by Hans Fallada
Fallada was no theorist, nor was he at the heart of any of the numerous debates about the possible limits of realism. Yet it is difficult to read Little Man—What Now? without sensing that issues currently under discussion were finding practical expression in his attempt to achieve a balance between the claims of fiction, of imaginative shaping, on the one hand, and the claims of documentary realism on the other. In the case of Little Man—What Now? the link between Fallada and that discussion is in fact neither coincidental nor tenuous. He read with keen interest the study of Siegfried Kracauer on White-collar Workers (Die Angestellten) which appeared to considerable acclaim in 1930. Kracauer, in hundreds of feuilleton essays a wide-ranging and incisive analyst of Weimar culture, wrote his study in an attempt to reconcile the need for documentation and the need for a creative shaping of the evidence. In an introductory chapter of White-collar Workers he recognizes the pervasive influence of Neue Sachlichkeit:
Writers hardly acknowledge any loftier ambition than to report—reproducing what you observe has top priority. There is a hunger for immediacy which is without doubt a consequence of being undernourished through a diet of German idealism.
In words that echo Brecht’s comment on photography, Kracauer expresses thoughts that Fallada might well have found congenial:
A hundred reports from a factory cannot be added up to make the reality of the factory—they remain for ever a hundred factory-views. Reality is a construction. Of course life must be observed, so that reality can emerge. But reality is in no way contained in the more or less fortuitous sequence of observations that make up reportage, rather it resides exclusively in the mosaic which gathers together discrete observations by grasping their real meaning. Reportage photographs life, a mosaic of this kind produces a picture of it.
Kracauer was one of many critics who around 1930 argued that reportage—‘Sachlichkeit’—was essential but inadequate and that literature required more. And Fallada was not the first to produce a bestseller that was praised for both its recording power and its imaginative scope. In 1929 Alfred Döblin had produced the classic Berlin novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, embracing both small fictional lives and the monster-city. Erich Kästner, whose world-wide best-seller Emil and the Detectives (1930) placed a bunch of children in a carefully documented Berlin world, created in Fabian (1931) a central character who registers with vivid irony the particularities of Berlin-life but is tragically unable to withstand its pressures.
The affinity between Fallada’s novel and Kracauer’s study is, however, exceptionally close—and here we move from the question of literary manner to that of subject-matter—because both are concerned with the world of the white-collar workers (Kracauer’s term, the ‘Angestellten’, occurs throughout Fallada’s novel). To explore that world was to Kracauer to venture into the unknown.
Whether Fallada had a similar sense of pioneering is a question that must remain unanswered, although his reviewers had no doubt that he was focusing on a world that most writers ignored. To Kracauer the white-collar worker—twenty per cent of all workers and numbering three and a half million—was a vast underclass, undefined hitherto and, in contrast to the proletariat, overlooked:
Hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers crowd the streets of Berlin daily and yet their life is more of a mystery than that of the primitive tribes whose customs they marvel at in the cinema.
Kracauer’s sense of exploration and discovery certainly fired his own enquiry and it may well help to explain the excitement that greeted Fallada’s novel. Kracauer’s own ‘little expedition’ is, he claims, ‘perhaps more adventurous than a film-trip to Africa. For by seeking out the white-collar worker it leads us to the heart of the city’.
Kracauer’s study is important and directly relevant to Fallada’s novel not simply because it scrutinizes the lives and the economic conditions of white-collar workers and places them centre-stage, but also because their lives are seen to have a tragic dimension. They are in an important sense homeless, more homeless indeed than the industrial worker—as Mr Morschel, Lammchen’s father, puts it in the novel: ‘You don’t stick together; you’ve got no solidarity. So they can push you around just as they like.’ Kracauer, it might be said, is mapping out the territory that is inhabited by Lammchen’s family on the one hand, proletarians with ‘solidarity’, and Pinneberg, very much more adrift, in Kracauer’s sense ‘homeless’. When Kracauer summarizes the comparison between proletariat and white-collar worker he supplies a context for Little Man—What Now? in advance of the novel itself:
The average worker, whom many a white-collar worker likes to look down on, is often not only materially but also existentially his superior. His life as a class-conscious proletarian is roofed over by popular Marxist concepts telling him where he belongs. Admittedly the roof is now leaking mightily.
