The Post-Office Girl

Author(s): Stefan Zweig

Location(s): Austria, Swiss Alps

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1926

Location

Content

The book is divided into two parts: It is 1926, and the main character, Christine Hoflehner, in her late 20s, works as a lowly postal clerk in a small Austrian village. She has lost her father and her brother to the war, and lives in poverty with her mortally ill and despairing mother. Christine feels as defeated as her country. As the narrator describes it, the war has ended but poverty has not: “Now it’s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad-muzzled, hungry and bold, and eating what’s left in the gutters of the war.”
One day, a telegram arrives from Christine’s Aunt Claire inviting her to come to Switzerland for a holiday. Claire had emigrated to America 25 years earlier, after being paid off by the family of a rich Viennese businessman with whom she was conducting a scandalous affair: in New York she married a wealthy cotton merchant, and now she has returned on vacation to Europe and thinks to treat her sister’s daughter to a little break from provincial life. Christine puts on her pathetically “best” clothes, packs her straw suitcase, and sets off into the Alps, expecting little, but with much in store.
In part two, she meets Ferdinand, an ex-soldier and frustrated architect, one of the many ruined souls left behind in the wake of war. They have a brief liaison, but for people such as them there is no hope. Ferdinand loses his job, and makes the journey out to the village where Christine lives to tell her of his decision to commit suicide. Christine, with nothing left to live for, tells him she will die with him. However, they change their minds and decide on a different but hardly less desperate venture, and at the close of the book we leave them as they are about to leap, hand in hand, into a terrifying future. (John Banville)

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