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| Stefan Zweig |
Once a year my mother comes to visit us, and we reminisce about
my father. Her visit last week was especially poignant because an aunt (my
father’s cousin) had died in India in the preceding week.
Last week, I also read a review of biographies of Joseph
Roth and Stefan Zweig (by Allan Massie. Read the review here: Standpoint.) and I remembered
my father.
He had insisted that I should read Zweig’s Beware of Pity. At that time, I was unwilling to do so because I was
at an age where I couldn't imagine liking anything that he recommended.
Surprisingly, I absolutely adored the novel. It’s a straightforward
tragedy – of a soldier’s compassion for a paraplegic being misunderstood by her
for love. Many years after I read it, the novel was reissued as a Penguin
paperback in the 1980s. I have a copy in Bombay.
Zweig was a German Jew who had to flee Austria in 1934 in
the wake of Nazism’s ascendancy. He wrote Beware
of Pity while in exile (1939), and committed suicide with his second wife in 1942
in Brazil.
Wikipedia notes that Zweig “had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture.”
(I also learnt that the novel was turned into a movie in 1946).
In his review, Massie succinctly captures this despair.
“Writing in the Spectator
in May 1989, G.M. Tamas, Hungarian philosopher, journalist, dissident, and
briefly, after the collapse of Communism, a member of parliament, wrote about
central Europe's "dark secret": "a universe of culture was
destroyed." That culture was German and Jewish, and its destruction was
the work of the two "industrious mass-murderers", Hitler and Stalin.
Hitler exterminated the Jews, even though "the Jews, almost everywhere,
were to all intents and purposes a peculiar German ethnic group",
originally speaking Yiddish, a German dialect, but understanding, enjoying and
ultimately transforming literary German. Then in 1945-46 Stalin murdered or
expelled the Germans, and central Europe was bereft. Without the Germans and
the Jews, Tamas wrote, "our supposed ‘common culture' does not make sense,
and never will".
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