An Officer's Mistake

Beware of Pity 
by Stefan Zweig


"One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another;  and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond." (p 192)


This is a curious novel from the pen of Stefan Zweig who tells the story of a young Austrian cavalry officer, Anton Hofmiller, who befriends a local millionaire, Kekesfalva, and his family, but in particular the old man's crippled daughter, Edith, with terrible consequences.  Stefan Zweig was a prolific biographer, short story writer, and is noted today mainly for his autobiography, The World of Yesterday.

Before the First World War, Anton Hofmiller, a young Austrian officer from a modest background, finds himself stationed in a town where he knows few people. He obtains an invitation to the home of the richest local family and, at the end of the evening, realizes he has not spent time with their attractive daughter, Edith. He invites her to dance, but realizes – to everyone’s horror – that she is sitting in a wheelchair and can’t even stand. This, he believes, is the worst faux pas imaginable, and he flees. But he is given another chance, which he eagerly accepts. To be nice he starts spending more and more time with the family, focusing on Edith, keeping her company – keeping himself company too. The relationship between them seems almost balanced at first. She’s sweet, if a bit over-eager for his attention. It is the father, though, who compels Hofmiller to involve himself more, to help find treatment for her condition, to lie to her about its effectiveness, to let her believe she has a chance of recovery. It’s all, of course, in the name of keeping her happy. Hofmiller’s eagerness to please, Edith’s father’s eagerness to please – beyond what is practical or real – subtly becomes a ticking bomb of anxiety. Where it naturally leads is to Hofmiller’s proposal of marriage. A good soldier, he will do everything he can but the denouement is devastating for Edith and Hofmiller goes off to war.

The message of the book is not only the ostensible one – that pity is an emotion that can cause great ruin – but also that we must not judge things by appearances. This is a lesson that the narrator has learned and the reader can appreciate from his experience reading this magnificent novel.

View all my reviews

Silhouettes from Paris

Paris Album, 1900 1914 

by Jean Cocteau

"I have only retained memories of individuals and groups who were desperate for survival, whose frivolity arose from tragedy, whose lightness was prodigious and whose silhouettes, to use the expression of Thomas Mann in that masterpiece The Magic Mountain, were silhouettes on a grand scale. 
Souvenir portraits on a grand scale.  That is a project that tempts me.  I wonder if I can pull it off?"  -  Jean Cocteau, Paris Album, p 16.

The short essais or vignettes that comprise Jean Cocteau's Paris Album, 1900-1914 were originally written for the Paris newspaper "Le Figaro". Thus they form an album of memories that include both intimate personal details and cultural details that inform the reader about Paris in the years immediately preceding the Great War. The portraits of individual persons are fascinating whether they are family, people of renown or friends who appear in slightly different form in Cocteau's fiction. He brings to life personages like Sara Bernhardt, Edmond Rostand, and Colette. Likewise he introduces his family. 
 He also explores the world of Paris with waltzers at the skating rink and beyond.  He follows the changes, discusses obscure authors, recalls events which made news, such as the disastrous fire at the Bazaar del la Charite and lets unexpected floodlights play over a vanished world.  It reminded me of the picture drawn by Stefan Zweig in his magnificent memoir, The World of Yesterday.  
I found Cocteau's portraits of musicians like Sarasate and Reynaldo Hahn the most interesting. The souvenirs in this book are articles that may be no more than caricatures, but also may contain some grains of truth. They are definitely entertaining.

Paris Album, 1900-1914 by Jean Cocteau, trans. by Margaret Crosland. W. H. Allen & Co., 1987 (1956)

Memento of an Age

The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

“We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.”  ― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

 A poet, novelist, dramatist and biographer, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a brilliant writer, documenting both historical lives and his own. His non-fiction includes literary biographies that are seldom read today, but The World of Yesterday remains in print and is his personal memoir of growing up in fin de siecle Austria and the early years of the twentieth century. Written the year before he died, the book is a testament to his life - one that was formed in a world before the devastation of the twentieth century with its wars and other cultural shocks (on that topic see Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins). It is when the world of 1939 Europe is compared with the "naive credulity" of 1914 Europe that the impact of these shocks becomes apparent.  "The New Republic" commented on Zweig's book: "It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at an illustrated lecture.  The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative."
 Zweig lived a life of the mind and a life of letters - one that was at odds with the new world. Unfortunately, the last years of his life were spent as an exile from his homeland and in the year after finishing this memoir he and his wife committed suicide together.

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. University of Nebraska Press, 1964 (1943)