Little Man, What Now?

by Hans Fallada

  Timing was obviously crucial: in the right hands at the right time the angle of the ‘Little Man’ can, however indirectly, prove revelatory. Charlie Chaplin, after all, expressed the state of an entire age—his immensely popular City Lights (1931) was showing in Berlin in 1932—and not just the state of tramps. Literary history is indeed rich in examples of bestsellers whose success suggests that the voice of the half-hidden victims can ring more eloquently and reach further than the voice of the victimisers. Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweyk and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front offer a bottom-up view of war, Anne Frank, whose diary opened millions of eyes to the Holocaust, had, to put it mildly, a restricted view of the world. Fallada’s Little Man is a distant relative, certainly his enduring success has been on a comparable scale: translated into over twenty languages, twice filmed—once in Germany, once in the USA—within two years of its appearance, by which time half a million copies had been sold world-wide—‘The Book of the Year is now the Film of the Year’, a film poster for the American version proclaimed, ‘Learn about Life from Little Man and his Wife’—thus the publicity from Universal Pictures. Enduring success is one thing, immediate impact is something different, and clearly the immediate impact of Fallada’s novel was undeniable. Film rights were sold within a month, indeed Fallada was working on a film version in the days immediately up to publication. At his death four unpublished film-outlines were found, entitled Keep your Head High!, of which the longest, thirty-one handwritten pages, was written between 6 and 10 June 1932. The fact that some fifty provincial German newspapers serialized the novel points to a readership that was diffuse and by nature immeasurable and to a resonance that resists final analysis.

  ‘Never,’ said the redoubtable critic Herbert Jhering, ‘has the success of a book been easier to explain.’ The statistics record the scale of that success; those who fuelled the success, the reviewers, help to explain it. To many of its most enthusiastic reviewers the novel’s strength lay in its close-up characterization. But these were not characters in a vacuum: timing—that critical year 1932—gave them a context and, with that context, urgent topicality. Thus even the Communists, to whom Pinneberg’s passivity, his opting-out of revolutionary engagement, was anathema, could still commend his relevance. One of their number, Jürgen Kuczynski, recalled later, ‘we found the novel completely unpolitical and yet full of a political actuality’. The leading literary journal, The Literary World, reviewed the novel in July 1932, and the review is worth quoting at length because it underlines the interaction between the book and its circumstances, between small lives in close-up and large issues at a distance:

  When a few decades ago a Russian newspaper serialized Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, complete strangers talked in the street and in trains, exchanging opinions about the characters in the novel and their fate. A man of exceptional gifts was expressing what all felt. When Fallada’s novel Little Man—What Now? appeared in the Vossische Zeitung, author and publisher were bombarded with letters seeking to express the passionate involvement of readers in the fate of the people in the novel. One man was expressing what all were suffering. One man was giving shape to what all could sense. That is how the miracle occurred that we no longer believed possible: a fragmented society, a mountain of conflicting interests, a nation which appeared to share nothing save poverty and the hatred of each against each that poverty gives rise to, this ill-treated people acquired in Fallada’s novel a book for the people. It concerns everyone … Thanks to Fallada’s keen sense of reality, his powers of observation, his gift of catching the flavour of ordinary speech and his boldness in conveying unvarnished what he has heard, he has created a book for our time and about our time … Any foreigner seeking to form a picture of present-day Germany will find it in this story of the little white-collar worker and his wife much more than in newspapers or party meetings or manifestos.

  The suggestion that authenticity was one of the virtues of Little Man—What Now? had already been made by Ernst Rowohlt, Fallada’s publisher, in their publicity material: ‘The marital bliss, the joy of fatherhood, happiness at work and the hunger for work, the despair and the love of Johannes Pinneberg, a little white-collar worker, one of millions. The novel is no novel, it is the life of all of us here and now.’ Critics bore out what Rowohlt were claiming in advance: here was the quintessential ‘novel of pauvreté’, as one reviewer put it; Fallada was ‘an unusual expert in the use of detail’; for Hermann Hesse, whose own fictional world was far removed from that of Fallada, he deserved high praise for ‘having reported so realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life’.

  Fallada himself once admitted that he could depict only what he saw, not what might happen, and shortly before his death he stressed the importance of a certain kind of authenticity. He had, he claimed, sampled and studied life before writing books. What sounds like a dispassionate reiteration of old truths about life and experience being the best teachers conceals the high price that Fallada paid for the sampling and the study. By the time that Little Man—What Now? was published he had spent nineteen months in a mental hospital and a total of over two years in prison. By the end of his life he had been variously institutionalized for some seven and a half years. The anguish began early: school was a torment, he was isolated, was bullied by those around him and a prey to constant, serious illness. To keep away from school he inflicted illness on himself by drinking quantities of vinegar, which produced a deathly pallor. In October 1911 at the age of eighteen he fought a duel with a fellow-pupil, killed him, failed to kill himself (this was not his first suicide attempt) and was charged with murder. From January 1912 until October 1913 he was confined in an institution. Soon after his release he became a morphine addict. During the next ten years he was repeatedly a patient at treatment-centres for drug-addiction but proved uncooperative. In 1924 and again between 1926 and 1928 he had two spells in prison, having been twice convicted of embezzlement, crimes committed in order to finance his addiction.

