Written in the 1930 and publish posthumously in 1982 and in English 2008. There is nothing dated about it. 11/1/25
Zweig born in 1881. Jean-Paul Sartre articulated a concept: The antisemite makes the Jew.
He wrote a memoir, The World of Yesterday, describing life before Nazism ended it.
Before the rise of Nazism, Zweig was an incredibly popular writer well known both for his novels and for his biographies. In Petropolis, Brazil he and his wife committed suicide..
1933 Nazis started burning books and Zweig's were amongst those burned. In Israel some immigrants escaping Nazism brought some First Edition of books that became rare collectors items.
A dark fairytale of Austria in 1926 an inconsequential village Klein-Reifling. . Christine’s job at the post office is “miserably paid and miserable in general. She goes home to her invalid mother in a tiny attic apartment. Maybe she was happy with her mates, before the “guns of August”. Her brother died in the Great War and father soon after that.
All one wants is too expensive: Christine hardly dares to breathe for fear it might be too expensive. The obvious poverty of her appearance? She has no free will to do anything different. The telegraph seldom works till in suddenly has a message with Christina name on it. Clara is her mothers sister. How will that go over at the luxury hotel? She learns within a day to behave as they do. The pageant of idle busyness goes on all day. Twenty-eight years old and I’m still saving myself, still denying myself, still waiting. The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it. Her poverty has been found out, and everyone is snickering.
Christines Aunt Clara had been the mistress of a wealthy man, whose wife found out and to stop the scandal of attempted murder she had agreed to leave Europe to the US and for 5 years would receive a sum of money on the first of every month. She married Antony van Boolen and with her capital helped him set up a successful business in NY. The same war that had destroyed the wealthy in Europe had made them stone rich and they had 2 children. Clara never revealed to her husband her story, she lives in a secret, and is always afraid of gossip.
In 1915 Hoflehner and Son was a successful taxidermy company but since people were not hunting animal and instead people the business failed. In 1919 the war ended but the poverty not. The war stole a whole decade of youth and there was no strength or courage for happiness.
She gets the invitation to meet her aunt and uncle in Switzerland and money to come. Her aunt sees her poor clothing and realized that instead of supporting charities should have supported her niece, and takes her on a shopping spree and spends money like water. Christina's good figure makes her attractive and she develops a personality to go with the clothes easily, she is transformed into another person. She is introduced to Colonel Elkins president of the London Geographical Society who she brighten up. Elkins's wife had died young and son had died by at German bullet at Soissons. (July 1918 France the American were there by then) Even the wealthy hide secret unhappiness's Elkins gives her books in German about Sven Hedins Tibetan journey 1922. Also books on climbing the Matterhorn., the Alps.
She is called Fraulein van Boolen and we realize that names have a magical power. She is sent to get her uncle away from the gaming table and with her presence he has luck and so gives her half his winning which is equivalent of her working for 4 months.
The school teacher is the one who writes her letters about the condition of her mother but she never even bothered to collect her letters. Happy people are poor psychologist but a troubled person in more alert. The engineer had been flirting with Carla but now is interested in Christine and Carla is upset. Christine had whispered her confidences with Carla and revealed the gaps in her worldliness. Now rumor starts circulating and the subject of rumor is the last to hear them. Colonel Elkins tries to show that he does not accept these rumours and gets seen publicly with her. He would like her to come to England with him to brighten up his castle.
The aunt is scared that her own background will be exposed and she never ever told her husband about it. The Cinderella story ends with Christine taking one new dress and the money given to her by the uncle and quietly walks to the railway station alone.
She returns home, the death of her mother does not move her emotionally. After the funeral the family want to divide the mothers thing and Christine does not want any of it, which includes the smell of poverty.
Part 2
At the Post Office she feels like in the movie Life Sentence that she is in jail and the window here also have bars on them. She finds herself very antagonistic with the poor individuals she has to deal with. She no longer goes to church or sings in a choir.
Christina visits her sister and Franzl and family in Vienna where they bump into Ferdinand who was a brother in arms with Franzl as well as a POW in Siberia but Franzl got home while Ferdinand spent 2 years more impressed into fighting and slave labour. Eventually the Red Cross got them home. Before the war he would have throttled anyone who made a joke of the Kaiser and the army, we bought that like schoolboys. He had to be home to register up to a certain date to apply for Austrian citizenship as the Austro Hungarian Empire had collapsed. He now can't get citizenship or compensation as a wounded veteran.
Johan Nestroy 1801 to 1863 Comic Viennese Playwright. Die Rote Fahme ( The Red Flag) a German Revolutionary newspaper founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. 1918 of the Communist Party.
Ferdinand had returned after 6 years home which was foreign country. His inheritance had been lost due to the war.
Christine finds so much in common and they spends a night together in a cheap hotel but are irritated by the loud sexual activity of the other occupants and the police checking up on everyone identity and arresting someone. She takes the early morning train to get to work.
Christine spends every Sunday in Vienne with Ferdinand, they had imagined they could help each other in dealing with the situation of poverty. She attempts to get transferred to the Post Office in Vienna with out success.
Ferdinand arrives at her Post Office - the constructing company he works for is bankrupt he got only half his months salary and has reached the end, of this type of temporary work.
People should be surrounded by people who love and care for them and friends are a most important asset. I want it all and now? People must be given hope. Must do something today that will give us a future. Embrace change as the essence of life is flow and small changes are important. The American dream is not in Austria. Should they rob the post office at the end of the week and a day when there is a large deposit of cash.
They decide on a suicide pact but at the PO he sees there is a fortune of money in the safe and they discuss plans to take it and flee. He goes into details of how they do this and travel to Paris with the money. It is far easier to just shoot yourself in the head.
The book does not have an ending
Afterword.
Post WW1 European Culture had been erased by history but was still in the minds of those who cherished it. His main influence at this time was Freud and not post modernism. Before he took his own life Zweig had just finalized the publication of 2 books but never managed to get this book in to a shape that satisfied him. Christina is persued by the sexy engineer Herr Wrong and the courtly old English General Herr Right. Her life is now worst than it was before as she knows what she has been missing.
Ferdinand had spent years in a Siberian prison camp only to return to a country that had no use for him. His dreams of becoming an architect are dashed by poverty and of decent employment wrecked by injury to his hand. Ferdinand refuses to accept his diminished expectation imposed by the war and this makes him a kindred spirit to Christina, while she thinks of the awful smell of poverty. Christine sees girls like her who have missed their chance of life as a result of the war. An awareness of the unfairness of life. A bourgeois family fell into poverty during the war, Is this deprivation, this absence, what made Hitler possible: the void that Nazism filled. Is the end two of them standing wide-eyed and enthusiastic amid vast, massed crowds, screaming Heil, Heil, Heil..
