by Stefan Zweig
The affair she begins with Ferdinand, two souls clinging together for friendship more than anything else, is no less immune than they to the withering circumstances of their lives. The couple contemplate suicide, then conceive a plan that will enable them to escape a different way. And that’s where the novel breaks off. Did Zweig intend to end it there? He might have. The narrative terminates at the conclusion of a scene, and on a thematically significant word. But it would have taken an even greater departure from his normal practice than any other the novel exhibits for Zweig to have suspended the story on such a radically Modernist note of openness, before even a climax, let alone a resolution. Zweig’s own death involved a suicide pact—he was found lying hand-in-hand with his second wife—and perhaps he simply never succeeded in imagining what a different ending could have looked like. On the other hand, by 1942, Christine and Ferdinand’s future would have been all too clear. The rage, the feelings of betrayal, the sense of wasted talent: the Great War’s toxic human residue, expressed so starkly in Ferdinand’s long denunciatory speeches, would fuel the politics of the 1930s. A million Ferdinands, roused by such tirades, would put on shirts of brown or black and dance the death march of Old Europe.
William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and The American Scholar.
Copyright
The Post Office Girl (Rausch der Verwandlung) by Stefan Zweig © 1982 by Williams Verlag AG, Zurich and Atrium Press Ltd, London
Translation copyright © 2008 by Joel Rotenberg: all rights reserved.
Afterword © William Deresiewicz (reprinted with permission from the June 9, 2008, issue of The Nation; www.thenation.com).
Author photo published by kind permission of Atrium Press Ltd, London.
Thanks to Sara Kramer and Edwin Frank of New York Review Books, Lindi Preuss of Williams Verlag AG, Zurich, and Sonya Dobbins of Atrium Press.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.
This English translation first published in the UK 2009 (and as an eBook in 2011) by Sort Of Books, PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL.
272 pp
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Print ISBN 978–0–9542217–2–0
eBook ISBN 978–1–908745–03–3