain, and in particular, from our optical nerve center, outward into the world around us, all the way to the Sun, thus also to the reflected Sun in the mirror.

So our brains are beaming sensory perception back at the sun. Okay. This could be an interesting philosophy to explore in a novella. But here it is not.

The actual plot has a solitary man meet a much younger woman and start dreaming of each other and this turns out to involve some mad-scientist-like old man (the woman’s uncle/father) who espouses the above philosophy, and has a magic mirror ready to demonstrate it (poorly). It’s boring, not particularly well written, and without charm. Then the story repeats. The Creator wraps up and there’s a second short story following it that tells almost exactly the same story. Younger woman, misunderstood man, old man with a magic mirror. Kant/Ernst Marcus monologue. Both stories have the exact same conclusion — man and woman merge into some pure non-sexual angelic being. It’s baffling.

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very odd that something so absurd could be so easy to digest an immediately enjoyable but I suppose I can thank Khrzhizhanovsky and Villiers for paving my way to Mynona/Friedlaender. If you enjoy a tale that displays coiled anachronisms and a bit of sci-fi wit - don't hesitate to check this out. He's not out to shock but he does fit nicely with the French Decadents. He's been fairly mis-cast as an expressionist and even a dadist because of his peers but like K. and V. he really doesn't fit any specific niche. However, to help the reader of this review understand him a bit more i think it's fair to suggest that like most people that read Kant, Verne and Kafka at the same time, there is a powerful and always intuitive drive to channel scientific progress into fictive machinations. If you'll allow film comparisons - I think Gance's Dr. Tube and the experimentation of Melies are both salient points of reference. I'm always fascinated to see what the intellectuals of their time projected as the reality that I currently experience.

The translation is something I do not feel overly qualified to critique based on my limited understanding of German but I think it's fair to say that this is a very book to read and the language never feels second-hand. Most importantly - I really enjoyed this book and where other historic sci-fi leaves me a bit cold - it's Mynona's attention to philosophy that ties things nicely together and provides a logical philosophical foundation that otherwise lacking might diminish my interest.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than a lot of this publisher's middling choices for rescue-from-obscurity translations, but not quite the "classic" the intro and afterword might lead you to believe.
"Mynona" was the pseudonym of German-Jewish fabulist and fantasist Salomo Friedlander and The Creator showcases his still-fascinating ideas of "eccentric creativity" and lucid dreamscapes by which an individual can master the control of reality. This is all told through the bare-bones plot of the narrator, the beautiful girl he keeps dreaming of, and her uncle, whose dream experiments have harmlessly ensnared them both, meeting up and philosophizing. There's a lot of pretty astounding sexual frankness, free-love suggestions of free-love fuckery, and ultimate gender union through cosmic sex.
Or something. I'm not quite sure. The story switches tracks often: one moment gothy chase mystery, the next bizarre aesthetic ideas of god/goddess imaginative reality-bending. I finished it, which I can't say for some of the publisher's works, and it does resonate with one for a while afterwards. Better than Kafka, I'll leave it there.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interessant, maar had een veel wildere of meer desoriënterende trip verwacht.

[Jalyn McNeal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is literally everything I like in the media that I ingest whether that be literary, cinematic, televisual, etc. “The Creator” is actually, now, one of my favorite books I’ve read. I randomly discovered Mynona/Salomo through a connection to Sun Ra; he was mentioned quite numerously by the editor in Ra’s “Immeasurable Equation”, with uncanny parallels drawn between the two. I really enjoyed reading Sun Ra’s output, so there isn’t any surprise that I’ve recently found myself enamored with Friedlaender.

Mynona has such an endearing and earnest quality in his writing. He’s whimsical, he’s surrealist, he’s absurdist, he’s witty, and he’s deeply in tune with the mechanics of how reality warps and eddies around the fine tuned imagination. No surprise there, as he is an avid and ardent follower of Immanuel Kant. This story is such a cool one, though it’s really just a vessel to imbue his philosophical allegory with, which gets no complaints from me.

“The Wearisome Wedding Night” — the grotesque following the end of “The Creator” — was disturbing in its portrayal, expectedly, but emotionally stirring in subject matter. All in all, this was a great first step into the world of Mynona, and I have since ordered “The Critical Introduction to Salomo Friedlaender” to satiate an acutely whetted appetite! 😃

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this one pretty enjoyable.

I think it is a real shame that this didn't make more of a splash back in the day because it might have garnered a more respected place in history. As it stands, it's been superseded by so many better novels that tackle the same themes.

It's a good book. A quick read. It is the story of a man who dreams a woman and then meets her. Thereafter it becomes more ludicrous than fantastic.

If you've read a lot of philosophy, you won't get much extra from this.

I kinda wish I'd read it when I was a kid, because I'd have fallen for it for sure. A good foundational text. I'll probably keep it on my shelf for my nieces and nephews when they get a bit older because it's surreal without being too crude.

One further note is that I might have to credit this one for my first lucid dream. A pretty cool side effect. I think it was a combo of this book and scribbling notes for a semi-autobiographical side project I'm working on. Fun times.

[B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose suffers from forced ebullitions to propel the narrative ("Please explain Sir Baron! I cried out, seized with great emotion." p. 71), but makes up for it with its philosophical density, its transcendental apotheosis towards the universal I, and its anti-erotic spiritual communion—themes redolent of my own story Aces.

Pretty decent, albeit flawed. 2.5-3.

Also includes a forgettable short story that is somewhat of a condensed rehash of the title story.

[Mario · Rating 3 out of 5]

No me he enterao ni del clima

[Texasshole · Rating 2 out of 5]

'It was okay' is pretty much the perfect rating for my opinion of this book. The cover illustration and the back cover blurb promised a lot, but in the end all it really did was fill my time at the airport. Although the book does end with some interesting ruminations (the last two or three chapters carry the story) there's just honestly not a lot that happens leading up to those thoughts. Also, the translator here has done little to correct Mynona's rough writing style, not least of which his amateurish use (or lack thereof) of quotation marks and the like. Originally published in incremental fashion, I find it hard to imagine keeping up with this story if it wasn't published in one continuous volume. I found the short story which accompanies this book, The Wearisome Wedding Night, to be a much more condensed and satisfying version of the same theme.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

A European Modernist sci-fi novel about the melding of an angel from two wayward souls. It started out a novel and ended up a philosophical treatise. Along the way the characters fade and become less interesting and the novel slumps into a occult treatise narrated by a kind of Kantian Dr. Frankenstein. Still worth reading if only for the dream descriptions and cityscapes early on.

[Julianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like many of you, I had never heard of Mynona before reading this book. It is an amazing philosophical journey through the idea of existence and what humans are capable of, while being quite enjoyable. I would definitely read this again

[stig · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice volume. A story concerned more with ideas than story. An interesting (not particularly revelatory) read.