{"id":262226,"date":"2008-05-27T16:35:39","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T16:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/05\/27\/the-post-office-girl\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:32:10","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:32:10","slug":"the-post-office-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/05\/27\/the-post-office-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"The Post-Office Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"

In their usual classy-as-hell manner, New York Review Books delivered a real gem last month in the 2008 Reading the World selection THE<\/span> POST-OFFICE<\/span> GIRL<\/span>, by Stefan Zweig and translated by Joel Rotenberg. Zweig\u2019s posthumously published book is bitter, brutal, and everything I love about post-war literature while still retaining some of the sweet softness of, say, A LITTLE<\/span> PRINCESS<\/span> by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The book is aptly billed as one which \u201clays bare the private life of capitalism\u201d\u2014it also exposes the meaninglessness and triviality of life and class while remaining firmly realistic. <\/p>\n

The title character is Christine Hoeflehner, a mere shade of postal official in a province outside Vienna who, in her miserable innocence, knows neither pleasure nor joy. Until, of course, she does. Ms. Hoeflehner is a survivor of the first World War, but only in the sense that she is still living. The Great War took the family business and, in fact, much of the family. She is old before her time and her mother an invalid and her charge. As for many, misery became the constant. Zweig writes: <\/p>\n

\n

The war has in fact ended. But poverty has not. It has only ducked beneath the barrage of ordinances, crawled foxily behind the paper ramparts of war loans and banknotes with their ink still wet. Now it\u2019s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad-muzzled, hungry, and bold, and eating what\u2019s left in the gutters of the war. An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky\u2026every thousand melts in your hand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Imagine taking a young woman from that bleak picture, a woman who has always worked and never known luxury or rest and whisking her away to a palace\u2014The Palace Hotel\u2014it\u2019s like something from a fairy tale. For Christine Hoeflehner, the fairy tale came true. Her wealthy aunt and uncle lavish her with all kinds of lovely foods and clothes. There and then, her name changes. She becomes Fr\u00e4ulein Christiane von Boolen, a glamorous doppelganger to her former self, a sort of gaudy butterfly entranced by the life of society and by the attentions of young men unscarred by the great tragedies of life. Zweig writes:<\/p>\n

\n

But how could she think, when would she think? She has no time to herself. No sooner does she appear in the lounge than someone from the merry band is there to drag her along somewhere\u2014on a drive or a photo excursion, to play games, chat, dance; there\u2019s always a shout of welcome, and then it\u2019s bedlam. The pageant of idle busyness goes on all day. There\u2019s no end of games played, things to smoke, nibble on, laugh at, and she falls into the whirl without resistance when any of the young fellows shouts for Fr\u00e4ulein von Boolen\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps it is odd that I mentioned that children\u2019s classic, A LITTLE<\/span> PRINCESS<\/span>. No, it\u2019s not odd\u2014in Ms. Hoeflehner there is such a simple appreciation of luxury goods, an intimate affection for all the pleasures of wealth. She is childlike in the way she takes in pleasure, perhaps selfish, but blamelessly so. For all his criticism of the wealthy, it must be noted that Zweig doesn’t condemn wealth or luxury. His characters love comfort as we all love comfort and who, honestly, can deny its charms? As before, this \u201clays bare the private life of capitalism,\u201d it doesn\u2019t attack it, but reveal it. The novel doesn\u2019t make moral claims; Zweig doesn\u2019t judge the way people live their lives, merely contrasts them, makes glaringly obvious the inequalities\u2014without assigning blame.<\/p>\n

The vacation came to an abrupt end. As dreams do. Fr\u00e4ulein Christiane von Boolen was revealed to be, merely, Christine Hoeflehner and, in shame and anger, she returned to Klein-Reifling, to the small town she came from. With her mother dead and her memories of her time at the resort too vivid, Christine cannot sink back into her own life. This is the real meat of the story; this is the bitter Part Two. A spectre of discontent is introduced in Christine Hoeflehner and Zweig provides it a mate, Ferdinand Farrner. In Ferdinand, Christine finds a kindred spirit, an awareness of the unfairness of life. Together, they come to a precipice familiar to the poor. They can no longer stand. They jump.<\/p>\n

When one reads a book of this range, it is impossible not to stare hard at the author who crafted these words, who built\u2014or rebuilt\u2014this world of extremes, of pleasure and deprivation. There\u2019s a disturbing autobiographical element. Even for someone only vaguely aware of Zweig\u2019s life, his personal history seems obscenely connected to his characters, as though he had already lived out several possible lives through his books. Toward the end of World War II, having achieved safety in Brazil, Zweig and his wife killed themselves\u2014 out of despair for European civilization. His suicide was the suicide of Europe, his death was the death of humanism. Zweig was a well-known pacifist and an adored writer. His forfeit was a recognition of his failed hope and we can mourn him, but not too long or too strong. Such a man as Zweig was too sincere to invent anything as improbable as a happy ending. His characters chose life, almost arbitrarily, and after all, there isn\u2019t that much difference.<\/p>\n

THE<\/span> POST-OFFICE<\/span> GIRL<\/span>
\nby Stefan Zweig
\nTranslated from the German by Joel Rotenberg
\nNew York Review Books
\n257 pgs, $14.00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In their usual classy-as-hell manner, New York Review Books delivered a real gem last month in the 2008 Reading the World selection THE POST-OFFICE GIRL, by Stefan Zweig and translated by Joel Rotenberg. Zweig\u2019s posthumously published book is bitter, brutal, and everything I love about post-war literature while still retaining some of the sweet softness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[10206,12246,1796,6,1646,12176],"class_list":["post-262226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-jeff-waxman","tag-joel-rotenberg","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-novel","tag-review","tag-stefan-zweig"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326406,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262226\/revisions\/326406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}