Little Man, What Now?

by Hans Fallada

  Jachmann gave her a long look. He had turned his great leonine head quite round and looked her full in the face.

  ‘You must stop thinking about the trains, Lammchen,’ he said. ‘Your husband will come back. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘It isn’t just the drink,’ said Lammchen. ‘Drinking would be bad, but not very bad. But he’s so down, you see, something might happen to him. He was at Puttbreese’s today, and Puttbreese might have been mean to him. A thing like that can knock him right over these days. He can’t stand much more. He might …’

  She gave him a big-eyed stare. And then suddenly her eyes filled with tears. They ran, large and bright, down her cheeks. The gentle, strong mouth began to quiver, lost its firmness. ‘Jachmann,’ she whispered, ‘he might …’

  Jachmann had stood up, and placed himself half behind her. He gripped her by the shoulders. ‘No, young lady, no!’ he said. ‘That couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Anything can happen.’ She broke free. ‘You’d better go home. You’re wasting your money waiting. You caught us at a bad time.’

  Jachmann didn’t answer. He kept pacing two steps forward, two steps back. On the table was the tin cigarette-case with the old playing-cards so beloved of the Shrimp.

  ‘What did you say your young chap called those cards?’

  ‘Which young chap? Oh, the Shrimp. He calls them “Ca-ca”.’

  ‘Shall I read the ca-ca-cards for you?’ said Jachmann, smiling. ‘Wait and see, your future is quite different from what you think.’

  ‘Leave off,’ said Lammchen. ‘A small gift of money will come into the house. That’s next week’s unemployment benefit.’

  ‘My funds are rather low at the moment,’ said Jachmann. ‘But eighty marks, maybe ninety, I’d be glad to give—’ he corrected himself—‘lend, I mean.’

  ‘It’s nice of you, Jachmann,’ said Lammchen. ‘We could certainly use it. But you know, money isn’t the answer. We can get by, and money isn’t what’s needed. It’s work that would help Sonny, a bit of hope. Money? No.’

  ‘Is it because I’m going back to your mother-in-law?’ he asked, looking searchingly at her.

  ‘That too,’ she said. ‘I have to keep things away from him if they’re going to add to his misery. You must understand that, Jachmann?’

  ‘I do understand,’ he said.

  ‘But the main thing is that money really doesn’t help. How does it change things being able to live a bit better for six or eight weeks? Not at all.’

  ‘Perhaps I could get him a job?’ reflected Jachmann.

  ‘Oh, Mr Jachmann, you mean well. But don’t put yourself out. If he does get something, it mustn’t be through lying or fraud. He’s got to lose his fear, feel free again.’

  ‘Well …’ said Jachmann sadly. ‘If you want the luxury of getting something today without lying or fraud, there I can’t help you!’

  ‘You see,’ said Lammchen eagerly, ‘they steal wood around here for fuel. I don’t find that specially wrong, but I told Sonny: you mustn’t. He shan’t go down, Jachmann, I won’t let him. That’s one thing he’s got to keep. It’s a luxury, maybe, but it’s our only luxury, and I’m going to hold onto it, and then nothing bad can happen to us, Jachmann.’

  ‘Young lady,’ said Jachmann. ‘I …’

  ‘Look at the Shrimp there in his little bed. Supposing things did get better, and Sonny got back on his feet and had a job he liked, and earned money again. What if he had to keep thinking: you did that, you were like that? It isn’t the wood, Jachmann, it isn’t the law. What sort of law is it that can smash up everything for us with impunity, and we can be sent to gaol for three marks’ worth of wood? That’s a laugh. Of course it’s no disgrace.’

  ‘Young lady …’ Jachmann tried to break in.

  ‘But Sonny,’ pursued Lammchen passionately, ‘he can’t laugh over it. He takes after his father, he’s not like his mother at all. Mama’s told me ten times over what a stickler his father was. He was chief clerk in a lawyer’s and everything at work had to be right, down to the last jot. His whole private life was the same. If he got a bill in the morning, he went straight out in the evening to pay it. “If I were to die,” he used to say, “and the bill wasn’t paid, someone could say I’d been a dishonourable man.” And Sonny is exactly like that. So that’s why it’s not a luxury, Jachmann. He has to hang on to that. He may sometimes think he can be like the others, but he can’t. He has to keep his hands clean. So I make sure it’s so and that he never again takes a job that’s built on dishonesty.’

