Little Man, What Now?

"Here I was tossing up between Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? and another novel about ‘small people’, the more well-known Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, but I felt it was important to have a contemporary novel on my list that deals with the fallout of the Great Depression , which was the big game-changer in Weimar history. If you look at the general elections in Germany in 1928, they ended with a victory for the Social Democrats, who were returning to power. The new Chancellor, Hermann Müller, who was leader of the SPD, published a book that year which dealt with the 10-year anniversary of the November Revolution. And the tenor of the book was, ‘We’ve made it. This has become a success story against all the odds.’ Then, one year later, the situation completely unravelled. Germany was particularly badly affected because the temporary recovery of the German economy in the mid-1920s was heavily dependent on short-term American loans and they started being recalled. On top of that, there was a massive banking crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1931, which actually saw a number of Austrian and German banks go bust. The German government tried to fight the financial situation with austerity politics, also designed to show to the Allies that Germany couldn’t pay its war debts. This massively increased the plight of many people. At the worst point of the crisis there were six million people unemployed, which is a number that only gives you a glimpse into the overall situation, because those six million often had several dependents and many more people were forced to work on short-term contracts, making their employment very precarious. That’s not always captured in statistics. A third of the German workforce was unemployed and Little Man, What Now? deals with the effects of that crisis. “When people write about the Weimar Republic, it’s very often about Berlin and other urban centres. But the vast majority of Germans at the time continued to live in smaller cities, villages and rural areas” It was first published in 1932 and it is set between 1930 and 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. The ‘little man’ in question is Johannes Pinneberg, a bookkeeper from northern Germany, and his girlfriend Emma, who is expecting their son. Just after they find out that she’s pregnant, he is fired from his job and must now find ways to make do in the middle of the world’s worst economic crisis. He tries to find a new job in Berlin and is hired as a salesman in one of the large Berlin department stores, where he and his colleagues have to meet extremely ambitious quotas to keep their jobs. Otherwise they get fired. The book really depicts how people became more and more dependent on occasional labour, how businesses became more and more exploitative because they knew that there was a large sea of unemployed people who could be forced to accept any work conditions. So, it’s very critical of these practices but, at the same time, it is also about how he and his small family make do under difficult circumstances. At some point Pinneberg is fired and they’re forced to leave the city because they can no longer afford accommodation in it. In the end, he returns to Berlin to collect his dole money, but is further humiliated when a policeman confuses him for a beggar and chases him away from the front of a fancy department store. This is a novel that deals with the harsh realities of ordinary people’s lives after 1929. At the same time, the novel also has some positive things to say about the Weimar Republic, in the sense that Pinneberg is surprisingly complimentary about the institutional social safety nets that exist in the Republic. At least for a while, he gets unemployment benefits, his wife’s medical bills are paid during the pregnancy and she gets paid maternity leave. There are lots of important themes that highlight both the plight of working class families during the Great Depression, but also some of the mitigating factors. Fallada has recently had a bit of a renaissance in the Anglophone world, with the publication of his book Alone in Berlin a few years ago. Yet his earlier works are also worth re-visiting. Apart from Little Man, What Now? I also like his important but perhaps underappreciated, A Small Circus , which deals with the often-overlooked rural population of Germany in the late Weimar period. When people write about the Weimar Republic, it’s very often about Berlin and other urban centres. But the vast majority of Germans at the time continued to live in smaller cities, villages and rural areas. A Small Circus is about how the economic crisis affected the rural population which, in turn, radicalised. There were arson attacks and bomb attacks on public institutions by members of the so-called Landvolk, a farmers’ self-help organisation, with mass demonstrations of tens of thousands of men. I think Fallada is an amazing chronicler of some of the most pressing social issues of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He chronicles the effects of the economic crisis. He doesn’t blame the Weimar Republic per se in the book, but is critical of capitalism and how businesses exploited people who are desperately looking for jobs. A Small Circus is about how the very real issues of the rural population have been neglected. It’s not so much a blame game against the Republic that he’s playing because, as I mentioned, the novel also highlights that the Republic has introduced certain measures that mitigate the suffering of people. I think he sees himself, in the same way as Döblin, as a chronicler of what happens to ordinary people. Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz , deals with somewhat related issues—the poorer neighbourhoods around Alexanderplatz, but it is set before the beginning of the Great Depression. The protagonist, Franz Bieberkopf, is recently released from prison and moves in—and drinks himself through—the world of prostitutes, pimps, and crime in 1920s Berlin. Döblin, in what is probably the most acclaimed Weimar Berlin novel, follows an approach that is similar to Joyce’s in Ulysses . By introducing these literary techniques, I would say he also contributes to the genre of the ‘big city novel’ more generally by making more prominent than had previously been the case the lives of ‘little people.’ That is, of course, something that can also be found elsewhere in Weimar literature. Bertolt Brecht wrote some of his most powerful plays during this period, too. So, I’ve picked one example of that genre and I think Fallada’s novels on Weimar are worth revisiting."