One village post office in Austria is much like another: seen one and you've seen them all. Each with identical meager furnishings provided (or rather issued, like uniforms) during Franz Josef's rule, all drawn from the same stock, their sad look of administrative stinginess is the same everywhere. Even in the most remote mountain villages of the Tyrol, in the shadow of the glaciers, they stubbornly retain that unmistakable odor of old Austrian officialdom, a smell of stale cheap tobacco and dusty files. The layout never varies: a wooden partition perforated by glass wickets divides the room, according to a precisely prescribed ratio, into This Side and That Side-the public sphere and the official one. The state's failure to give much thought to the significant amount of time spent by its citizens in the public area is clear from the absence of seating or any other amenities. In most cases the only piece of furniture in the public area is a rickety stand-up desk propped against the wall, its cracked oilcloth covered with innumerable inkblots, though no one can remember finding anything but congealed, moldy, unusable goo in the recessed inkwell, and if there happens to be a pen lying in the grooved gutter, the nib is always bent and useless. The thrifty Treasury attaches as little significance to beauty as to comfort: since the Republic took Franz Josef's picture down, what might be called interior decoration is limited to the garish posters on the dirty whitewashed walls inviting one to attend exhibitions which have long since closed, to buy lottery tickets, and even, in certain neglectful offices, to take out war loans. With these cheap wall coverings and possibly an admonition not to smoke, heeded by no one, the state's generosity to the public ends.

But the area beyond the official barrier evidently demands more respect. Here the state arrays the unmistakable symbols of its power and reach. The iron safe in the corner may actually contain considerable sums from time to time, or so the bars on the windows seem to suggest. The centerpiece gleaming on the wheeled worktable is a well-polished brass telegraph; next to it the more unassuming telephone receiver sleeps on a black nickel cradle. These two items are accorded a certain amount of space betokening honor and respect, for, via copper wires, they link the tiny, remote village with the width and breadth of the Reich. The other postal implements are forced to crowd together: the package scales and weights, the letter bags, books, folders, brochures, and index files, the petty cash, the black, blue, red, and indigo pencils, the clips and clasps, the twine, sealing wax, moistening sponge, and blotter, the gum arabic, the knives and scissors, the bookbinder's bone folder, all the varied equipment of the postal service lies in a jumble on a desk hardly broader than a forearm is long, while the many drawers and boxes hold an inconceivable profusion of papers and forms, each different from the last. But the seeming extravagance with which these objects are scattered about is deceptive, for every last piece of this cheap equipment is stealthily and inexorably enumerated by the state. From this pencil stub to that torn stamp, from the frayed blotter sheet to the used bar of soap in the metal sink, from the lightbulb illuminating the office to the iron key for locking it up, the Treasury is unyielding in demanding that its employees account for each and every piece of public property either in use or consumed.