  ‘What am I doing sitting here?’ said Jachmann. ‘What am I waiting for? You’re doing all right. You’re right, young lady, you’re absolutely right. I’m going home.’

  But he didn’t go. He didn’t even get up from his chair, he looked Lammchen full in the face. ‘This morning at six, young lady, I was let out of gaol. I did time for a year, young lady,’ said Jachmann.

  ‘Jachmann,’ said Lammchen. ‘Ever since you didn’t come back that night, I’ve imagined something of the kind. It wasn’t my first thought, but it seemed possible. I mean,’ Lammchen didn’t know how to put it. ‘You’re that sort of …’

  ‘Of course I’m that sort,’ said Jachmann.

  ‘To the few people you like you’re nice, and to all the rest I think you’re probably not nice at all.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Jachmann. ‘You I like, young lady.’

  ‘Then you enjoy living and having a lot of money, and you have to have things going on around you, and you have to have plans … Well, all that’s your business. But when Mama told me you were wanted by the police, I realized it must be so.’

  ‘And d’you know who informed on me?’

  ‘Mama, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it was Mama. Mrs Marie, otherwise known as Mia Pinneberg. I went astray a bit, you know, Lammchen, and Mama’s a devil when she’s jealous. She landed in it too, but not badly, four weeks.’

  ‘And now you’re going back to her? Actually, I do understand why. You belong together.’

  ‘Right, young lady. We belong together. And she is a splendid woman for all that. I like her for being so greedy and so egotistical. Did you know that Mama’s got over thirty thousand marks in the bank?’

  ‘What? Over thirty thousand?’

  ‘What d’you think of that? Mama’s clever. Mama prepares for the future. She thinks about her old age and doesn’t want to be dependent on anybody. No, I’m going back to her. For a man like me she’s the best pal in the world, through thick and thin, game for anything.’

  There was a silence, and then Jachmann stood up suddenly and said ‘Well, good night, Lammchen. I’ll be off.’

  ‘Good night, Jachmann, and I hope things go well, really well for you.’

  Jachmann shrugged his shoulders. ‘The cream’s gone when you reach fifty, Lammchen. There nothing left but skimmed milk, just watery stuff.’ He paused, then said softly. ‘I suppose you’re out of the question for me, Lammchen?’

  Lammchen smiled at him, from the depths of her heart. ‘Yes, Jachmann, I am. Sonny and I …’

  ‘Well, don’t worry about your young man! He’ll come. He’ll be here in a moment! Cheers, my Lammchen. Perhaps we’ll meet again!’

  ‘Certainly we’ll meet again. When things are going better for us. Now go, and don’t forget your cases. They were the main reason.’

  ‘They were the main reason, young lady. Right as always. Absolutely right.’

  A BUSH BETWEEN THE BUSHES. AND THE OLD LOVE

  Lammchen went out into the garden with him, the sleepy driver couldn’t get the cold engine going at once, and they stood in silence next to the car. Then they shook hands and said goodbye once again, and Lammchen watched the light of the headlamps getting farther and farther away. She heard the noise of the engine for a little while longer, and then all was still and dark around her.

  The sky was starry-clear, there was a slight frost. In the whole settlement, so far as s
he could see, there was no light, only behind her, in the window of her own summer-house, there was the soft reddish glow of the petrol lamp.

  Lammchen stood there, the Shrimp slept—was she waiting? What was there to wait for? The last train had gone through; the earliest Sonny could now come was next morning. He must have got up to something. So she hadn’t been spared that either. She’d been spared nothing. She could lie down and go to sleep. Or stay awake. It didn’t matter. Who cared?

  Lammchen didn’t go inside. She stood still. There was something in this silent night which made her heart uneasy. There were the stars, glittering in the cold air, they were friendly enough. The bushes in the garden and the next door garden had clumped together into a mass of black, the neighbour’s summer-house was like a great dark animal.

  No wind, no sound, nothing but a train going down the line in the far distance, which only made it stiller and more soundless here. And Lammchen knew she was not alone. Someone else was here outside in the darkness like her, immobile. Could she hear breathing? No. And yet there was someone.

