Bill Kerwin's Reviews > Beware of Pity

Did you enjoy Wes Anderson's film The Grand Hotel Budapest? Did you become entranced—as I did—by its nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in those moonlight days before the Great War? Beware of Pity (1939), the novel which inspired the film, was written by Stefan Zweig--in exile, in London—during the time when the Nazis occupied his beloved Vienna, when Germany subsumed Austria into itself, and Austria--alas!--was no more. How ironic: at the very moment Zweig was mourning the cultural demise of the cosmopolitan empire of twenty-five years ago, Hitler was accomplishing the political death of the country on which it had been built, the present day republic that was his home.

Zweig was indeed a man of ironies. He was a name-dropper, a frequenter of fashionable cafes who fiercely guarded his privacy; he was a celebrated writer of popular fiction who yearned for artistic recognition; he was a husband who treated his wife as a secretary, then divorced her to marry his secretary; he was a Jew who considered his Judaism “an accident of birth,” a Jew who never thought of himself as a Jew until Hitler classified him as such, who even then declined to denounce the Third Reich with vigor, preferring to remain “objective”; and he was a cosmopolite comfortable in all cities of the world until the Nazis barred him from the comforts of his own city Vienna: he despaired, and, together with his second wife, killed himself with barbituates, in Petropolis, the "Imperial City" of Brazil, in 1942.

The title of this novel—and its overriding theme—Beware of Pity--has its ironies too. How can pity—the exercise of simple human compassion—be considered a corrosive force?And why would a man like Zweig, wounded by a pitiless tyrant, choose the dangers of pity for his theme?

The novel tells the story of a young Austrian lieutenant, Anton Hoffmiller, who, invited to the home of the great landowner Kekesfalva, performs the gentlemanly gesture of asking his host's daughter to dance. When she bursts into tears, he realizes that the young lady's legs are paralyzed. Humiliated, he immediately flees from the house, but sends her a dozen roses the next day. So begins a series of visits—motivated primarily by pity—which lead to disaster, not only for Lieutenant Hoffmiller, but for the Kekesfalva family too.

Zweig's reputation rests primarily on his novellas--”Letter from an Unknown Woman” and “The Royal Game” are masterpieces of the form—and some critics have faulted this, his only novel, as a novella padded to novel length by the addition of a few irrelevant stories. I disagree. Each of these subordinate narratives—about the landowner's fortune, the physician's marriage, the courtship of the officer turned waiter--presents a glimpse into the dynamics of male/female relationships, and how—for good or for ill—such relationships may be altered by pity. The novel would be poorer without these stories: like mirrors, they flash moonlight upon the surface of events, illuminating poor Hoffmiller's dilemma.

The tale is compelling, and there were even a few moments (two moments, to be precise) that had me gasping (small gasps, but real gasps), my hand raised to my mouth. The general course of the narrative may be tragically predictable, but there are plenty of little surprises--and pleasures--to be encountered along the way.

And of course, there is the moonlight which suffuses all: that seductive, antique Austrian atmosphere, which pities little and yet forgives everything.