  Contradicting the self-destructive urges that the young Fallada manifested—and yet perhaps complementing them—were his precocious literary ambitions. While still a schoolboy he had, according to one of his teachers, no academic goals, learned little, but was seized with the desire to achieve fame as a writer. His first attempt to fulfil that ambition yielded Young Goedeschal: A Novel of Puberty, completed in 1918 and published in 1920. It is not easy to discern the author of Little Man—What Now? in the hectic hyperbole of this immature piece, indeed Fallada subsequently disowned both this and his second novel, Anton and Gerda, published in 1923, requesting that available copies be pulped. In Goedeschal disorder is not in society but in the blood, in the turmoil of adolescence, in a hothouse sensibility that soon palls. Of Johannes Pinneberg, the later Little Man, who is more sober than soul-searching, there is no sign, yet there may be much of Fallada himself in the febrile, volatile central character:

  The icy wind sweeping down the street bit into his fevered face. Kai’s hand shot up, passed smoothingly across his face, and it was as if cracks had opened in his cheeks, a deep, jagged cleft seemed to gape open on his forehead and inside it his blood was singing, pressing out of every vein, white, foaming, scornful of the cold, and every heart-beat drove it to ever wilder turbulence. It sang, it yelled, it stormed in him.

  Fallada’s case was too tragic and too complex to permit slick summary diagnosis, nevertheless it might be suggested that Young Goedeschal, for all its weaknesses, explores the youthful sources of the disabling extremism that was to plague Fallada himself.

  However, the life that Fallada claimed to have sampled and studied had its less painful aspects, embracing more than nervous breakdowns, drug-addiction and crime. Looking back in 1946 in an essay ‘How I became a writer’, which was found after his death, Fallada points to a positive consequence of what had at first been seen by his father and others as a course of physical and psychological rehabilitation—work and training on farms and estates in Mecklenburg, Si
lesia and West Prussia through the first half of the 1920s:

  I was with people almost all the time, I stood behind endless rows of women talking away while they chopped turnips and dug potatoes, and I heard the women and girls talking away. It went on from dawn till dusk … I could not avoid it, I had to listen and I learned how they talk and what they talk about, what their worries are and what problems they have. And as I was only a very minor official and not riding around on horseback—I just had a bike now and then to save time—they had no inhibitions about talking to me and I learned to talk to everybody.

  From the adolescent’s pounding blood to the trainee-inspector on his bike is a long road and it is the latter that ultimately, after a long, unproductive interval, bore fruit. It is a clear case of experience, gained first on those farming-estates and then in a newspaper-office, providing the material for documentary fiction.

  In 1929 Fallada, by now a reporter on a local newspaper in Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, the town in which, the previous year, he had completed two years in prison, experienced at close hand the increasingly violent confrontation between the over-taxed, under-resourced small-farmers of Schleswig-Holstein and the authorities. By 1930 he had moved to Berlin, working part-time for his old publisher Ernst Rowohlt, and began to write a novel around those experiences, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (a title which has been ingeniously translated as Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks). The novel, Fallada’s third, was published in 1931, having already reached a large public and gained pre-publication publicity via serialization in a leading Cologne journal. The novel launched—or re-launched—Fallada as a writer. It was commended not least for its authoritative documentary perspective on events through characters who were by no means locked in parochialism—one leading critic, Kurt Tucholsky, saw the work indeed as a ‘political manual of Fauna Germanica’. But the novel is also rooted at many levels in Fallada’s private circumstances. The events—Fallada shifts the stage from Schleswig-Holstein to Pomerania—are witnessed through a local newspaper-office and they involve, among others, a local journalist Max Tredup. Tredup is not the central figure but he is important as the first in a line of ‘little men’ which, most obviously, includes Tredup’s immediate successor in Fallada’s fictional world, Johannes Pinneberg. Tredup is a victim, a wretched, despised figure, seeking—and failing—to improve his shaky financial state, to protect his family, to survive in an uneasy world. His fate is ultimately more tragic than Pinneberg’s—he is killed by mistake—but the affinity, both to Pinneberg and to Fallada’s own circumstances, is striking.

  In 1929 those circumstances had changed. In June of that year Fallada married Anna Issel, daughter of a working-class family. She was a sane, sound, practically-minded twenty-eight-year-old, employed in a milliner’ shop and she is generally held to have had a stabilizing influence on Fallada and to have been a model for the equally level-headed Lammchen in Little Man—What Now? In March 1930 a son was born. Fallada later recollected the straitened circumstances in which the trio had to live: ‘Those were times of dreadful anxiety! Instead of making progress we were up to our ears—up to our hair—in debt! We had nothing, except worries and sleepless nights!’ But Fallada was no longer alone, no longer—or not yet again—addicted to drink or drugs. If anything, writing itself had become a source of intoxication, a means of escape:

  It was often like an intoxication, but one above all the forms of intoxication that material substances can deliver. Even the worst hours, when I was in utter despair about how to continue the novel, were far better than my most beautiful free hours. No, that’s what it was, I had taken a poison that I could not shake out of my mind or my body, I was thirsty for it, I wanted to drink more of it, to drink it always, every day for the rest of my life.

