Stefan Zweig - Beware of Pity

Stefan Zweig - Beware of Pity

There are writers whose reputation, while they are alive, burns fierce and bright; but once they have died, for whatever reason the fire becomes dully glowing embers, stoked only the occasional obsessive. Stefan Zweig, at least in the English speaking world, has suffered such a fate. Until reasonably recently, most any of the works of this great early twentieth century writer were unavailable in print, and devotees, the numbers of which throughout the intervening decades was small though their passion, high, were forced to read and reread tattered paperback copies printed years and years ago. Over the last fifteen or twenty years, The Pushkin Press in the UK have been duly reissuing Zweig's works, and one of the greatest is Beware of Pity, a sophisticated examination of the psychology of guilt set immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. The Pushkin Press' efforts, along with the New York Review of Books in the US, have done much to enhance the reputation of Zweig for readers in English.

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian empire was one of the two 'sick men of Europe', its culture stagnating and decadent, with an atrophied monied class and a number of large minorities increasingly clamouring for independence and nationhood. Herr Leutenant Anton Hofmiller, a second lieutenant in an Imperial Uhlan regiment, is a product of this culture. He comes from a reasonably well respected family, and has enough money – but only just enough – to support himself as an officer in the cavalry. Newly transferred to a garrison town on the Hungarian front, Anton learns, through a friend, of Kekesfalva, one of the richest men about the city. At Kekesfalva's dinner party, Hofmiller spies his pretty young daughter, Edith, and out of politeness to his host, and pity for the girl who has sat there by herself all evening, asks her to dance.

What now happened was appalling. The bowed head and shoulders jerked backwards, as though to avoid a blow; the blood came rushing to the pale cheeks; the lips, parted the moment before, were pressed sharply together, and only the eyes started fixedly at me with an expression of horror such as I had never before encountered in my whole life.

Edith, though Anton did not know it, is crippled, her legs withered and useless. He is mortified by his behaviour, though accidental, and seeks to rectify the mistake by visiting the Kekesfalva's again by way of apology. Kekesfalva is proud of his visitor and happy to entertain, for the family is rich, yes, but lacking in contacts and sophistication. Kekesfalva is new money, and Jewish, and following a series of misfortunes, have become insular.

Edith is seventeen, and understandably unhappy with her situation. She clings to the hopes of her father that she will be cured, but there is a bitter, manipulative streak to her interactions with others. Edith is sweet, but she rules the house from her lounge, and her tempestuous outbursts cause paroxysms throughout her family members and the household staff.

She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God. But it was this very challenge, this frightful challenge, which made me feel – and a thousand times more acutely than on the occasion of her outburst of despair when I had asked her to dance – how immeasurably she must suffer from her helplessness.

Anton's desire to apologise swamps his capacity for reason, and soon, as his visits increase, his feelings of pity for Edith override any greater sense of reality for his situation. Edith, used to being ignored by everyone for her disability, but particularly by eligible young officers, falls obsessively in love with him.

Anton's emotional immaturity acts as the whirlpool around which everyone else swirls. In the beginning, extricating himself from the Kekesfalva's would be easy, but Anton's sense of pity prevents this from occurring.

Ever since I had first allowed this capacity for sympathy to enter into my being, it seemed to me as though a toxin had found its way into my blood and had made it run warmer, redder, faster, pulsate and throb more vigorously. All of a sudden I could no longer understand the slothful torpor in which I had hitherto lived as though in a grey, insipid twilight. A hundred and one things to which I had never even given a passing thought began to excite me and occupy my thoughts.

And then, a little later:

Again and again, day after day, I found fresh opportunities for indulging, trying out, this passion that had suddenly possessed me. And I said to myself: from now on, help anyone and everyone so far as in you lies. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent. Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.

The sentiment is nice but the expression of it is not. Anton's life becomes tightly embroiled with the Kekesfalva, and as his visits continue, he feels less exulted and more constricted. The senior Kekesfalva smothers Anton with the attention of a man aware that his daughter might have only one chance at a husband. Tensions among Anton and the household increase, until Edith tells him,

Do you think I'm so silly that I can't understand your sometimes getting fed up with playing the Good Samaritan here day after day, can't realise that a grown man would rather go for a ride or take his sound legs for a walk than sit about by an invalid's chair? There's only one thing that disgusts me, one thing I can't stand, and that is excuses, humbug, lies – I'm fed up to the teeth with them.

