IT is the absence of political rhetoric and didactic asides makes Hans Fallada's German classic, Little Man - What Now? (Berlin, 1932), so effective a portrait of a society in collapse. Although it was first published in English within a year of its German publication, that version was substantially abridged. This new translation (Libris, no price given) is the first complete edition of Fallada's novel to appear in English. Hugely popular when first published, it was the book which finally replaced Remarque's masterpiece All Quiet On the Western Front (1929) as the number one German bestseller.
Johannes Pinneberg is Fallada's "Little Man", an Everyman figure who finds his life spiralling out of his control through his girlfriend's unexpected pregnancy. On being informed of the baby's arrival, Johannes offers to marry her. The couple, with their pet names for each other, quickly emerge as vulnerable and likeable innocents forced into some of the oddest of situations and petty deceptions, largely through the dithery Pinneberg's fear of losing his job.
Though anxious to work, lie is trapped by his many limitations, including a distinct lack of initiative. He has one strength: Emma, or Lammchen, his wife, an optimistic and engaging character intent on seeing the bright side of everything. Yet Fallada ensures that she never becomes a mindless fool, crazed by romantic notions of domestic bliss. He is careful to give her the knowing street wisdom gained from growing up in a miserable family. Her resilience is eventually noticed by her slightly gormless spouse. She says: "Did you really think I could be all sugar and spice when I've been going out to work since I left school, and had the sort of father and brother I've had, as well as that bitch of a boss and those workmates of mine?"
The picaresque narrative follows the newlyweds - accompanied with their unborn, nicknamed The Shrimp, who becomes a character well before birth - from a small provincial town where Johannes works, through their move to Berlin and genuine financial hardship. While the couple are gentle, almost childlike in their behaviour, they are surrounded by a vividly drawn group of disgruntled caricatures, all complaining about money and life and each other. There is tremendous comic energy in the book, and Fallada, a natural writer, possesses a graceful lightness of touch and a skill for changing pace and tone.
Ducherow offers all the claustrophobia and lack of privacy common to small towns anywhere. One of the men working at the seed and fertiliser factory where Johannes is employed is a nazi. His reasons for joining are easily explained. "Lauterbach's lust for life was finally satisfied: almost every Sunday, and an occasional weekday evening too, he was able to have a fight."
Intent on meeting her mother in law, Lammchen writes to her. Once contact is made, the wayward Mia attempts to take over the couple's life. Promising them good fortune in the guise of a new job for Pinneberg, the older woman brings them to Berlin, obsessed with extracting a high rent from them. Of course, no job has been arranged. But Pinneberg does talk his way into a post at a smart menswear store where his days and nights are haunted by the need to meet an oppressive sales quota.
The climax of the novel is reached when Pinneberg, desperate to make a sale, begs a famous actor, who has spent an hour trying on clothes, to buy a suit from him. His humiliation is witnessed by a supervisor, to whom the actor makes a complaint.
Near the end of the novel, Johannes, while looking into a shop window, is moved on by a watching policeman. Shabby, unkempt and unemployed, "suddenly Pinneberg understood everything that he was on the outside now, that he didn't belong here anymore, and that it was perfectly correct to chase him away".
Considering his difficult personality and the bizarre path his life took, it is a small miracle that Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen in 1893, ever wrote any novels at all. While he favoured writing about the innocent victim, there was little about him that was innocent. The son of a high court judge, the young Ditzen ran away from home, tried to kill himself, was accused of writing obscene letters to the daughter of one of his father's colleagues, and shot and killed a young friend in a suicide pact, then failed to honour the terms by remaining alive. On the grounds of insanity, he escaped trial for this crime, and also avoided war service. During the first World War, he became an alcoholic and morphine addict. His life long flair for survival against the odds came to the rescue and from a lowly start as an agricultural apprentice, he became an estate accountant and farm manager. However, having written two novels by the mid 1920s, he had also served two prison sentences for embezzlement, activities resulting no doubt from his need to sustain his drug habit.
About this time, publisher Ernest Rowohlt intervened and gave Fallada a part time job, thus enabling him to continue writing. Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben ("Peasants, Bosses and Bombs") was published in 1930 and provided Fallada with his first success. But it was Little Man - What Now? which really captured the public imagination at a time when daily life was becoming harder and harder for ordinary citizens. He divorced his first wife, and later shot and wounded her. Arrested for his anti nazi stance, he nonetheless survived, only to die in 1947 from an overdose of morphine after treatment for alcoholic poisoning.
Fallada's life story is as nasty a narrative one could hope to read, yet Little Man - What Now? reveals a real humanity and depth of understanding. This classic narrative of comedy and pathos deserves to be rediscovered.
