Certain old habits survive even the fall of empires. When the Habsburg dynasty collapsed, after World War I, it wasn’t only the grand palaces and spacious parade grounds which survived: Its stubborn bureaucracy lived on, too. Imperial protocols vanished, but the civil service endured. The Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy was notorious for its obsession with order; even a requisition for pencils in a remote Tyrolean post office had to travel up an intricate chain of command. Such meticulous control made sense in a huge empire made up of many unruly nationalities. After 1918, when Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as Austria itself, became nation-states, the languages of government changed but the old bureaucratic machinery continued to grind. In the end, red tape proved mightier than the sword.

In his last, posthumously published novel, “The Post-Office Girl” (NYRB Classics, 272 pages, $14), translated by Joel Rotenberg, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig describes the effects of this crushing bureaucratic wheel on one of its smallest cogs. Unlike Kafka, his contemporary, who made a nightmare parody of officialdom, Zweig is scrupulously realistic. The little post office where Christine Hoflehner toils in the desolate hamlet of Klein-Reifling — it is “two hours from Vienna,” but might as well be on the moon — is rendered in stifling detail. Christine’s life is as tabulated as the inventories she must compile. She is only 28 but “seems good for at least another twenty-five years of service,” and during those years to come:

Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the cancelling desk with the same swivelling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceller onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump.

Zweig was a great admirer of Balzac, of whom he wrote a superb biography, and his skill at evoking the post office with its unvarying routines and clattering equipment, or the sordid little village of muddy cow-paths which it serves, owes much to the French novelist. And yet, the novel, found among Zweig’s papers after he and his second wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 — and only published in German in 1982 — is not a work of social protest at all. It is about the possibilities of escape — slim at the best of times — from those prisons we make for ourselves.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 into a wealthy and privileged Viennese Jewish family. He went to the best universities; he traveled widely. A member of that fabulous generation of Viennese intellectuals and artists, which included Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur Schnitzler, Zweig became a best-selling author, producing biographies (of Erasmus, Dickens, Casanova, and others), plays and poems, essays, short stories, and a dozen novels (his “Beware of Pity” and the brilliant novella “Chess Story,” also translated by Mr. Rotenberg, have already appeared from NYRB Classics). He settled in Salzburg but was forced to emigrate in 1934 after the Nazi rise to power. He went first to London, then to New York, finally taking refuge in Petrópolis, just outside of Rio de Janeiro. It was as though he could not run far enough or fast enough. Thomas Mann declared proudly from exile, “Where I am, there is Germany.” As a Jew driven from his homeland, Zweig could never assume so grandiose a stance: The Austria he had so brilliantly personified no longer existed except in memory, and from that there was no escape.

In “The Post-Office Girl,” Zweig’s last novel, an unexpected telegram frees Christine briefly from her grim village: Her wealthy aunt invites her for two weeks to a luxurious hotel in Switzerland. Zweig’s description of Christine’s train journey to the Engadine, with her awed first glimpse of the Alps, and of her humiliating arrival at the grand hotel in her dowdy hand-me-downs with a battered straw suitcase in her trembling hands, is intensely moving. But at the Palace Hotel, Christine is transformed; her aunt provides a complete makeover with a stylish haircut and shimmering silk frocks. Overnight the country girl becomes the belle of the ball.

In German, the novel is entitled “Rausch der Verwandlung,” or “The Ecstasy of Transformation,” and the sheer intoxication of self-discovery has perhaps never been better — or more terrifyingly — depicted. Christine is dazzled, not only by the privileged milieu into which she’s been so suddenly plunged, but by her glittering new self: The mousy postal official has become alluring, lovely, desired by all. But after only eight days, her skittish aunt, afraid that her own scandalous past will be revealed through her niece’s giddiness, sends her packing. Christine slinks back to Klein-Reifling; it is as though a butterfly were forced back into the drab chrysalis from which it had once burst free.

Here the novel changes, becoming terse and even somewhat “noir” in manner. In an essay, Zweig stated that he “proceeded like a painter” when he wrote, creating spaces in which light and shadow might flow together for a powerful effect. The contrast Zweig draws between the miserable little post office and the Palace Hotel in its splendor is sharp; and yet, both are ruled by iron protocols from which no escape is possible. Zweig ends the novel abruptly; Christine makes a desperate decision, and we don’t know where it will lead. Zweig was far too honest to tack on a happy ending. He saw no way out for himself but he was too compassionate an artist not to offer us, at the very last, the bare uncertainty of hope.

eormsby@nysun.com