by Stefan Zweig
STEFAN ZWEIG (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied at the Universities of Berlin and Vienna. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. Among his most celebrated books are his memoir of the Vienna of his youth, The World of Yesterday, and the novella Schachnovelle, published by NYRB Classics as Chess Story.
JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mark Morris, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, and Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. She also edited the recent, unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.
BEWARE OF PITY
STEFAN ZWEIG
Translated by
PHYLLIS AND TREVOR BLEWITT
Introduction by
JOAN ACOCELLA
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title
Introduction
Author’s Note
Beware of Pity
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
In the 1920s and 1930s Stefan Zweig was an immensely popular writer, a man who had to barricade himself in his house in Salzburg in order to avoid the fans lurking around his property in the hope of waylaying him. According to his publisher, he was the most widely translated author in the world. Today, while he is still read in Germany and also in France, his name is barely known to the average Anglophone reader. In the last few decades, however, there has been an effort on the part of several publishers to get Zweig back into print in English. In my opinion, no book of his deserves reissue more than his one novel, Beware of Pity (Ungeduld des Herzens, 1938).
Zweig was a friend and admirer of Sigmund Freud, his fellow Viennese, and it was no doubt Freud’s writings, together with the experience of two world wars, that persuaded him of the fundamental irrationalism of the human mind. Absolutely central to his fiction is the subject of obsession. And so it is with Beware of Pity. To my knowledge, this book is the first sustained fictional portrait of emotional blackmail based on guilt. Today, it is a commonplace that one person may enslave another by excessive love, laced with appeals to gratitude, compassion, and duty, and that the loved one may actually feel those sentiments — love, too, of a sort — while at the same time wanting nothing more than to be out the door. But even in the iconoclastic Thirties, gratitude, compassion, and duty were not yet widely seen as potential engines of tyranny. It was partly for his cold examination of those esteemed motives that Zweig admired Freud — “he enlarged the sincerity of the universe,” Zweig wrote — and in Beware of Pity he carried the analysis forward.
The story opens in 1913, in a small garrison town on the Hungarian frontier. Stationed there is Anton Hofmiller, a second lieutenant of the Austro-Hungarian cavalry. He is twenty-five, but having spent most of his life in a military academy, he is younger than his years. One night he wangles an invitation to dinner at the local Schloss, the home of Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva, a great industrialist. He spends the evening in a daze of Tokay and admiration. The halls are hung with Gobelins; the dinner is magnificent; his seatmate, Kekesfalva’s niece Ilona, has arms “like peeled peaches”; he dances the night away. Then, as he is about to leave, he remembers that his host has a daughter — Edith, seventeen or eighteen years old — and that he should ask her to dance. In a side room, he finds her, a frail-looking girl with gray eyes. He bows to her, and says, “May I have this dance, gnädiges Fräulein?” Her response is not what he expected:
The bowed head and shoulders jerked backwards, as though to avoid a blow; ... the eyes stared fixedly at me with an expression of horror such as I had never before encountered in my whole life. The next moment a shudder passed through the whole convulsed body.... And suddenly there burst forth a storm of sobbing.... The weeping went on, grew, if anything, more vehement, breaking forth again and again, like a gush of blood, like a hot agony of vomiting, in spasm after spasm.
Hofmiller retreats to the salon, where Ilona intercepts him. “Are you mad?” she says. “Didn’t you see her crippled legs?” No, he didn’t; she was sitting at a table. He bolts from the house, his heart “hot with shame.”
Edith has thus made her first strike, spontaneously. (As we discover, she often has such fits when something displeases her.) But for the folie à deux that is the novel’s subject to take root, Hofmiller must make a complementary response. Already that night, he is appalled at having given such pain: “I felt as though I had struck an innocent child with a whip.” At the same time, another thought — one that will become important as the story continues — begins working on his mind: his prestige as an officer. He has committed a gaffe, a social error, and has thereby dishonored both his regiment and himself within the regiment: “At our mess table every piece of idiocy on the part of any one of us was chewed over for the next ten or twenty years.” The following morning, spending all he has left of his month’s pay, he sends Edith a great bouquet of roses. In return, he receives a note from her, inviting him to tea. He needn’t say what day he’s coming, she adds: “I am — alas! — always at home.” Already she is appealing to his compassion, and when, the next afternoon, he pays his call, she does so again, telling him how, before the illness that paralyzed her legs five years earlier, she loved to dance, she wanted to be Pavlova. But alas!