  There was one lilac bush, and another. Since when was there something between the two?

  Lammchen took a step forward, her heart was hammering, but she asked quite calmly: ‘Sonny, is that you?’

  The bush that shouldn’t be there remained motionless. Then it moved, hesitantly, and Sonny asked hoarsely, dragging out the words: ‘Has he gone?’ ‘Yes, Jachmann’s gone. Have you been waiting here a long time?’

  Pinneberg did not answer.

  For a while they stood silent. Lammchen would have liked to be able to make out his face, but there was nothing to be seen. And yet a sense of danger emanated from the motionless figure, something darker than the night, something more threatening than the strange immobility of the man she knew so well. Lammchen stood silent.

  Then she said lightly: ‘Shall we go in? I’m getting cold.’

  He did not reply.

  Lammchen understood. Something had happened. It wasn’t that he had been drinking. Or not only that he had been drinking, because he might have done that as well. Something else had happened, something bad.

  There stood her man, her beloved young man, in the darkness, like a wounded animal, and did not trust himself to come into the light. They had crushed him at last.

  She said: ‘Jachmann only came for his cases. He’s not coming back.’

  But Pinneberg did not answer.

  They stood for a while again; Lammchen heard a car going along the high road, up hill and down dale, very distant at first then humming nearer, very loud, then growing farther away till it disappeared. She thought: ‘What shall I say? If only he’d speak!’

  She said: ‘You know I went to do some darning at the Kramers today?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘I didn’t actually do any darning. She’d got some material there and I cut it out to her figure. I’m making her a housecoat. She’s very satisfied and she’s going to let me have her old sewing-machine cheap and recommend me to all her friends. I’ll get eight marks for making a dress, maybe ten.’

  She waited. She waited a long time. She said cautiously. ‘We might be able to make a good bit of money out of that. Perhaps we’re out of the mire.’

  He made a movement, but then he stood still again and still said nothing.

  Lammchen waited, heavy-hearted, it was cold. She couldn’t comfort him any further, she was at a loss. It was all useless. What help was it to struggle? What for? He might as well have gone out with the others to steal wood.

  She bent back her head once again, and saw the sky full of stars. It was still and solemn, but terribly strange and huge and far away. ‘The Shrimp kept asking for you all afternoon. He’s suddenly begun saying Daddy instead of Dad-Dad,’ she said.

  Sonny said nothing.

  ‘Oh Sonny! Sonny!’ she cried. ‘What is it? Say something to your Lammchen! Do I no longer exist? Are we both quite alone?’

  But, oh, nothing helped. He came no nearer, he said nothing, he seemed to be getting farther and farther away.

  The cold had risen in Lammchen, penetrated her through and through, nothing was left. Behind her was the warm reddish brightness of the summer-house window, where the Shrimp was sleeping. But oh, even children pass, they belong to us only a short while—six years? ten years? Nothing lasted but being alone.

  She went towards the reddish brightness; she had to, what else was there?

  Behind her, a far-off voice cried: ‘Lammchen!’

  She continued on her way, nothing could help any more, so she went on.

  ‘Lammchen!’

  She went on. There was the summer-house, there the door, only one more step, her hand was on the latch.

  She felt herself grasped tight, it was Sonny who held her, he sobbed and stammered: ‘Oh Lammchen, what have they done to me … the police … they knocked me off the pavement … they chased me away … how can I look anyone in the face …?’

  And suddenly the cold had gone, an immeasurably gentle green wave lifted her up and him with her. They glided up together; the stars glittered very near; she whispered: ‘But you can look at me! Always, always! You’re with me, we’re together …’

  The wave rose and rose. It was the beach at night between Lensahn and Wiek, the one other time when the stars had been so near. It was the old joy, it was the old love. Higher and higher, from the tarnished earth to the stars.

  And then they both went into the house where the Shrimp was sleeping.

