by Stefan Zweig (1982)

2025 reads, 6/25:

“A hundred times I’ve taken postcards out of the mailbag, picture-postcards showing gray Norwegian fjords, the boulevards of Paris, the bay of Sorrento, the stone monoliths of New York, and haven’t I always put them down with a sigh?”

The Post-Office Girl is a horror story.

No, not in the sense of the supernatural, or serial killers, or monsters, or even pure evil. Here, author Stefan Zweig tells the tragedy of Christine, an impoverished postal worker who has been given the opportunity to stay with her rich aunt in a bourgeois hotel in the Swiss Alps. Her story is uneasy and unsettling, as we witness someone who has nothing be given everything – just to have it all taken away again.

Set in 1930s, the Great War having taken a toll on many (including Christine’s father and her friend Ferdinand), Zweig presents an unfiltered view into the realities of postwar Austria. The inflation, famine, and trauma seem to affect everyone, both rich and poor, but one group clearly has an easier time bouncing back.

“His own generation’s sour unwillingness to recognize the truth and its inability to adapt to the postwar era anger him, as does the younger generation’s smart-alecky thoughtlessness.”

But it’s not presented as a black and white issue. By switching between the point-of-views of Christine and her aunt in this first part of the book, the “rich vs. poor” is not represented as “good vs. evil” – Christine meets people at this hotel who mean well, who sympathize with her, and appreciate her company regardless of background. In fact, one of the most crucial lines in the novel is uttered by Christine in the second part, after she’s abruptly thrown back into her monotonous routine: “I don’t mean ‘why not me instead of [them]’…Just ‘why not me too.’” There is no desire to bring others down, she just wants herself to be lifted up. This jump starts the second half of the book, as Christine meets Ferdinand, another deprived soul. Together, they talk about their experiences, and through many monologues by Ferdinand, we learn his views on class, on capitalism, and the shaky postwar Austrian government.

“How terrible it is to have to live here, and why, who’s it for? Why breathe in this day after day, knowing that there’s another world out there somewhere, the real one, and in herself another person, who is suffocating, being poisoned, in this miasma.”

Since this was published from unfinished manuscripts, Zweig leaves us with something of an open ending, which might be unsatisfactory to some – but I don’t mind speculating on how the story continues, and personally, I’m choosing a (comparatively) happy ending. Or maybe this was Zweig’s intent all along, and he wanted the ending written as is, open for interpretation.

So, what’s more dangerous than someone who has nothing? Someone who had everything first. As essayist William Deresiewicz writes in the afterword, “midnight has struck for Cinderella, but there will be no glass slipper and no prince,” as she is whisked out of that world almost as soon as she is whisked in. At least, this is the main takeaway I get from Zweig. The Post-Office Girl is a great historical gem of a novel – but reader beware, as you may find yourself preferring a supernatural thriller or monster horror.

“At worst we’ll lose, but when did we ever win?”

Postscript: I’ve been finding tons of great literature at New York Review Books. They bring to light unfamiliar works (unfamiliar to me, that is), usually having been translated for the first time. Someone called them “the Criterion Collection for books” and I can’t stop thinking of that. It’s how I found one of my favorite books of last year, Notes of a Crocodile. Any books I find and read through this site will have the #nyrb tag, so check them out!

#readingyear2025 #nyrb #german

by David Stubbs (2014)

“The rearrangement of rhythm in Krautrock, its novel textures and colouring, the relationship between instruments, song structures and spontaneous improvisation, are all metaphors for a necessary postwar reconstruction, the re-establishment of cultural identity.”

It’s hard to define Krautrock sonically, but you know it when you hear it. It was through the band Kraftwerk, one of the defining electronic bands of the seventies, that I started branching out into other bands of that time and place – this book then gave me a bigger picture of what the genre actually is.

Krautrock (originally a derogatory term from the British music press, using the German insult “Kraut”) styles can range from electronic, punk, ambient, psychedelic; some bands even embrace avant-garde and noise. But more than the music, these bands were making something authentically German, shying away from the influence of the British Invasion, rock ‘n’ roll or American blues.

