The Post Office Girl (34 page)

All of this represents an immeasurable advance over Zweig’s other fiction. Instead of a single emotion intensively examined within a narrow social frame—a fair description even, as its title suggests, of “Beware of Pity”, though that work is considerably longer than “The Post Office Girl”—Zweig gives us fully rounded lives rooted in a broad historical context. This, he is telling us, is what the war has done to people. This is what history has made of
their bodies. This is the fate of a whole generation. The question of historical luck, and thus of the possibility of alternative lives or selves, is everywhere at issue. Franz made it home right after the war; Ferdinand got stuck in Siberia for an extra two years. Klara was sent off to America; her sister Maria, Christine’s mother, spent the war working in a damp hospital basement. The postwar generation of girls is bold and shameless, but everywhere Christine looks she sees women like her, who have missed their chance at life.

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.