‘She has begun to find out who she is, and,
having discovered this new world, to discover herself.’
Christine Hoflehner is the post office girl of
the title, working in a village branch in Klein-Reifling, Austria, in the years
after World War One. Her days are identical, each spent working away at the
post office, just earning enough to make ends meet, and then returning to the
small home she shares with her ailing mother. There is the constant awareness
of most things being ‘too expensive’, of having to scrimp and save to survive.
Then one day an unexpected telegram arrives
from Christine’s American aunt, a wealthy woman, inviting her to stay with her
and her husband at a resort in the Swiss Alps. Not having had a break, let
alone a holiday in years, after initial fear and apprehension Christine accepts
the initiation. Traveling to meet them she is painfully aware and
self-conscious as to her appearance, but as the journey goes on she becomes
aware of the sights outside the train carriage window, and it dawns on her,
with joy and surprise, that there is a whole world which she has never seen.
‘Indifferent and without desires before, now
she’s beginning to realize what she’s been missing….This is her first glimpse
of the unimaginable majesty of the Alps, and she sways with surprise…if not for
the accident of this journey, she herself would have died, rotted away, and
turned to dust with no inkling of their glory.’
Her stay at the resort with her aunt and uncle
will irrevocably alter her life. She discovers a world of luxury, freedom and
pleasure, surrounded by pretty clothes, beautiful interiors, exciting people,
and she is intoxicated and totally swept away by it all. There are none of her
usual worries about lack of money, of boredom and routine; everything is new
and exciting, the world is there to be discovered, people to meet and places to
see. She undergoes such a change in all aspects of her life; it is like a real
Cinderella story, from rags to riches.
On waking on her first morning in the hotel, ‘she
looks and around and remembers everything – vacation, holiday, freedom,
Switzerland, her aunt, her uncle, the magnificent hotel! No worries, no
responsibilities, no work, no time, no alarm clock! No stove, no one waiting,
no pressure from anyone: the terrible mill of hardship that’s been crushing her
life for ten years has ground to a halt for the first time….She feels
self-confident and happy as never before.’
Suddenly having to return to her former life,
to her job at the post office, to wear her old clothes again, to return to the
village, having tasted this alternative, leaves Christine utterly devastated
and ashamed. Looking at her old clothes in the hotel wardrobe, the language
conveys how disgusted and black she feels about them and the life they remind
her of; ‘the hated blouse she came in, dangling there as white and ghastly
as a hanged man.’
Back in Klein-Reifling, ‘everything hideous,
narrow, disagreeable about this little world she’s been pushed back into digs
in its barbs until she can’t even feel her own pain.’ A chance meeting with an old friend
of her brother-in-law in Vienna one Sunday, someone with whom she feels a
common bond, will shape her life going forward.
What a moving, emotional novel that sees the
human spirit briefly reach such happiness and then return to such deep despair,
driven by a glimpse of what wealth can offer and dragged down by grinding
poverty in the post war years. I feel the author has captured the drudgery and
monotony that can overshadow a life, as well as the potential beauty. He has so
convincingly demonstrated, through Christine, the highs and lows of capitalist
society, and how this can affect one woman’s life. I felt such sympathy for
her, having her hopes for a different life so suddenly raised and just as
suddenly shattered.
The language is beautiful, the story
compelling, and the pain palpable. This work was found after the author’s death
by suicide in 1942. I would highly recommend it.
I'm so glad that German Literature Month has meant that I finally read this novel.
Published by Sort of Books
I bought my copy of this book.
