Stefan Zweig did not like confrontation. He grew up in a privileged class in a privileged time and in a peaceful place. Vienna was the place. The time was before “the shot heard around the world” rang out and events still inexplicable today led to trench warfare and mustard gas bombs from the air—a time forever branded as World War I, the Great War.

Yet, in his way, Zweig leads us to confront the Achilles’ heel of all Humanity. We’d rather fight than engage in active problem solving. We’d rather pretend that tomorrow’s imminent danger really belongs to the day after tomorrow and then never engage in meaningful preventive action that we should have begun yesterday. We insist upon remaining separated from our fellow humans by false differences rather than abiding by the wisdom of ages that demonstrates—we are one—we are all more alike than we are different—and we all share a common human destiny.

As Nicholas Lezard observed, “One of the earliest writers to note what Freud was doing, Zweig took on board early the lesson that directly dealing with terrible things is not necessarily the way the mind works.” [1]

From Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig[2], the setting is during a conversation among high-society dinner guests in 1938 as they discuss what all Europe was talking about, the actions of Hitler’s Third Reich and its cavalcade toward armed aggression. The narrator, a man with no experience in war or mass violence, makes this observation:

“Of course they were all against me, for, as is borne out by experience, the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent….”

Then, the sheltered narrator’s view is supported by the highly decorated officer Anton Hoffmiller. His views on aggression were forged by leading his own men through hell in the Great War. Looking ahead Hoffmiller hearkens to the past and, as the narrator tells us, he sums things up like this:

“Even in the last war I had not met many men at the front who had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one of them tossed about willy-nilly like a pea in a great sack. On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war then from it.”

Image: Little Bentari plays on a deserted war-machine without knowing that the dreadful reach of Man’s armed aggression has found him out.... And Stefan Zweig, renowned author and friend of Sigmund Freud

[1] See: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/15/beware-pity-stefan-zweig-rereading a short essay for “The Guardian” by Nicholas Lezard, 7/15/2011, “Re-reading: Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig”

[2] Available on Amazon.com or at Powell’s Books or in your public library