The mass of white-collar workers differs from the industrial proletariat in that they are intellectually homeless. They cannot connect with the proletarian comrades, and the haven of middle-class values and feelings where they once lived has collapsed … they live without tenets that they can respect and without a goal that they can ascertain.
Not only does Kracauer sketch out the emotional and existential deprivation that is the lot of the white-collar worker, he also focuses on individual cases at least as ominous as any that Fallada came to flesh out. The Union of White-collar Workers sent out a questionnaire to its unemployed members in early 1929, and the brief résumés of some who replied are harrowingly succinct:
39 years, married, three children (14,12,9). No earnings for three years. Future? Work, mad-house or gas-tap.
Future hopeless, no prospects. A quick death would be the best—thus writes a thirty-two year old married man, father of two children.
Fallada avoids such extremes, but they cannot have been unknown to either him or his readers. ‘One unemployed less,’ a woman remarks as a young man throws himself from a tenement window in the opening sequence of Brecht’s only film, Kuhle Wampe. The film appeared in 1932, the same year as Little Man—What Now?
Topicality of theme and of method, relevance across the spectrum from cultural theorist to general reader, variously fuelled the success of Fallada’s novel. Contexts—economic, political, literary or cultural—are, of course, crucial but timeliness at whatever level is no substitute for intrinsic merit, and the reasons for Fallada’s success must be sought between the covers of the book itself. Or even, to begin with, on the binding of the first edition, which contains a drawing by George Grosz. This is not Grosz the creator of nightmare grotesques, pillorying the inequalities of the Weimar Republic. Here a young girl, smiling, dangles a little toy over a cheery-looking baby in a basket. Not a hint of trouble, no sign of hardship. But a clue to a part of the book’s appeal.
Fallada’s narrative soon puts the Grosz idyll in perspective—the novel has hardly started before Johannes Pinneberg, waiting outside the doctor’s consulting-room, winces violently as he hears Lammchen ‘in a high, clear voice that was almost a shriek’ call out “ ‘No, no, no!” And once again, “No!” And then, very softly, but he still heard it: “Oh God.”‘ Fallada begins with a disaster, an unwanted pregnancy, unwelcome to a couple who are hard-up and not yet married. Within moments, however, they are planning marriage and Pinneberg’s bleak despair has been replaced:
Her eyes lit up. She had dark blue eyes with a green tinge.
And now they were fairly overflowing with light.
As if all the Christmas trees of her life were glowing inside her, thought Pinneberg, so moved that he felt embarrassed.
In a very short space Fallada has staged a disaster and then softened the blow. It is a technique that he employs throughout the novel—life is cruel but the Pinnebergs survive, or rather, for this is the common pattern, Lammchen’s innate fortitude banishes the gloom. Grosz’s drawing is, in other words, not after all so misleading—the tower of strength in the Pinneberg household is not Pinneberg but Lammchen, and it takes Pinneb
erg—and Fallada’s reader—some time to realize how strong she in fact is:
She stood there, all determination, aggressive, with red cheeks and flashing eyes, her head thrown back.
Pinneberg said slowly: ‘You know, Lammchen, I’d thought you were quite different. Much gentler …’
She laughed, sprang over to him, ran her hand through his hair. ‘Of course I’m different from what you thought I was. 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?’
Without that central contrast Little Man—What Now? would lose a source of tension, would indeed lose its character as a story not of destruction but of survival. And the contrast has another advantage—Pinneberg’s despair may time and again be mollified by Lammchen, but it is voiced, it is eloquently present in the novel. It can be a passing comment—‘It just suddenly makes you angry, the way things are set up’—or it can be a sustained, rhetorical diatribe:
He was one of millions. Ministers made speeches to him, enjoined him to tighten his belt, to make sacrifices, to feel German, to put his money in the savings-bank and to vote for the constitutional party.
Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, according to the circumstances, but he didn’t believe what they said. Not in the least. His innermost conviction was: they all want something from me, but not for me. It’s all the same to them whether I live or die. They couldn’t care less whether I can afford to go to the cinema or not, whether Lammchen can get proper food or has too much excitement, whether the Shrimp is happy or miserable. Nobody gives a damn.
