The Post Office Girl - Stefan Zweig

Christine is in her mid twenties, works as a post official and lives with her desperately sick mother in severely straightened circumstances, in Austria, during the years just after the first world war. In a fit of beneficence her aunt, who escaped Austria following a small scandal, invites Christine’s mother to holiday with her and her prosperous husband. Unable to go the mother sends Christine in her place. She arrives at the Swiss hotel her aunt and uncle are holidaying in, a poor, shabby girl, ashamed of her clothes and frightened of desk clerks. Her aunt quickly transforms her into a presentable young woman and her new appearance unleashes a natural exuberance that makes her the shining light of hotel society.

A few weeks later her aunt hears rumours that people have found out that Christine is a poor village girl. Fearful that the scandalous origins of her own money (the pay off for removing herself during the scandal years ago) may be discovered she dismisses Christine in a night, sending her back to the run down village she used to call home. Christine’s mother is dead and her prospects are bleak, as they were before, except now Christine is aware of how good life is for some other people and how very bad things are for her.

Recapped like this the premise of 'The Post Office Girl’ suggests that the central dilemma in the book is whether a person is better off ignorant of their true situation and it’s certainly something that Stefan Zweig mentions, although it is clear from the beginning of the book that he thinks this question is artificial. When the reader initially meets Christine she seems content in her current position, quiet and not ambitious, or interested in examining her way of life:

‘Thus the postal official sits in a kind of pleasant waking paralysis at the center of her sleeping word. She’d meant to do some needlework – this is clear from the needle and scissors there at hand – but she has neither the will nor the strength to pick up the embroidery lying rumpled on the floor. She leans back comfortably in her chair, hardly breathing, eyes closed, and basks in the strange and wonderful feeling of permissible idleness.’ .

But there is a dreadful wastefulness and forced quality embedded in this sleepy description of contented idleness. Christine is paralysed, she has ‘neither the will nor the strength’ to take up a task at this point in the day, not because she is tired but because her inactive job saps the rest of her energy, which she needs to fill other aspects of her life. This type of negative language is used throughout the initial description of Christine’s world, for example the clock in her office makes a ‘weak, monotonous sound’ that ‘gulps down a drop of time every second’, creating an atmosphere of constant, draining inaction. By using these adjectives with negative connotations Zweig shows us that although Christine’s world is stable, there is nothing to be actively enjoyed even before Christine learns of the world of possibility outside the village.

The knowledge of possibility is something that negatively affects a character’s responses when they are required to return to their original circumstances, so some people might feel that the best way for the poor to be happy is for them to remain ignorant and untroubled. However, Zweig makes it clear that this should not be considered a real answer to the problems of poverty, or mindless work, because the character is already suffering the ill effects of their situation even if they don’t realise it. Poverty, lack, an unfulfilling life all continue to destroy, despite ignorance and perhaps when a character gains knowledge about their true situation they can begin to react and combat their conditions. Zweig endows his main character with an understanding of what is missing in her life and while this causes Christine great pain it gives her the courage to try to beat back the system that oppresses her.

Christine’s story is meant to engage readers with the questions she and the second main character Ferdinand ask about their lives. Why can’t the poor rise as the rich do? How does the generation who powered and upheld the war effort fit in, once the war is over and their youth is gone? How can others around them go on with life as it is? Both characters have been changed by the war, Ferdinand realises it sooner as he is physically disabled and unable to pursue his career, but it takes a trip outside of her world for Christine to see how the war has robbed her of youth and pushed her into a lifelong position from which she can’t escape. The questions they both ask, once aware of their missed opportunities, are questions that, at the time Zweig was writing, few people were asking. Despite the fact that the first world war changed so much, it had not managed to shake the old order of things. This left those directly involved moor less between the old and the new ways of having what you want, without any way of breaking free from their current lives.

‘The Post office Girl’ reminds me of all the modern, classic novelists I like the best, because Zweig’s writing style shares so many similarities with them. He uses fast, tumbling language and sentence style that manages to show the heightened emotions all the characters. He is precise in his use of words, despite the speed which pushes each sentence along. He examines each emotion thoroughly, almost over dramatising them, with elaborately descriptive language, in order to show how intensely every human being can feel. Then he pares everything back to simple sentences that show the darkness of life and the bare walls his characters must shelter underneath. He creates both seedy scenes and bracing walks with the same commitment and scrupulousness, which makes me imagine that he understood or tried to understand everything.

But there’s so little of him to read! It looks like he’s another author to ration through the years.

Did this book inspire you to seek out his short stories and novellas? Did you dislike it? Let me know in the comments. ‘The Slaves of Golconda’ have much to say about the sudden ending and Zweig’s status as a humanist author (by the way Wiliam Deresiewicz who wrote the afterword to my edition believes the book was never completely finished as he feels the ending was too modern and I found it very abrupt).

If you’ve reviewed ‘The Post Office Girl’ please leave a link to your review in the comments and I’ll add the link at the bottom of my review.

Other Reviews

Of Books and Bicycles