70 February-March
February-March 71
Beware
of Pity
By Tony Lowes
Lessons for those who are too
civilised for tormented times
from Stefan Zweig, friend of
Joyce, technology sceptic
and the greatest storyteller of
the last 100 years
J
erey Archer has called Stefan Zweig
“the greatest storyteller of the past 100
years”. He could certainly write. Look at
this, his description of the countryside
around the castle where he had just
met a woman who was central to the coming
cataclysm, in ‘Beware of Pity’ (1939):
“A hot clear windless day lay over the
summer countryside like a golden web.
Smoke rose from the chimneys of the
scattered houses and farms, standing
almost motionless in the air. You could
see thatched cottages with the inevitable
stork’s nests on their rooftops, every
outline showing against the background
of the steel-blue sky as if it had been cut
out with a sharp knife; you could see
the duck ponds glistening like polished
metal outside barns. And among them, in
the pale field of ripening crops, you saw
tiny, Lilliputian figures, dappled cows
grazing, women pulling out weeds and
washing clothes, heavy wagons drawn by
oxen, little carts moving quickly amongst
the neat patches of the arable land”.
The narrator of ‘Beware of Pity’, Zweig’s
only full-length novel, is Anton ‘Toni’
Hofmiller, a young Austro-Hungarian
cavalry ocer stationed in a small
garrison town on the empire’s Hungarian
border shortly before the First World War.
Invited to a castle owned by the wealthy
parvenu Lajos Kekesfalva, he carelessly
asks his host’s daughter Edith, crippled
by polio, to dance; and her humiliation
in revealing her crippled state drives him
into a pattern of remorseful visits in which
genuine compassion is fatally mixed with
vanity and fear of social embarrassment.
Edith mistakes his escalating gestures
of kindness and half-spoken promises for
love, and Hofmiller, too weak to draw a clear
line, allows himself to be manoeuvred into
what looks to the family like an engagement
though he does not intend one. Horrified at
the prospect of being bound to a disabled
girl of Jewish origin and mocked by his fellow
ocers, he publicly denies the engagement,
then panics at the cruelty of what he has done
and flees, arranging a transfer away from the
town.
On the train he is overcome by guilt and
sends a telegram to Kekesfalva’s house,
insisting that he meant his promise and will
stand by Edith after all. The date is 28 June
1914, the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand is
assassinated at Sarajevo, and his telegram
is lost amid the sudden disruption of
communications; Edith, learning only of his
denial and abandonment, kills herself before
his message can reach her.
Like ‘Chess Story’ (often published in
English as ‘The Royal Game’),‘Beware of Pity’
hinges on an intrusive, almost malign external
force – a deus ex machina - that drives the
tragedy to its climax. In ‘Beware of Pity’, it is
the assassination at Sarajevo; in ‘Chess Story’,
it is the chance presence on an Atlantic liner of
a former political prisoner, Dr B., whose mind
was nearly destroyed in solitary confinement
by obsessive, imaginary chess games with
himself — allowing the narrator to witness
the psychological unmasking of the boorish
world champion, Mirko Czentovic. What could
look like convenient plotting in both works
becomes, in Zweig’s hands, a way of showing
how impersonal historical and political forces
can violently ambush private lives.
Jerey Archer was eusive: “A genius. His
‘Beware of Pity’ is a work of genius. Because
he is a great storyteller and a great writer. And
that is a rare combination”.
In the years just before 1914, Zweig, who
I did not know that
everything I had achieved
by hard work for thirty
or forty years could be
extinguished without trace
CULTURE
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70 February-March
February-March 71
We all know from experience how the
human tendency to self-delusion likes to
declare dangers null and void even when
we sense in our hearts that they are real
belonged to a wealthy Jewish industrial family,
lived as a successful, cosmopolitan man of
letters in what he later called a “golden age
of security”, moving between Vienna and
other European cultural centres, cultivating
friendships across borders. He had completed
a doctorate in 1904, and by the 1910s was
already well known for poetry, essays and
novellas, moving in the literary and artistic
circles of pre-war Vienna rather than those of
political activism. By the 1920s, he was the
most widely translated author in the world.
Befriending Joyce, he helped with German
translation and promotion of ‘Exiles’. Joyce
also asked Zweig’s help with tricky points of
translation of ‘Portrait’ into German, leading to
conversations where they switched between
German and Italian as Joyce displayed
his extraordinary command of languages.
Alongside Pound and others he quietly acted
as a ‘patron advocate’.
Zweig continued to meet the writers and
intellectuals – Steiner, Freud, Einstein, Klimt,
Mahler, Schnitzler, Rilke, and his bravest
defender, Richard Strauss — as the forces
of war began to build up again, denying to
himself that another World War was possible.
