Review: Stefan Zweig's Ungeduld des Herzens

There was only one work by Stefan Zweig on my reading list at the university: Die Welt von gestern - Zweig's evocative paen to Europe before the Great War which turned out to be an extended suicide note.  Zweig's only novel - Ungeduld des Herzens (1938, The Impatient Heart - available in English with the unfortunate title "Beware of Pity") was not on the list. Which is a pity, since Ungeduld des Herzen belongs in the canon of great 20th century novels along side Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch and Arthur Schnitzler's Der Weg ins Freie. 

I became interested in reading Zweig after a reader encouraged me to read his great novella about psychological torture -  Schachnovelle. It is the human psyche that Zweig, the friend of Sigmund Freud, explores in his fiction, and Ungeduld des Herzens is one of the great psychological novels. 

The novel is set in a sleepy provincial garrison town near the Hungarian border in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Anton Hofmiller, a decorated hero in the Great War, tells the story of what happened to him two decades earlier when he was a young second lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry. Out of boredom Hofmiller wrangles an invitation to the "palace" owned by the Hungarian magnate Lajos von Kekesfalva, where he commits a faux pas by asking the 17-year old daughter Edith to dance.  It turns out the girl is paraplegic and Hofmiller, horrified at his blunder, flees the palace. His remorse and his subsequent actions would have tragic consequences.

Hofmiller returns to the Schloss the next day with flowers.  Edith and the old man von Kekesfalva are so delighted by the young man's presence that he becomes a regular fixture there.  Hofmiller is intoxicated by the fact that he is the cause of someone's happiness:

Nun aber war das Unerwartete geschehen, und staunend blickte ich mit aufgeschreckter Neugier mich selber an. Wie? Auch ich mittelmäßiger junger Mensch hatte Macht über andere Menschen? Ich, der keine fünfzig Kronen ehrlich meinen Besitz nennen konnte, vermochte einem reichen Manne mehr Glück zu schenken als alle seine Freunde? Ich, Leutnant Hofmiller, konnte jemandem helfen, ich konnte jemanden trösten? Wenn ich mich einen Abend, zwei Abende zu einem lahmen, verstörten Mädchen setzte und mit ihr plauderte, wurden ihre Augen hell, ihre Wangen atmeten Leben, und ein ganzes verdüstertes Haus ward licht durch meine Gegenwart?

(But now the unexpected had happened and I began to look at myself with astonished curiosity. How could this be?  Even a very average young person like me could have power over other poeple. How could a poor boy like me, with only 50 Crowns to his name, bring more happiness to a rich man than all of his friends?  I, Lieutenant Hofmiller, could help someone, could bring solace to someone. When on one evening, or two evenings, I would sit with a paralyzed and disturbed girl and chat with her, and her eyes would shine, her cheeks would glow, and the sad house would light up with my presence.)

But Hofmiller's act of charity would have unintended consequences, and his attentions would be interpreted by Edith as something more than just kindness and pity towards an unfortunate creature. 

What prevents Ungeduld des Herzens from becoming simply a sentimental tale of unhappy love is Zweig's powerful psychological depiction of the key characters. Hofmiller is a product of the Austrian military with a weak ego and an exaggerated sense of honor.  Like Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl he is easily driven to suicidal despair but is too cowardly to act on this.  His later courage in war was, as he acknowledges, nothing more than a cowardly pursuit of death.  Von Kekesfalva is also a damaged human being who came to his great wealth by deception, but then took pity on the victim of his scheme and married her.  He is a pathetic figure in his inability to accept the truth about his daughter Edith's condition. Then there is Edith's physician, Dr. Condor, who has a Freud-like ability to analyze the underlying truth in other human beings.  He recognizes  Hofmiller's weak character and lectures him on the two types of pity:

Das eine, das schwachmütige und sentimentale, das eigentlich nur Ungeduld des Herzens ist, sich möglichst schnell freizumachen von der peinliche Ergriffenheit vor einem fremden Unglück... Und das andere, das einzig zählt - das unsentimentale, aber schöpferische Mitleid, das weiss, was es will, und entschlossen ist, geduldig und mitduldend durchzustehen bis zum Letzten seiner Kraft und noch über dies Letzte hinaus.

(One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really nothing 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....;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.)

And then there is Edith, the most fascinating character of all.  Edith is a sweet teenager who invites pity but who then lashes out at anyone who feels sorry for her. She terrorizes the household with her mercurial mood-swings. No doubt Zweig was familiar with Freud's case studies on female hysteria.   As the novel progresses, Edith takes on certain demonic qualities and the tap-tap of her crutches elicits a feeling of foreboding as one would find in an ETA Hoffmann tale of horror. Actually Edith for some reason reminded me of the wounded child in in Kafka's story Ein Landarzt who destroys the country doctor sent to heal him.  

Ungeduld des Herzen is in some ways an old-fashion novel and Zweig employs favorite 19th century literary devices such as stories within stories and lightening storms to convey emotional tumult.  But it is the tension between the old-style narrative and the ultra-modern psychology that is so compelling.  Zweig wrote the novel from exile in London, forced to flee his beloved Vienna by the Nazis, watching with alarm as the Europe he so loved was about to be destroyed for a second time in his lifetime.  In Ungeduld des Herzens he conjures up a world on the eve of its extinction, a world he loved but whose neurosis, he could clearly see, carried the seeds of its own destruction.

Comments

[hattie]

It's not easy for me to get German books, but *Brennendes Geheimnis* is available on Kindle. Have you read it?

[knibraksHar]

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