  And Little Man—What Now? was written in sixteen weeks.

  Fallada’s writing, meeting as it clearly did a personal need, offered a kind of therapy. What sounds from his own account like an escape from reality might seem to inhibit every impulse towards gritty realism, but for Fallada, it might be said, even the humdrum, the ins-and-outs of lives lived at the margin of society, had an intoxicating fascination. Not that the escapism is always under control, there are moments in Little Man—What Now? when escapes are escapes into idylls, however imperilled and short-lived they might be. Thus Romantic colours suffuse the end of the novel:

  And suddenly the cold had gone, an immeasurable 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.

  At such a point the imaginative freedom of fiction seems to be colliding with the harsher exigencies of the lives that Fallada has been recording. Indeed he seems, when he came to recollect the year between Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks and Little Man—What Now? to have overlaid fact with fiction. He did not, as he later alleged, lose his job in 1931, he resigned in 1932. Times were indeed hard, resources very limited, but by the winter of 1931, when he began work on Little Man—What Now?, his circumstances in his little house in a Berlin suburb, bought with the proceeds of Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks, were not comparable with the desperate poverty of Pinneberg. When Fallada later describes his mode of life he comes close to indulgent romanticizing nostalgia:

  Every morning, while Suse did the housework, I went out, pushing my son in his pram … I pushed him through Altenhagen, I pushed him through Neuenhagen, I pushed him through Bollensdorf … Everywhere we appeared, the pram and me, we were part of the landscape. In a greengrocers Suse heard that we had a name—I was just called ‘the poor out-of-work man with his baby.’

  Intoxication, romanticizing and personal therapy aside, Fallada clearly had acquired and had put to use in Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks and in Little Man—What Now? detailed knowledge of lives that he had at most only half shared and an ability to capture the essence of those lives, the temporary pleasures and the enduring ordeals. In fulfilling that life-long and exclusive ambition to be a writer Fallada was not, in other words, rejecting the skills in listening and in observation that had been valuably practised first on the women chopping turnips and then, more recently, on events recorded in the Neumünster paper.

  But neither acquired skills nor the fruitful conjunction of opportunity, experience and the 1932 crisis can quite account for the success of Little Man—What Now? Observation and close-up realism were among the virtues singled out by reviewers whom we have quoted, reviewers who also stressed the novel’s social relevance, the general significance, the symptomatic character, of the seemingly insignificant lives led by its central figures. But two other factors, the one bearing on Fallada’s manner, the other on his subject-matter, help to explain the impact of the novel and, in so doing, link it with contemporary trends.

  First, the manner. Fallada’s much-praised authenticity is inseparable from a major cultural shift in Germany in the late 1920s. No change during these admittedly changeable years was quite so far-reaching as that towards what came to be called ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, a term variously rendered as neo-realism, new objectivity, new sobriety. The term had gained currency in 1925 when G. F. Hartlaub, a gallery-director, opened an exhibition in Mannheim under that title. In that same year Expressionism, the polar opposite of realism, was pronounced dead in a famous essay by the art-critic Franz Roh. Cinema and photography were soon seeking to exploit the realistic rather than the visionary, the transcendent potential of the camera. Painting too exemplifies the move towards what the art-historian Wieland Schmied has called ‘a new attentiveness to the world of objects’. In literature the change was equally marked through the cultiva
tion of coolness of gesture, of undemonstrative language, in the foregrounding of fact and authenticity, in the cult of reportage.

  In 1926 the journal The Literary World conducted an inquiry among leading writers on the question ‘whether literature, narrative prose in particular, is being decisively influenced by Neue Sachlichkeit and reportage’. That the question was being asked at all is significant. Opinions might vary, but there was no denying the fact that Neue Sachlichkeit, however construed, was an influence to be reckoned with. As the Austrian novelist and feuilletonist Joseph Roth put it: ‘Nowadays only what is recognizably documentary is recognized at all.’ There is a hint of ruefulness in Roth’s observation and, indeed, this was no cut-and-dried affair. Writers, including contributors to the debate initiated by The Literary World, had misgivings about the extent and the nature of the interaction between the differing modes of narrative fiction on the one hand, reportage on the other. The risk could be ‘Fact-poets’, as they were disparagingly called. The world of facts, the evidence of the senses, needed to be mediated creatively in order to be grasped, otherwise the facts defeat the understanding—‘700 Intellectuals Revering An Oil-tank’, thus the title of a poem by Brecht, caricaturing what he felt to be the uncomprehending stance of the out-and-out realists. Plain documentation, Brecht suggested elsewhere, is not enough—a photograph of the Kruppworks or AEG tells us nothing about the reality.