Live and let die
Authors: Theodore Dalrymple
Journal: BMJ (2007)

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer who was a close friend of Freud's. He occupies more or less the same place in German letters as the literary doctor Somerset Maugham in British—that is to say, he is viewed with suspicion by the literati because, although brilliantly intelligent and immensely cultivated, what he wrote was so intensely readable. To be really great, at least nowadays, you have to be difficult to understand.

Like Somerset Maugham he wrote short stories and novellas in which the most intense passion is described with almost clinical detachment. Like Maugham, Zweig understood that human nature was best examined in the petri dish of marginality and social isolation. Like Maugham, he is able to conjure an atmosphere in a few simple words.

In his novella Amok the narrator—obviously Zweig himself, just as Maugham is often his own narrator—describes a shipboard meeting with a German doctor who has been working in what were then (in 1912) the Dutch East Indies. The doctor avoids all human contact on board ship and meets Zweig by accident in the dead of night. He then tells Zweig his story.

Fleeing disgrace in Germany, where he had had a once promising career, he signs up to the Dutch colonial service and is posted to a remote station in Java, which he does not leave for seven years. Deprived of European company, one day a very superior English woman, the wife of a rich Dutch merchant who is away on business, comes to his remote station to ask him to perform an abortion. In her husband's absence she has had an affair and wishes to preserve her reputation.

The doctor has no moral qualms—he has helped women before in this situation—and though strictly abortion is illegal, the law permits him to make up some kind of medical excuse to perform it. The woman asks that he leave the colony as soon as he has performed the operation and offers him a sum of money that will yield the equivalent of his pension. In a moment of madness, after which he acts like a man suffering from amok, the mental condition in which, because of an emotional crisis, a previously sane man runs around stabbing people, the doctor offers to perform the abortion if she will sleep with him.

She refuses his offer with contempt and has an abortion performed by a local midwife. Too late, the doctor is called in to watch her die from haemorrhage and infection. On her deathbed she extracts a promise from him never to reveal what has happened to her.

Going home penniless and morally broken, the doctor rejects Zweig's feeble offer of help, inherently inadequate to the situation.

“Among the ‘rights of man' there is a right which no one can take away, the right to croak when and where and how one pleases, without ‘a helping hand.'”

And the doctor does indeed commit suicide.

Ten years after the British publication of Amok, Zweig, having seen the writing on the wall in his native Austria, was a British subject living in exile in Brazil. The Nazis having scored victory after victory in Europe, Zweig thought they would win the war, and he and his wife swallowed a fatal dose of Veronal, the very sleeping draught the doctor in Amok had used regularly to procure sleep from his troubled conscience.

“Among the ‘rights of man' there is a right which no one can take away, the right to croak when and where and how one pleases, without ‘a helping hand.'”