Stefan Zweig

Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig: "I had never heard of Zweig...when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book. I also read the The Post-Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself — our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well." 2009 PEN Translation Prize Finalist The logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine’s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same. Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within. Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig’s haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master’s achievement.

The Post-Office Girl

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At last, during a pause, he bashfully takes a white folded object out of his breast pocket. She must forgive him, of course it’s not a gift, just a little something, maybe it’ll come in handy. Surprised, she opens the long handmade paper construction. It’s a map of her route from Linz to Pontresina, to be unfolded accordion-style. All the rivers, mountains, and cities along the train route are microscopically labeled in black ink, the mountains shaded in with finer or coarser hatching corresponding to their altitude and with meter figures shown in tiny numerals, the rivers drawn in blue pencil, the cities marked in red; distances are indicated in a separate table at bottom right, exactly as on the Geographical Institute’s large maps for schools, but here neatly, painstakingly, lovingly copied by a little assistant schoolmaster.

This sweet man must have secretly spent days in libraries in Linz or Vienna finding models to copy, must have sharpened his pencils a hundred times and bought special drafting pens to draw and ink these maps, tenderly, patiently, for nights on end, just to produce from his meager means something that was suitable and practical and would delight her. Her journey hasn’t even begun, but he’s anticipated it as though experiencing it himself, at her side for every kilometer of the trip; her route and what will happen to her must have been in his thoughts day and night.

They saved up all week for their Sundays, wanting to spend this one day together without constant penny-pinching, to go to a restaurant or coffeehouses, to the pictures, to drop a few schillings without constantly counting and calculating. And they saved up words and feelings too, thought about what they’d tell each other, and they were both glad to have someone who listened intently, with sympathy and understanding, no matter what happened to them.

The Post-Office Girl quotes

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