Little Man, What Now? (45 page)

The sky was starry-clear, there was a slight frost. In the whole settlement, so far as she 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.

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.