Marc Lamot's Reviews > Little Man, What Now?

It sounds silly, I know, but what a charming story this is! Yes, charming, although it describes the fateful misery of two little people, in the depression years of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Germany. And what a misery they experience: the couple Johannes, 'der Pinneberg' and Emma, 'Lämmchen'/Angel, are as poor as the street and end up from one mishap to the next. Johannes in particular is under the spell of looming disaster, constantly insecure, constantly concerned with keeping up appearances and at the same time plagued by a moral compass what's right, that keeps him on the good path. And Emma, in all her clumsiness, still believing in the good and above all in their love.

When described like this, this sounds like a tearjerker, and it is, this book. But Fallada tells it all in such an endearing way that you can't help but have deep sympathy for these two people who have to endure the injustice of life. At the same time, he gives a striking picture of Germany in the turmoil between the chaos of the Weimar Republic and emerging radical tendencies such as national socialism and communism. Published in 1932, Fallada knew damn well what he was writing about. As far as I'm concerned, he can safely be rated higher than the perhaps more genial but at the same time also more haughty Bertold Brecht.