At such a moment Pinneberg’s misery is a misery shared; close-up becomes wide-angle.
If Pinneberg and Lammchen are at the heart of the novel and must in the end account in large measure for its popularity, this does not mean that Fallada presents them solely in terms of the polarity of despair and hope. Most important is his refusal to let their troubles overwhelm the novel or dictate its tone. Indeed his refusal to take them or their troubles entirely seriously may be risky—irony and humour can defuse an explosive theme, and the critical, revolutionary Left, while acknowledging his skill, found his mixed feelings unpalatable. But the humour is inescapably a part of the whole from the moment when Pinneberg, at the start of the novel, having slipped up on birth-control, calls pessaries ‘pessoirs’ and Lammchen takes off her blouse for an abdominal examination. Lammchen, for all her resourcefulness, can be comically incompetent, cooking a pound of peas in five litres of water and producing what Pinneberg ruefully calls ‘hot water’. Pinneberg too, put upon and put down by those with whom he works, predisposed to expect the worst, nevertheless is a source of or an accessory to humour. His early job with Kleinholz, bagging grain, lands him in a richly comic set-up where a drunken father, fearsome mother and pathetic daughter have one goal—to marry the daughter off. When mother, dressed in slippers and dressing-gown, hounds her drunken husband off a dance-floor she is ‘a force of nature, a tornado, a volcanic eruption’ and the reader is a long way from slumps and cash-flow problems. Pinneberg’s own mother, Mia Pinneberg, whose past, unforgotten by her son, is as suspect as her present, is a comic figure, ferocity incarnate, locked, whenever they meet, in a war of words with her disapproving son. The disapproval is itself important: Pinneberg’s moral stance—he resists a host of temptations and exhibits more than once a straightforward integrity—could easily become too good to be true, but the integrity is being put to the test in encounters with people, Kleinholz, Mia Pinneberg, Jachmann, who are themselves at least in part comic. And the comedy can take unexpected turns—Heilbutt, staunch helper of the Pinnebergs, reduces the by no means strait-laced Pinneberg to cringing embarrassment by suggesting and, worse still, demonstrating that the answer to the dreadful state of Germany is not politics but nudism.
Fallada adopts a variety of tones of voice towards his central figures, but his narrative embraces more than the plight of individuals, even though the title—devised not by him but by a colleague—seems to reinforce the individual focus. At his death Fallada left a five-page manuscript-talk, possibly intended for radio and almost certainly written in 1932. It brings us close to the time when, at extraordinary speed, Fallada wrote the novel. He admits that Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks had been a laborious enterprise and that he had been sustained by the pleasurable anticipation of writing something wholly different, something less crisis-torn, ‘a story about a marriage, a quite simple good little marriage—a baby is born: two are happy, three are happy.’ But complications of a less idyllic kind intruded:
There are these two young people that we’ve been having such pleasant dreams about—what, by the way, are they going to live on? Well he’s going to earn his money, our new hero Pinneberg. Earn his money at a time like this? … So I said to my wife: ‘You know, it’s not going to be so straightforward for these two young people. I can see difficulties. I’m going to have to collect material about the situation of white-collar workers.’
The route, as we have seen, led to Siegfried Kracauer. In Fallada’s response to the external reality pressing in, as it were, on his characters lies, of course, the ‘Sachlichkeit’ of his novel, but it is easy, in reading Little Man—What Now?, to understate the documentation that underlies the story because Fallada himself does not overstate the socio-critical case. The life of white-collar workers, whether bagging grain or selling men’s clothes, is closely observed, the financial exploitation is accurately measured. Stores such as Mandel’s were the glory of Weimar Berlin, glorified in song, celebrated in giant neon lights, in vast posters and even in spectacular stage-musicals. Fallada exposes the hierarchies that were endemic, the dog-eat-dog rivalries and painful insecurities that the bright lights concealed. And there is exactitude underpinning the humdrum penny-pinching of Lammchen and Pinneberg—the exact price of a cigarette can be crucial—and when Lammchen produces a shopping-list of essentials it is an integral part of the narrative texture, not a piece of down-to-earth documentation tacked on for effect.
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
