Little Man, What Now? (48 page)

Fallada is economical with his facts, avoiding the temptation to root his fiction in a copious spread of documentation. This is most obvious in his treatment of what, after all, is the setting for most of Pinneberg’s troubles—Berlin. Berlin as myth, as endlessly
fascinating, endlessly documented metropolis, figures in countless films and literary works of the time. At first sight the two-part structure of the novel—‘The Small Town’ and ‘Berlin’—seems to build a contrast and a sense of climax into the narrative. But Fallada creates no climax, does not make the arrival in Berlin into a grand occasion of the kind experienced by Erich Kästner’s Emil who arrives by train or by Alfred Döblin’s Franz Biberkopf who emerges from prison, or by the wordless camera in Walter Ruttmann’s film
Berlin, Symphony of a City
, speeding through the suburbs by train into the waking city. Arrival in Berlin for Pinneberg and his wife means above all, after the briefest mention of a ‘mêlée of pedestrians and trams’, a first encounter with the formidable Mia Pinneberg, not a detailed encounter with a vibrant, vivid metropolis. There is consistency in this—the lives lived by the couple connect only tangentially with the big city, where they see it, they only glimpse it—and then for personal reasons. Thus Johannes in the Tiergarten:

 … with the winding blowing out of all corners and a lot of ugly brownish-yellow leaves, it looked particularly desolate. It wasn’t empty, far from it. Masses of people were there, clothed in grey, and sallow-faced. Unemployed people, waiting for something, they didn’t themselves know what, for who waited for work any more …?

or Lammchen flat-hunting, noting that ‘it’s a wide world and Berlin’s a big city’ but seeing only what matters to her:

And the sleek cars roared by, and there were delicatessens, and people who earned so much they didn’t know how to spend it all. No, Lammchen didn’t understand it.

 … Recently she’d been going ever further east and north, where there were endless frightful blocks of flats,
overcrowded, malodorous, noisy.

Berlin, a cold, unglamourous place, rejects Pinneberg shortly before the end of the novel, when he is roughly handled by the police in the Friedrichstra\??\e and realizes ‘he was on the outside now, that he didn’t belong here any more’.

Yet the novel closes on a momentarily upbeat note, more open-endedly than in Fallada’s first, unpublished version in which Johannes brings in a prostitute from the street and Lammchen makes them all a cup of coffee. At least in this earlier version the novel ended with a kind of social intervention, but even here the scope for action is limited, the basic predicament stays unresolved. Any answer to the question in the title might, in any case, have reduced the lasting success of
Little Man—What Now
?—answers often date more quickly than questions. Certainly when the centenary of Fallada’s birth was celebrated in 1993 commentators were quick to praise Fallada’s avoidance of slick answers, his portrayal of helplessness. The state of mind of workers in Eastern Germany threatened with unemployment could—thus the
Tageszeitung—
be understood through Fallada’s novel. Fallada,
Die Welt
suggested, is as much a mouthpiece of the powerless victims as ever.

Fallada himself preferred to leave the
What Now?
question unanswered. Yet for him the sheer indestructibility of Lammchen was a kind of answer. A partial answer no doubt and not one for the proponents of root-and-branch policies, but an answer that nevertheless deserves to be heeded:

People have said to me: ‘Why have you no answer to the question “What Now?”‘ Lammchen is my answer, I know no better one. Happiness and misery, worries and a child, worries about a child, the ups and downs of life, no more, no less.

PHILIP BRADY

Other books by Hans Fallada available from Melville House

Every Man Dies Alone

“Hans Fallada’s
Every Man Dies Alone
is one of the most extraordinary and compelling novels ever written about World War II. Ever. Fallada lived through the Nazi hell, so every word rings true—this is who they really were: the Gestapo monsters, the petty informers, the few who dared to resist. Please, do
not
miss this.”

—Alan Furst, author of
Spies of Warsaw

“The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”

—Primo Levi

“An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin.”

—Philip Kerr, author of the
Berlin Noir
series

The Drinker

“Fallada deserves high praise for having reported so realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life.”

—Herman Hesse

“Profound in its psychological insight and in language sparse yet explosive, this is a novel both shocking and original.”

—Beryl Bainbridge

“…  genuinely tragic and beautiful … Fallada’s perfectly horrifying, horrifyingly perfect novel is the story of himself rejected by society and returning the insult.”

—The New Statesman

“This is an heroic book, brave, fearless and honest. It is necessary reading.”

—Sunday Times (London)