by Stefan Zweig
Melodramatic phrases revolt me. So I am not going to say that I sought death. I shall only say that I did not fear it, or at least feared it less than most people, for there were moments when the thought of returning home, where I should meet those who shared the knowledge of my guilt, was more horrible to me than all the horrors of the front. Where, moreover, was there for me to go? Who was there who needed me, who was there who still loved me? For whom, for what was I to go on living? In so far as bravery is no more than not being afraid, I may safely and honestly claim to have been brave in the field, for even what to the most valorous of my comrades seemed worse than death, even the possibility of being crippled, of being maimed, held no terrors for me. I should probably have looked upon it as a punishment, as a just vengeance on the part of Providence, to have myself been made a helpless cripple, the prey of every stranger’s pity, because my pity had been so cowardly, so weak. If, then, Death did not cross my path, the fault did not lie with me; dozens of times I went to meet him with the cold eye of indifference. Wherever there was any particularly difficult task to perform, I would volunteer. Wherever there was fierce fighting, wherever there was danger, I felt happy. After being wounded for the first time I transferred to a machine-gun company and then later to the Air Force; apparently I really did perform all sorts of daring feats in our gimcrack machines. But whenever I read the word ‘bravery’ in a despatch in connection with my name, I had the feeling that I was a fraud. And whenever anyone peered too closely at my medals, I turned quickly away.
When those four interminable years came to an end, I discovered to my own astonishment that, despite everything, I was able to go on living in my former world. For we who had returned from hell measured everything by new standards. To have the death of a human being on one’s conscience no longer meant the same to a man who had been to the front as to a man of the pre-war era. In the vast blood-bath of the war my own private guilt had been absorbed into the general guilt; for I was the same person, it was the same eyes, the same hands, that had, after all, set up the machine-gun at Limanova which had mown down the first wave of Russian infantry to advance on our trenches, and I myself had afterwards seen through my field-glasses the hideous eyes of those whom I had been instrumental in killing, in wounding, and who, impaled on barbed wire, groaned for hours until they died a pitiable death. I had brought down an aeroplane on the outskirts of Görz; three times it had turned a somersault in the air until it crashed in the Alps and went up in a sheet of flame, and then with our own hands we had searched the charred and still gruesomely smouldering bodies for their identity discs. Thousands upon thousands of those who went to the war with me did the same, with rifle, bayonet, hand-grenade, machine-gun and naked fist, hundreds of thousands, millions of my generation, in France, in Russia and Germany — of what moment, then, was one murder more, what mattered private, personal guilt in the midst of this thousandfold, cosmic destruction and wrecking of human life, the most appalling holocaust history had ever known?
And then — a further relief — in this world to which I returned there was no one left to bear witness against me. No one could reproach with past cowardice one so singled out for his special bravery. There was no one to call me a liar, a weakling. Kekesfalva had survived his daughter’s death by only a few days. Ilona was living as the wife of an insignificant lawyer in a Jugoslav village. Colonel Bubencic had shot himself on the Save. My fellow-officers had either been killed in action or had long since forgotten the trivial episode — everything that had happened before the war had become as trivial, as valueless as the former Austrian currency. There was no one to accuse me, no one to judge me. I felt like a murderer who has buried the corpse of his victim in a wood: the snow begins to fall in thick, white, dense flakes; for months, he knows, this concealing coverlet will hide his crime, and afterwards all trace of it will have vanished for ever. And so I plucked up courage and began to live again. Since no one reminded me of it, I myself forgot my guilt. For the heart is able to bury deep and well what it urgently desires to forget.
Only once did a reminder come to me from the other shore. I was sitting in the Vienna Opera House, in a corner seat of the last row of the stalls, listening to Gluck’s Orphée, the pure and restrained melancholy of which grips me more than any other music. The overture had just ended, and although the house lights did not go up for the brief interval, one or two stragglers were given an opportunity of finding their way in the dark to their seats. Two of these late-comers, a lady and a gentleman, hovered dimly at the end of my row.
‘Excuse me please,’ the gentleman said, bowing politely to me. Without noticing or glancing at him, I stood up to allow them to pass. But instead of sitting down immediately in the empty seat next to me, he cautiously steered the lady ahead of him with gentle guiding hands; he showed her to her place, paved the way for her, as it were, thoughtfully pulled down the seat for her and helped her into it. This kind of attention was too unusual not to attract my notice. Oh, a blind woman, I thought, and involuntarily looked sympathetically in her direction. Then the somewhat portly gentleman sat down next to me, and with a pang I recognized him — it was Condor! The only man who knew everything, who knew the very depths of my guilt, was sitting so close to me that I could hear his breathing! The man whose pity had not, like mine, been murderous weakness but selfless, self-sacrificing strength; the only man who could judge me, the only man before whom I need feel ashamed! When, in the interval, the lights went up, he would be bound to recognize me.
I began to tremble, and hurriedly put my hand up to my face to be at least safe from discovery in the darkness. Not a bar more did I hear of the beloved music, so violently was my heart pounding. The proximity of this individual, the only man who really knew me, appalled me. As though I were sitting stark naked in the dark among all those well-dressed, respectable people, I shuddered at the thought of the moment when the blaze of light would reveal me. And so in the short space of time before the lights came on, and while the curtain was just falling on the first act, I hurriedly ducked my head and fled up the gangway — quickly enough, I think, for him not to see or recognize me. But ever since that moment I have realized afresh that no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
[1] We are the ——th Regiment
Of His Royal and Imperial Majesty's Uhlans . . .
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Copyright © 1976 by Williams Verlag AG, Zurich, and Atrium Press
Introduction copyright © 2006 by Joan Acocella
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Egon Schiele, The Artist’s Sister Melanie, 1908; courtesy Christie’s Images
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Zweig, Stefan, 1881–1942.
[Ungeduld des Herzens. English]
Beware of pity / Stefan Zweig ; Translation by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
Originally published: London : J. Cape, 1982.
ISBN 1-59017-200-0 (alk. paper)
1. Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Heer—Officers—Fiction. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Fiction. 3. Sympathy—Fiction. I. Blewitt, Phyllis. II. Blewitt, Trevor, 1900– III. Title. IV. Series.
PT2653.W42U6213 2006
833'.912–dc22
2005022744
eISBN 978-1-59017-604-7
v1.0
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