Translated by Susan Bennett, introduced by Philip Brady

Little man – what now? is a documentary novel which tells the story of a society’s decline and fall entirely through the personal lives of its numerous characters. Fallada began writing it in October 1931, when unemployment was rising to its ultimate 40 per cent and the National Socialists were becoming a serious threat. He worked at it, he told his publisher, ‘like a steam-engine’ and delivered the manuscript in February 1932. By the time Hitler had come to power a year later, the book had become a runaway bestseller and was being translated into several languages.

Little man is the story of a young North German clerical worker, Johannes Pinneberg, and his wife Lammchen and their struggle for a decent life for themselves and their expected child, at a time of acute economic crisis leading to growing political polarization to which – no matter how much it affects them – the young couple can barely relate. Pinneberg’s employment and unemployment during this insecure time takes him from working for a grain merchant deep in the provinces (a world Fallada knew from personal experience) to the shop-floor of the men’s clothing department of a big Berlin store, besides tramping the streets of the big city.

The vividness of the novel’s picturesque cast, which offers a cross-section of the ‘lower’ end of German society at the time, results from the author’s empathy with his characters, good and bad. Fallada’s is a world in which everyone – employers, creeping salesmen, vulgar mothers-in-law, working-class bigots, men and women in dubious occupations, and even an occasionally well-meaning Nazi – has their reasons and is portrayed at full length without prejudice or preaching. Lammchen, loosely based on his own wife, immediately became and has remained one of the best-loved characters in German fiction.

Little man – what now? was first published in English in 1933 in a substantially abridged version. This new translation provides the first uncut English-language edition of a twentieth-century German classic of universal appeal whose popularity has never waned.

Published by Libris in 1996