  AFTERWORD

  In its first issue of 1932 the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung launched the new year with two pieces of vivid photoreportage, one entitled ‘Unemployed between 14 and 21’, the other ‘Shelter for the Night’. The titles, like the accompanying photographs, speak for themselves. The camera, so often focused in Berlin’s illustrated weeklies on the glitzy aspects of city-life, was exploring the darker recesses, the wretchedness of lives lived—to adapt lines from the film of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera—not visibly in the light but invisibly in the dark. Later in 1932 the same weekly produced a documentation in pictures of ‘Berlin Cave-dwellers’, the Berlin poor living in unspeakably primitive huts and hovels. Three camera-essays from the same source in the same year—three occasions for despair and perhaps anger, three outrages recorded. Yet the overall impression is of impotence and inaction: grounds for anger, it seems, are plentiful; solutions are harder to come by.

  But there were other responses to social horror-stories. ‘Food first, then Rent’ is the slogan on a dank wall in a gloomy backyard depicted in a left-wing weekly for women, Woman’s Way, from the same year. The woman’s way seems to have been more purposeful—graffiti protestations on walls were obviously not enough. A poem accompanies the photograph, a song by the Communist versifier Erich Weinert entitled ‘Bright Song from a Dark Yard’:

  Old and young are on the dole,

  But they don’t just sit and stare,

  Hoping it will all just go away,

  They raise the alarm in every street.

  You old folk and youngsters, come out of your

  night!

  When the people finally wake in the slums,

  Their iron bonds will burst apart!

  On each pale face there’s a glow of hope,

  As the children strike up their new song,

  The Song of the Hammer and Sickle.

  A different strain indeed—utopian perhaps, propagandistic for sure, but at least far removed from impotence and inaction.

  By 1932, the year in which all these photographic records of deprivation appeared, the Great Slump, set in train by the Wall Street Crash of 24 October 1929, was in its third year. A newspaper graph published in mid-1932 charted the course of the slump in Germany from late 1929 to the present: unemployment had risen from 1.4 million to 6 million, wages had decreased by fifty per cent, production by forty per cent. Red Pepper, a Communist satirical journal, found a pictorial equivalent for the state of the Weimar Republic (it had
in the event less than a year of life left in it): a policeman guards a shop whose fascia reads ‘German Republic Ltd’ and whose window is empty save for stickers reading ‘Stocktaking Sale, cheaper than ever’, ‘Everything to clear!’ and labels lying around—‘Pensions’, ‘Wages and Salaries’, ‘Social Welfare’.

  At a time when the prospect, like that shop-window, looked bleak, when poverty, conflict and social disorder were endemic, it is hardly surprising that there were conflicting recipes spanning the entire political spectrum. They ranged from National Socialists, destined, of course, to assume power, who, if the occasion demanded it—and the crisis of 1932 did—could put an extra shine on the Socialist part of their name (‘National Socialism is socialism only for form’s sake’ was Brecht’s later verdict) to the Communists, to whom solidarity with the workers and with those deprived of work came perhaps more easily—in 1932 eighty-five per cent of party members in Germany were unemployed. The common thread, linking the photoreportage and the Weinert poem, the Communist cartoon depicting the empty Republic shop and Nazi posters offering work and bread, was unemployment. In 1932 forty-two per cent of German workers were unemployed (corresponding figures for Britain are twenty-two per cent, for Denmark thirty-two per cent). On 1 June 1932 Chancellor Brüning, who for two years had responded to a worsening situation with ineffectual emergency-measures, was replaced by von Papen who promptly cut unemployment-support. On 10 June 1932 Little Man—What Now? appeared.

  It is worth emphasizing the social upheavals, the explosive mixture of despair and revolutionary zeal, that surrounded Fallada as he wrote and published his novel—he had begun work in October 1931—not because he aims at any kind of total picture. The time-span of his narrative is close to that of the Slump itself, but the principal actors, whether politicians or industrialists, are absent. Fallada—leaving his readers, as it were, to fill in the all-too-familiar background—has chosen characters whose perspective is narrow, even blinkered, people for whom the major political issues, if they arise at all (and Johannes Pinneberg, his central character, encounters Nazis and anti-Nazis), are incidental, reduced to virtual invisibility in the day-to-day struggle to stay above the bread-line. ‘The terror of those on the margin of employment … the agony of those who are never secure’—this was Fallada’s theme in the eyes of The Spectator, reviewing the first English translation which appeared less than twelve months after the German edition.