Thursday 26 May 2016


The only other book by Hans Fallada that I've read is Alone in Berlin, written just before his death in 1947 and based on the true story of a couple who were executed for distributing anti-Nazi material during the war. His own life sounds unremittingly grim.
Little Man, What Now? is an earlier work from 1932, written just before the Nazis came to power. A best-seller, it was turned into a Hollywood film that I can't track down.
Sonny and his Lämmchen - his lambkin - are a young couple struggling through the economic crisis that saw the rise of Hitler.  (Forty-two per cent of German workers were unemployed.) Sonny is a little white-collar worker, a department-store shop-walker, clinging to respectability but his life is even more precarious than an industrial worker who has some solidarity with his comrades. Sonny gets his girl pregnant - he marries her - they're hard up but deliriously happy and so much in love that it doesn't seem to matter that she's a disastrously inept cook and they can't manage their money. The sums are never going to add up and when he loses one job, and then another - he lives in dread of not achieving his sales targets - the little family are on a downward spiral ...
As I read, I couldn't help thinking of Greenery Street, a 1925 novel about another young couple embarking on married life in Chelsea. But how different their worries are, unable to manage their servants or live within an income of £1000 a year. It's frothy, romantic and silly ... and how bored I got with Felicity, the silly wife who is so completely different from stoical Lämmchen.  But PG Wodehouse's comment holds good for both novels: 'It's the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.'

3 comments:

Cosy Books said...

I wonder if I would enjoy this story, Mary? In a way, it reminds me of the Jean Rhys book I just finished...almost no joy to be found in it but compulsively readable.

mary said...

I think you might like it, Darlene. It has all the domestic detail that you enjoy, and the young couple is somehow indomitable - no matter what happens, they seem to find strength in each other. Of course, we know what happened in Germany next. It's fascinating that this was written in the early 1930s, and makes you realise what it was like for so many ordinary people and why Communism/National Socialism had such a pull.

mary said...

Also, meant to say it's not joyless - there's enough humour to lighten the mood.