“Springsteen, as ever, is preoccupied with keeping it ‘real’, yet his febrile lyrical visions are sheer rock ’n’ roll mythological hokum. Kraftwerk may look and sound ‘inauthentic’ but at least ‘Autobahn’ [the album] bears a closer resemblance to life as it is lived.”

I don’t think that Springsteen is inauthentic, but the above quote exhibits the difference in what these bands were striving for at the time (you can also see from the quote how Stubbs wears his opinions on his sleeve throughout the book). Krautrock’s authenticity can range from a beautiful psychedelic instrumental, a twenty-minute long ambient soundscape, or an extended improvisation over a simple motorik beat. Stubbs even describes one song as, ‘a high-pitched electronic peal around which the Moog [synthesizer] coils its oblique variations. For the less tolerant it will resemble an uninvestigated car alarm;’ – but don’t let this deter you from checking out some of these bands.

This book gives a great introduction to the history, stories, and relationships of the bands that formed the Krautrock genre. At times the text can be a bit bloated, especially with his strong bias, but Stubbs concludes the book well, chronicling bands that have gone on record describing their influence from Krautrock, including David Bowie, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, Portishead, Sonic Youth, Simple Minds, Soft Cell, Talking Heads, among many others. You may not have heard of Kraftwerk, but you have heard their influences in modern electronic/dance music (or even directly through sampling across all different musicians, e.g., Coldplay, New Order, Afrika Bambaataa, Dr. Dre, LCD Soundsystem, etc.). Anyone interested in music history, especially that of the 70s and 80s, would learn a lot from this book.

Addendum: This past summer I took a trip to Berlin for a conference and had some time to do some exploring. Maybe it was the fact that I had time to do a good amount of sightseeing, but I feel that the below quote perfectly captures what I liked about the city:

“No great city, not London, not New York, not Paris, not even Moscow, wears the scars of twentieth-century trauma the way Berlin does. Many of its streets and tenements are still riddled and strafed with bullet holes, a legacy of the Soviet advance on the city. Even today, with the remnants of Checkpoint Charlie cleared to make way for a vast business centre, the city is dotted with reminders and memorials of the Second World War, from the bleakly understated ‘Topography of Terror’, former site of the SS and the Gestapo in Niederkirchnerstrasse, to Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold’s Holocaust Memorial near to the Brandenburg Gate, whose sloping, undulating series of concrete slabs seeks to speak volumes about the unspeakable, in abstract form. Berlin is not exactly a ‘pretty’ city, in the cosy, old town, nostalgic sense. It is harsh, brusque in its modernity and its juxtapositions, though in unexpected spaces it throws up glimpses of the surreal.”

#readingyear2023 #music #history #german

by Franz Kafka (1925)

I’m still collecting my thoughts on one of my favorite books this year, Albert Camus’ The Stranger (and hopefully I’ll post them sometime next week), but in the meantime, it might be appropriate to comment on The Trial by Franz Kafka – one of the earliest pieces of absurdist literature. And this book certainly fit the bill – there was no shortage of odd and sometimes creepy situations for the main character, Joseph K. (referred to as K. throughout the book).

While The Trial does hold its rightful place in absurdist fiction, I argue it’s also a great authoritarian novel as well. George Orwell’s 1984 may be the quintessential work of that genre, but The Trial tends to focus less so on the large-scale dystopian/totalitarian society in 1984, and places more emphasis on the asymmetric/authoritarian relationship between K. and the Court that is accusing him. And it’s this Court that he is consistently trying to understand.

Even though this book is certainly dense in some parts (I’m suddenly reminded that K. goes on a 16-page internal tirade against his accusers and the systems that allow it), the ending chapter seems to occur fairly abruptly. The main plot cedes, but there are some loose ends. Throughout the book, K. has riveting conversations with other characters such as his lawyer, a whipper, a painter, a tradesman, and lastly a preacher (side note: a great parallel to The Stranger), but there really seems to be no convergence or closure of these side character plot lines.

However, these issues are likely there because Kafka never actually finished this book, and it wasn’t even published until after his death. It certainly doesn’t ruin the experience, just leaves you wanting a bit more. But even though we will never have the full book, The Trial is 100% worth the read.

#readingyear2021 #absurdism #german