The day after this visit, the innocent Hofmiller is riding out to the morning parade, his men behind him. He loves riding, and he spurs his horse to a gallop: “On, on, on, gallop, gallop, gallop! Ah, to ride thus, to ride thus to the ends of the earth!” But suddenly, in the midst of this ecstasy, he remembers Edith, and is ashamed of his physical strength, physical enjoyment. He orders his men to slow to a trot. Disappointed, they obey. That, Hofmiller says, was “the first symptom of the strange poisoning of my spirit by pity.”
Interestingly, anti-sentimentally, the object of his pity is not endearing. Edith is narcissistic and imperious — a diva of pain. At tea the day before, she had been forced to leave early (the masseur had arrived), and, though accustomed to using a wheelchair, this time she insisted on walking:
She pressed her lips firmly together, raised herself on to the crutches and — tap-tap, tap-tap — stamped, swayed, heaved herself forward, contorted and witch-like, while the butler held his hands out behind her to catch her should she slip or collapse. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap — first one foot and then the other.... She wanted to show me, me in particular, to show all of us, that she was a cripple. She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture.
In the course of the novel, that “tap-tap” will come to sound like something out of Poe, and Edith’s witch-like character will become more pronounced. In a way, her father, grieving for her, his only love (he is a widower), appeals more powerfully to Hofmiller’s compassion than Edith does. Even in this grotesque scene, however, Zweig makes it clear that the wounded do deserve our pity. And how are we to withhold it, though in giving it in the measure they ask — Hofmiller is soon expected at the house every day — we may feel coerced?
That, in any case, is Hofmiller’s reasoning as, from day to day, from teatime to dinnertime, he doles out the greater and greater reassurances that Edith demands. She of course falls in love with him, and her doctor tells him that he cannot disabuse her as to his feelings, or not yet, for this would doom a cure that she is about to undertake in Switzerland. So he descends ever deeper into hypocrisy. In the process, Zweig gives us a piercing analysis of the motives underlying pity. Gradually Hofmiller realizes how much he enjoys the attentions paid to him for
his emotional services, how it pleases him that when he arrives at the Schloss his favorite cigarettes — and also the novel (its pages already cut) that he had said in passing that he wanted to read — are laid out on the tea table. Nor is it lost on him that his own sense of strength is magnified by Edith’s weakness and, above all, by his growing power over the Kekesfalvas, the fact that if he, a poor soldier, does not present himself at teatime, this great, rich household is thrown into a panic, and the chauffeur is dispatched to town to spy him out and see what he is doing in preference to waiting on Edith. Beyond the matter of power, however, Hofmiller finds that the emotion of pity is a pleasure just in itself. It exalts him, takes him to a new place. Before, as an officer, he was required only to obey orders and be a good fellow. Now he is a moral being, a soul.
That analysis of compassion is one of the book’s foremost contributions, but any psychoanalyst could have done it. What only Zweig could have created are the scenes between Hofmiller and Edith: the concrete, subtle, and hair-raising enactments of ambivalence, hers as she vacillates between appealing to his pity and asking for his love, his as he is torn between solicitude and recoil. Late in the novel, during one of his visits, she finds his attentions insufficient. She starts to have one of her fits, and to allay it, he places his hand on her arm:
Suddenly the spasm ceased; she grew rigid again and did not stir. It was as though her whole body were straining to understand what this touch indicated, to know whether it was a gesture of ... love or merely of pity. It was terrible, this waiting with bated breath, this waiting of a tense, motionless body. I had not the courage to withdraw the hand which had with such marvellous suddenness stilled the paroxysm of sobs, and on the other hand I had not the strength to force from my fingers the caress that Edith’s body, her burning flesh — I could tell — so urgently awaited. I let my hand lie there, as though it were not a part of me, and I felt as though all the blood in her body came surging in a warm pulsating stream to this one spot.
