He was the illegitimate son of Baron Karl von Varnbüler und zu Hemmingen, a Württembergian minister, and actress Maria Wilhelmina Adelheyd Meier.

[1] Until thirteen years of age Meyrink lived mainly in Munich, where he completed elementary school.

That day, 14 August 1892, on Assumption Eve, Meyrink, twenty-four years old, was allegedly standing at his table with a gun at his head, determined to shoot himself.

At that moment he heard a strange scratching sound and someone's hand put a tiny booklet under his door.

[2] During the 1900s Meyrink started publishing satiric short stories in the magazine Simplicissimus, signing them with his mother's surname.

In 1911 Meyrink relocated with his family to the little Bavarian town Starnberg, and in 1913 the book Des deutschen Spießers Wunderhorn (The German Philistine's Magic Horn) was published in Munich.

It was a compilation of short stories from the previous three books and several new ones; the title is a parody of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Many of these stories had satirical styles, ridiculing institutions such as the army and the church; Austrian writer Karl Kraus would later describe Meyrink's work as combining "Buddhism with a dislike for the infantry".

It is left to the reader to decide whether Pernath is simply writing down his hallucinations or gradually becoming a real golem.

The success of these works caused Meyrink to be ranked as one of the three main German-language supernatural fiction authors (along with Hanns Heinz Ewers and Karl Hans Strobl).

There he and his family lived for the next eight years and two more works – The White Dominican and Meyrink's longest novel The Angel of the West Window – were written.

[1] During the winter of 1931, while skiing, Meyrink's son seriously injured his backbone and for the rest of his life he was confined to his armchair.