Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Hans Fallada
(translated by Susan Bennett)
Melville House 2010
This, Hans Fallada’s most successful novel in his lifetime both in Germany and abroad, was published in 1932, and takes us back to a time when the Nazi horror described so brutally in Alone in Berlin, was about to begin. He tells the story of the young white collar worker Pinneberg and his wife Emma (usually called Lammchen) as they struggle through the depression which followed the crash of 1929. Faced with meeting ever more demanding sales targets, he struggles to keep his job in a Berlin department store, and to keep a roof over his family’s head on the pitiful sum he is paid. We hear noises off of conflict between fascists and communists, and actually meet one or two Nazi party members, presented in a quite ridiculous light, but Pinneberg is just a little man, too involved in life’s struggles to get involved in any bigger movement. This, along with the vivid portrayal of poverty and near despair, and the casual anti-semitism the novel depicts, goes a long way to explain what was to happen in Germany in the next few years. After all, it wasn’t just in his spare, simple prose that Fallada was a proponent of the “new realism” (neue Sachlichkeit) that defined a lot of German prose and visual art at this time, it was also in his depiction of the lives of ordinary people caught up in and battered by economic and political upheavals over which they have little control. In both these aspects, and in much else, Little Man, What Now? is very similar to Alone in Berlin. I don’t think it’s quite as good, mainly because the story is less gripping, but nevertheless this is a fine novel, intelligently translated.
29 September 2010
http://hansfallada.com/
See also: The Drinker
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