Now she moves his hand to her heart and begins caressing it:
There was no avidity in this fervent stroking, only serene, awe-struck bliss at being allowed at last to take fleeting possession of some part of my body.... I enjoyed the rippling of her fingers over my skin, the tingling of my nerves — I let it happen, powerless, defenceless, yet subconsciously ashamed at the thought of being loved so infinitely, while for my part feeling nothing but shy confusion, an embarrassed thrill.
The image of Hofmiller standing there awkwardly as Edith fondles his captured hand, the sheer, no-exit suffocation of the situation: the great psychologists of love (Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev) never went further than this. The scene combines their moral knowledge with a kind of neurotic, subdermal excitement reminiscent of Schnitzler, a friend of Zweig’s and another legatee of Freud. Nothing in the book is more striking than its sustained, morbid tension: the nervous laughter, the drumming fingers, the moments of happiness that convert in an instant to fury and grief, with the cutlery suddenly thrown onto the plates. Like Hofmiller, the reader is dragged down, by the neck.
A few days after the above episode, Edith will again seize Hofmiller’s hand, and slip an engagement ring onto his finger. From there, the relationship moves swiftly to its fated, disastrous conclusion. That very fatedness, not just in Beware of Pity but in his stories too, has been held against Zweig. A number of writers — for example, Stephen Spender and Salman Rushdie — have remarked on the lock-step progression of his plots and, correspondingly, on the psychological fixity of his characters. His fictional writings are in some measure case histories, textbook portraits of neurosis, Hofmiller’s indecision and Edith’s guilt-wielding being prime examples. To my mind, however, Edith’s character — her unlovability, even as she demands to be loved — is a wonderfully bold stroke, opening up whole caverns of psychological meaning. The outcasts of the world “desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy,” Hofmiller says. “They love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love.”
Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881, within months of many of the great early modernists (Joyce, Stravinsky, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Picasso), but his views were not the same as theirs. Silence, exile, and cunning: these were imposed on him, but they were torture to him, and he never ceased to mourn the passing of what, in his memoir The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, 1942), he called the “Golden Age of Security” represented by pre — World War I Vienna. From Musil and Schnitzler and Joseph Roth, we have learned to view Franz Joseph’s Vienna as a scene of empty (however glittering) pomp in the public sphere and neuroticism in the private sphere, but Zweig’s circumstances were different from those men’s. He was the son of a millionaire industrialist — and the second son, the one not required to go into the family business. Already as a teenager he had joined a group of aesthetes whose lodestar was the brilliant young Hugo von Hofmannsthal. His thoughts were only for art, which he saw in the most ideal terms. After a conversation with Rilke, he wrote, “one was incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days.” A visit to the studio of Rodin bestowed on one “the Eternal secret of all great art, yes, of every mortal achievement, ... that ecstasis, that being-out-of-the-world of every artist.” Zweig’s politics were correspondingly vague and soaring. In keeping with the so-called “Austrian idea” — that multi-national, multi-ethnic Austro-Hungary was a symbol of human fellowship — he saw himself as a citizen not of any one country, but of Europe as a whole, “our sacred home, cradle and Parthenon of our occidental civilization.” His membership in that collective fired him with humanitarianism and optimism. In 1914, he writes in The World of Yesterday, “The world offered itself to me like a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.”