Zweig shows an astonishing sensitivity in his exploration of his major characters. Anton and Edith gradually slip into an emotionally symbiotic relationship, dependent on one another to satisfy their unhealthy passions. Anton swings back and forth from reluctantly succumbing to his situation, to wildly rebelling against it. Edith, it seems, craves the apology that occurs when Anton, contrite, returns to her side after an outburst, and as time moves on she forces conflict after conflict.

Pity and guilt are difficult emotions to accurately convey, but Zweig manages to do so through the complex examination of the mental states of his characters. Anton's mental turmoil could so easily fall into the melodramatic or contrived, but over the course of three hundred pages, what we instead discover is a complicated situation of cruelty and dependence with no easy answers and little immediate opportunity for resolution. Anton and Edith seem to be inexorably destroying each other's lives, and their own, for reasons that don't make sense from outside their situation, but from their perspectives, is both inevitable and undesirable.

Midway through the novel, Anton discovers Edith's father's background, which has its own origins in pity – though for Kekesfalva, pity turned to love and, until Edith's mother's death, happiness permeated the Kekesfalva household. After her death, and Edith's maiming, the Kekesfalva's turned to Dr Condor in hope of a cure, though Condor, as he tells Anton, knows that there is little that can be done, though Kekesfalva will have none of this. Condor says,

I know, I know...Naturally, he forced it out of you, wrung it from you. I know how he can break down all one's defences with his desperate persistence. Yes, I know, I know that you only weakened out of pity, out of the best possible motives. But – and I think I've already warned you on this score – pity is a confoundedly two-edged business.

Eventually Edith's true feelings of love – plain to the reader, to Kekesfalva, Dr Condor and most anyone who isn't Anton – are revealed, and here Zweig increases the intensity to an almost unbearable level.

Not even for a fleeting moment had it occurred to me to think that under that concealing coverlet there breathed, felt, waited, a naked body, a female body which, like any other, desired and longed to be desired. Never had I, even in my wildest dreams, imagined that invalids, cripples, the immature, the prematurely aged, the despised and rejected, the pariahs among human beings, dared to love.

The emotional significance of the situation the character's find themselves in takes over their lives. What began as an accident turned into an inextricable complication of guilt, pity and the pangs of conscience. Nobody comes away looking pleasant in the situation, but nobody is particularly bad, either. There aren't any evil characters, just a horrible tangle of emotions such as might be experienced during the course of a normal life.

The backdrop of the upcoming World War allows Zweig to juxtapose the predicament of the Kekesfalva's and Anton, with the slowly tipping monolith of the Austro-Hungarian empire. From the opening pages, the creaking and groaning of a very large structure beginning to fall apart is evident. The decay of the empire is reflected in the moral decay of Anton and the corruption and cowardice of the rich in their treatment of the military. Zweig is careful never to overstate his connections, but they are there, just tangible enough to add an extra layer of sophistication to the narration without swamping the story with extraneous details.

Beware of Pity is one of those rare novels, infrequently found, which explore a concept to its utmost depths without ever exhausting its premise. It sits comfortably alongside the great psychological novels of Stendhal, Flaubert and Rolland, the last a great friend of Zweig during the traumatic years of Europe's disintegration. It is a novel that will, cliché aside, stay with you for a very long time. Guilt and pity are not pretty emotions, either to experience directed toward you or to feel yourself toward someone else, but they are common, and Zweig's novel masterfully explores the ramifications of allowing these feelings to take over your life.

Author	Stefan Zweig
Title	Beware of Pity (Original Title: Ungeduld des Herzens)
Translator	Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt
Nationality	Austrian
Publisher	The Pushkin Press
Published	2000 (English) 1939 (German)
Pages	361
Availability: ---Fishpond (AU) ---Amazon (US)

See Also

List of titles by The Pushkin Press under review