Much of Zweig’s vast range of essays,
biographies, librettos and stories, and
especially the finely tuned emotional turmoil
in a novella like ‘Beware of Pity’ , reflect
the wider Viennese fascination with the
unconscious and hidden motives associated
with Freud. Writing later about his home city,
he recalled that “nowhere was it easier to be
a European” and that he owed to Vienna his
early love of community and comradeship as
the “highest ideal” of his heart.
Above all Zweig valued an independence
embodying a humanitarian pacifist and
idealism rooted in European liberalism
— eschewing nationalism or populism,
advocating tolerance and mutual
understanding.
Shocked by the nationalism even his most
trusted intellectual allies suddenly imbibed,
he moved from Vienna to Salzburg (where he
erroneously suggested he could see Hitler’s
‘Eagle’s Nest’) for the years of the First World
War to be free of the intense pressures.
But the changed restrictive world that
emerged after the war further frustrated his
dreams. “Before 1914 the earth belonged to
the entire human race. Everyone could go
where he wanted and stay there as long as
he liked”, he wrote, allowing “a life in which
intellectual labour meant the purest joy and
personal freedom: the highest good on earth”.
“I had no idea”, he wrote in his final
memoire and finest work ‘The Days of
Yesteryear’, “that I would be driven out of my
own home, a hunted exile who must wander
from land to land, over sea after sea, or
that my books would be burnt, banned and
despised, my name pilloried in Germany like
a criminal’s, or that the same friends whose
letters and telegrams lay on the table before
me would turn pale if they happened to meet
me by chance. I did not know that everything
I had achieved by hard work for thirty or forty
years could be extinguished without trace”.
As well as borders inhibiting the evolution
of ideas, he identified another barrier that
resonates today: “The greatest curse brought
down on us by technology is that it prevents
us from escaping the present even for a brief
time. Previous generations could retreat into
solitude and seclusion when disaster struck;
it was our fate to be aware of everything
catastrophic happening anywhere in the
world at the hour and the second when it
happened”.
It seems that our generation was not the
first to discover that fast, space-conquering
media destroy the temporal margin needed
for reflection. Zweig nailed it: The “tyranny of
now” forces us “to witness every catastrophe
at the moment it occurs” which leaves “no
time to think before reacting”.
In 1914 the forces that were to contribute
to the destruction of society were already
maturing — Stalin was 34, Hitler 25, and Mao
21.
Indeed, if the outbreak of the First World War
was cataclysmic, the peace was even more
dramatic to Zweig. Old imperial certainties
collapsed, money lost value — cash arrived
in wheelbarrows — and a cohort of the young
turned to pleasure, experimentation and
defiance of bourgeois norms. In Vienna and
Berlin, in particular, the youth rose up and
revolted against their history. Girls cut their
hair short to look like boys; lesbianism was
encouraged as an expression of freedom. To
be under suspicion of virginity at the age of
16 was considered a disgrace. Drugs flooded
the urban night-life. In his eyes, what America
experienced as the ‘Jazz Age’ and the ‘Roaring
Twenties’ was a milder version of the moral
and cultural upheaval that Central Europe had
already undergone in a far more traumatic key.
Stefan Zweig remained active in European
literary circles as the 1930s advanced,
reluctant to accept that a second cataclysmic
war was looming. “We all know from
experience how the human tendency to self-
delusion likes to declare dangers null and
void even when we sense in our hearts that
they are real”.
As Hitler’s power grew and antisemitic
measures spread, Zweig’s own position in
Austria became untenable: in 1934 he left
Salzburg for exile, settling first in London and
later spending time in Bath and Bristol while
continuing to write and lecture. In the buildup
to the Second World War, fearful of being
trapped or interned yet again as an ‘enemy
alien’ in England, he moved first to the US
and then, when it entered the War in 1941,
on to Brazil where he hoped to find a place
far enough from Europe’s catastrophe for a
humane, cosmopolitan culture to survive,
even as he grew increasingly despondent
about the continent he had once seen as a
unified spiritual home.
In the end, in 1942 “exhausted by long
years of homeless wandering” he and his wife
took their lives. In his suicide note he wrote
he thought it “better to conclude in good time
and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual
labour meant the purest joy and personal
freedom the highest good on earth. I salute
all my friends! May they live to see the dawn
after this long night! I, the most impatient, go
before them”.
Zweig recognised the dangers early but
was psychologically incapable of confronting
them with timely vigour, instead trusting
civilisation to endure. His suicide, coinciding
with the collapse of the world he had insisted
was secure, suggests that humane ideals
survive only through vigilance, clarity and
the defiance of comforting illusions, however
pervasive.
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