The fact that he was Jewish put no dent in his confidence. He was part of that large class of educated, assimilated, secular European Jews who were to receive such a surprise in the 1930s. As a young man, he said, he never “experienced the slightest suppression or indignity as a Jew,” and his Moravian family were “free both of the sense of inferiority and of the smooth pushing impatience of the ... Eastern Jews.” Note his willingness to disassociate himself from the poor, despised Ostjuden, who at that time were pouring into Western Europe in flight from the Russian pogroms. Herr von Kekesfalva, in Beware of Pity, started out as one of that species, and Zweig’s portrayal of Kekesfalva’s early years is what, today, many of us would call anti-Semitic writing. But Zweig, as a youth, didn’t really regard himself as a Jew, or not mostly. That was his father’s world, or his grandfather’s. By the time he wrote The World of Yesterday, in the 1940s, he had, perforce, learned to identify with the Jews and to make claims for them as an entity. “Nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry,” he says, and he names the names. With typical modesty, he does not include himself, but by the age of nineteen he had published his first book of poems and had begun writing feuilletons for the highly regarded Neue Freie Presse, under the editorship of Theodor Herzl.
Fired by his devotion to art, he was nevertheless unconfident of his ability to contribute to that enterprise, and so he spent many of his early years in service to other artists, as translator or biographer. During his lifetime he was as much valued for his biographical books and essays — on Verlaine, Verhaeren, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Romain Rolland, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Erasmus, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, and Magellan, among others — as for anything else that he wrote, though his collections of novellas were also hugely popular, with their portrayals of sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois manners. In addition, he wrote plays, travel books, and an opera libretto. He was a literary man of all trades, not so much an author as a “voice” — to some, the voice of Europe.
Zweig often received letters from female fans, and one such correspondence — with Friderike von Winternitz, a young writer — led t
o his first marriage. Friderike left her husband for Zweig, and they were together for more than twenty years, his most productive years, from the 1910s to the 1930s. Then, in 1933, Friderike hired a new secretary for Zweig: Charlotte Altmann, a shy, self-effacing German-Jewish woman, twenty-seven years his junior, whose family had just been run out of Germany. Lotte immediately fell in love with him. What he felt in return is not clear to his biographers, but at this time his mood was very bleak. His youthful confidence had been irreparably wounded by World War I, and as the Nazis began dragging Europe into a second war, his former optimism converted to an equally absolute pessimism. By 1933 the Hitler Youth were burning his books; in 1935 Richard Strauss’s opera The Silent Woman was canceled after two performances because Zweig had written the libretto.
But his problem went beyond politics. He had come to hate the bustle and noise of his Salzburg household. He was a manically devoted worker. Friderike, though she tried to insulate him, had two daughters from her previous marriage, and she enjoyed visitors. In her 1946 biography of Zweig she blames his defection on “the climacteric.” Maybe so, but it seems that he just wanted out, of everything except silence and work, two things that Lotte provided. After several years of vacillation — for he was, by nature, as indecisive as Hofmiller — Zweig in 1938 persuaded Friderike to give him a divorce, assuring her that he had no intention of remarrying and needed only to regain his “student’s freedom.” The following year, he married Lotte.
By then he had escaped to London, and it was during this terrible period, the late Thirties, that he wrote Beware of Pity. Some people have seen Lotte — vulnerable not just politically but also physically (she had severe asthma), and utterly dependent on Zweig — as a model for Edith, but Zweig’s guilt over discarding Friderike must have had some part in the portrait. Then there was Zweig’s mother, a willful and self-absorbed woman with whom, Friderike reports, he lived in open conflict throughout his childhood — a situation that left “indelible scars.” This does not exhaust the list of probable sources. Freud’s case histories unquestionably contributed to Beware of Pity. His patients often suffered paralyses, and tended to fall in love with their doctor. (The words “hysterical” and “subconscious” recur in the novel.) Finally, it does not need restating that this pessimistic book was written during the buildup to World War II. During the Thirties and Forties, Zweig was criticized by many of his colleagues for making no public denunciation of Nazism. His famous name would have added heft to the anti-fascist cause. But for all his humanitarianism, Zweig had a horror of politics. (He didn’t vote; he allowed no radio in the house; he read the newspapers only at night, in the café, lest they disturb his day’s work.) His response to Europe’s peril was indirect, symbolic: Beware of Pity, among other writings.