The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Literature (1982/2008* - 257 pp.)
The Post-Office Girl follows the life of Christine Hoflehner (b. 1898), a young woman in interwar Austria who lives with her mother in poverty after the family business collapses during World War I. Christine's life is forever changed by an invitation by her mercurial and largely absent aunt, a former dress model who has moved to America and married into money. They vacation together in Switzerland in Part One, after which Christine can no longer be content at the post-office again. Curmudgeonly in her home village in Part Two, where everyone takes note, she soon meets Ferdinand, who may be the love of her life - or play a different role entirely.
One of Zweig's immediate strengths is the way he builds the dark, crushing atmosphere of provincial Austria during and directly after World War I. Only two hours outside Vienna, the veneration of the Habsburgs and the cult of militarism are absent, whereas the reader feels each vivid family crisis: Christine's father's illness and destitution, her brother being drafted, and then, especially, the ominous letter from her brother's commander on the front lines. Much of the first thirty pages discusses the robbery of Christine's childhood, how she brims with simultaneous contempt and jealousy at the carefree nature of the postwar generation, how she feels, at age 28, like her only missions are to work her loathsome job at the post office and to care for her ill mother.
Then her aunt Klara invites her to Switzerland for a vacation. Christine is initially intimidated by the high society she encounters when she leaves the train: "Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated". (36) After Christine's return from Switzerland, her old appearance revolts her to the point that she does not know how she could have ever endured it before: "She got up furiously, got dressed furiously: the old underthings, the repulsive black dress." (153)
A wardrobe and a makeover later, though, she sees herself as their equal because she can look like the people she meets at the hotel. She undergoes a 1930s-era version of What Not to Wear, in which Klara refits her, and then she feels alive: "Now the eyes are quite openly and proudly laughing at her, and the parted red lips seem to acknowledge with amusement: 'Yes, I am beautiful.'" (55) Christine's lack of experience in luxury settings shows when her gambling victory initially confuses her, (80-81) but she also forgets to check her mail from home, showing that she is not succeeding in either of her worlds. The irony that Christine's slight improvement in life upon returning home is due to her gambling winnings is not lost on her.
The greatest question The Post-Office Girl asks, though, is: Who am I? Much as anyone who's taken a high school English course has heard that William Shakespeare mastered "the human condition", Zweig constantly forces his characters to consider their own identities. In turn, the reader does too. In Switzerland, Christine becomes so consumed by discovering how she relates to her suitors, clothes and new name of Christiana van Boolen that "She's discovered herself for the first time in twenty-eight years, and the discovery is so intoxicating she's forgetting everyone else." (91)
When Christine meets thirty-year-old Ferdinand, he is wondering the same thing about himself. He concludes, and she agrees, that staking his own place in life is all that will satisfy him:
One of Zweig's immediate strengths is the way he builds the dark, crushing atmosphere of provincial Austria during and directly after World War I. Only two hours outside Vienna, the veneration of the Habsburgs and the cult of militarism are absent, whereas the reader feels each vivid family crisis: Christine's father's illness and destitution, her brother being drafted, and then, especially, the ominous letter from her brother's commander on the front lines. Much of the first thirty pages discusses the robbery of Christine's childhood, how she brims with simultaneous contempt and jealousy at the carefree nature of the postwar generation, how she feels, at age 28, like her only missions are to work her loathsome job at the post office and to care for her ill mother.
Then her aunt Klara invites her to Switzerland for a vacation. Christine is initially intimidated by the high society she encounters when she leaves the train: "Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated". (36) After Christine's return from Switzerland, her old appearance revolts her to the point that she does not know how she could have ever endured it before: "She got up furiously, got dressed furiously: the old underthings, the repulsive black dress." (153)
A wardrobe and a makeover later, though, she sees herself as their equal because she can look like the people she meets at the hotel. She undergoes a 1930s-era version of What Not to Wear, in which Klara refits her, and then she feels alive: "Now the eyes are quite openly and proudly laughing at her, and the parted red lips seem to acknowledge with amusement: 'Yes, I am beautiful.'" (55) Christine's lack of experience in luxury settings shows when her gambling victory initially confuses her, (80-81) but she also forgets to check her mail from home, showing that she is not succeeding in either of her worlds. The irony that Christine's slight improvement in life upon returning home is due to her gambling winnings is not lost on her.
The greatest question The Post-Office Girl asks, though, is: Who am I? Much as anyone who's taken a high school English course has heard that William Shakespeare mastered "the human condition", Zweig constantly forces his characters to consider their own identities. In turn, the reader does too. In Switzerland, Christine becomes so consumed by discovering how she relates to her suitors, clothes and new name of Christiana van Boolen that "She's discovered herself for the first time in twenty-eight years, and the discovery is so intoxicating she's forgetting everyone else." (91)
When Christine meets thirty-year-old Ferdinand, he is wondering the same thing about himself. He concludes, and she agrees, that staking his own place in life is all that will satisfy him:
Christine was taken aback. The man beside her had just said what she'd been thinking all this time; he'd expressed clearly what she'd dully felt - the wish to be given one's due, not to take anything from anyone, but to have some kind of life, not to be left out in the cold forever while the others were warm inside. (184)
Ferdinand's words near the end of the book show the choice he has to make,** that Christine, by being with him, has to make as well. Whether Christine is at home in her village, which she hates, or in Switzerland at the whim of her aunt and uncle, she is either in thrall to her precarious finances or to the opinions of everyone around her. Ferdinand directly, correctly, associates accomplishment with making one's own decisions:
There [the world] was, so bright and beautiful, so full of warm and sunny life, and there I was, still fairly young and quick and spirited. I reckoned everything up and asked myself what I'd actually accomplished in this world, and the answer was painful. Sad to say, I haven't acted or thought for myself at all. (239)
Zweig's wordsmithing is crisp and witty, especially during Christine's introspections, but parts of the book are dragged down in exposition. A discussion of the future of socialism dominates a portion of Part Two, to the point that after page 191, there is no paragraph break until page 194. Opening the book to pages 192-193 reveals a perfectly rectangular block of text, which would be difficult enough in a science textbook but is eye-popping in fiction.
Sadly, Zweig was never able to see The Post-Office Girl's legacy. Although he wrote The Post-Office Girl in the 1930s, it was not published until 1982, forty years after his death. It has lived on most notably in Wes Anderson's 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is one of my favourite movies of all time.
Ease of Reading: 8
Educational Content: 4
*I use a double publication date whenever I review a translation. The first date is the original publication; the second date is the English-language edition I'm reading. Recently, I have reviewed three other Central European translations:
- March 2019 Bonus Book: Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher (German)
- December 2019: The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (German)
- January 2020: Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish)
My German and Polish are nowhere near advanced enough to read full-length texts like those, especially not an academic history text, so I greatly appreciate the work of the translators whose affinity for multiple languages brings these great works to life for English-speaking audiences.
Aside: All three fiction translations I've read in the past thirteen months take place in the 1920s, at least in part, although all three were written in subsequent decades. After World War I but before the Great Depression, the 1920s left an indelible mark on fiction across continents.
**As much as I would love to write about this part of the book in more detail, I would be violating my (almost) no spoiler policy. I was stunned by the book's last few pages. I hope future readers are just as surprised by the twist as I was.
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