Little man - now what?

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Little man - now what? (originally planned title "Der Pumm") is a novel by Hans Fallada that was first published in 1932 by Rowohlt Verlag . In the original version by the author, without the abbreviations already made in the first edition, the work was only published in 2016 by Aufbau-Verlag . The novel became a bestseller and longseller, with 45 editions and 20 foreign editions.

Initial release

The novel was published from April 20 to June 10, 1932 as a preprint in an edited version in the Vossische Zeitung des Ullstein Verlag, which was a shareholder in the Rowohlt Verlag, which fell in 1931. The book went up for sale on June 10, 1932, the day of the last installment in the series. The success of the book was an important factor in the restructuring of the Rowohlt publishing house. The illustrator of the cover and binding of the first edition was George Grosz . The front of the envelope showed Fallada's wife Anna, model of "Lammchen". The drawings met with rejection from readers, retailers and publishers. The fifth edition appeared without the illustrations.

Historical background

The novel was published at the time of the global economic crisis that began in 1929 with the collapse of the American stock exchange on October 24, 1929 . The crisis brought misery and poverty around the world and in many cases caused a rapid rise in unemployment . Fallada describes the fate of a “little man” and his wife in Germany during the Weimar Republic .

Fallada describes in detail the living conditions of an employee at that time by showing, among other things, what the spouses spend the money they have at their disposal (they set up a "normal budget" ). He also describes the legal situation at the time with regard to labor law ( trade unions , works council , dismissal ), as well as the social law that was repeatedly changed with the emergency ordinances (unemployment and crisis support).

Fallada brought this novel - which can be attributed to the New Objectivity - the breakthrough as a writer. He was substantially supported by his publisher Ernst Rowohlt , who had given him a part-time job in his publishing house so that he could work on the novel without financial worries.

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists , the novel remained available (1935: 116th – 145th thousand; 1941: 179th – 188th thousand), albeit in a version changed by Fallada, in which, for example, an SA man who is regularly involved in brawls with political opponents with his cronies, transformed into a flogging football goalkeeper without political ties.

Table of contents

Hans Fallada himself summarized the content in a letter to his publisher Ernst Rowohlt:

The marriage and woes of Johannes Pinneberg, an employee, loses his job, gets a job and becomes permanently unemployed. One in six million, nothing at all, and what he feels, thinks and experiences nothing.

The action takes place from 1930 to 1932. At the beginning of the first chapter, the accountant Johannes Pinneberg and his girlfriend, the saleswoman Emma "Lämmchen" Mörschel, learn that she is two months pregnant. After the spontaneous marriage of the two lovers, a happy marriage is announced, albeit in modest circumstances. Shortly after moving into their shared apartment in the small north German town of Ducherow , however, Pinneberg was dismissed due to an intrigue of his employer's wife who wanted to pair him up with her daughter and had to look for a new job in Germany during the global economic crisis .

Rescue comes from Pinneberg's unloved mother Mia, a girl from Berlin, whose friend Jachmann Pinneberg gets a job as a men's clothing seller in the Mandel department store in Berlin. Pinneberg and his wife move to Berlin. They first live with Pinneberg's mother, then in two rooms in Moabit that the master carpenter Puttbreese rents out to them illegally. After a short time, Pinneberg is under pressure in the department store because the new organizer, Spannfuß, demands a mandatory sales quota, which leads to scuffles and competition among the sellers. Pinneberg's colleague and friend Joachim Heilbutt can always intervene to help until he is fired because of his membership in a nudist association .

When the son Horst, known as Murkel, was born in March 1931, money was again tight, especially since the application for weekly and breastfeeding allowance was processed by the health insurance company “according to official regulations” . After only one year, Pinneberg's work in the Mandel department store ends: When he comes to work late one morning because Murkel got his first tooth that night, he receives a warning. He's also lagging behind with his sales quota. When the film actor Schlueter, who had impressed Pinneberg in the cinema as the actor of a "little man", comes into the store, tries on dozen items of clothing and in the end doesn't want to buy anything, Pinneberg begs him to buy something in order to meet his quota . He counts on the star's understanding, but Schlüter complains about the "pushy" salesman, which is taken as an opportunity to terminate him. Later it also emerges that a disapproving colleague had denounced Pinneberg as an alleged National Socialist in the Jewish management team.

In November 1932 the small family lived in Heilbutts Gartenlaube , about 40 kilometers east of Berlin. Although Pinneberg has been unemployed for 14 months, Lammchen forbids him to accompany the illegally hibernating arboreal pipit neighbors when they steal firewood. Instead, he collects outstanding wages for his wife, who earns something extra with sewing work for private individuals. A trip to Berlin to collect unemployment benefits ends in a fiasco. Humiliated by a Berlin police officer who chased him off the shop windows of the department stores in Friedrichstrasse as a "rabble" , he is on the verge of losing all self-respect and therefore hardly dares to face his wife. Pinneberg and Lammchen still manage not to lose their love and hold on to it because only it is really important. The last sentence of the novel makes this clear: It's the old happiness, it's the old love […] And then they both go into the house where the bumblebee is sleeping .

title

The title of the novel Little Man - Now What? became a trademark for Fallada's work. The author was soon known as the “little man's poet”. The title became a catchphrase even beyond Fallada's work . According to the editor of Ernst Bloch's letters, it marks “the passivity, narrow-mindedness and political disorientation of the petty bourgeoisie”. Based on the English translation of the novel Little Man, What Now? named Morrissey a song released in 1988.

Text changes and new editions

Out of consideration for the bourgeois public, the text edition for the Vossische Zeitung was cleared of passages relating to the racism of National Socialism or to sexually revealing representations. In 1934 the book edition was politically adjusted to eight pages: the main change was the transformation of the Nazi Lauterbach into a footballer.

The reconstructed Urtext edition is a quarter longer than the 1932 edition and contains many passages on contemporary Berlin, nightlife and subcultures. The political issues of the time are dealt with in detail.

The message of the work is still the same - but otherwise, according to Gansel, a lot has changed. In this way, there were indentations in all of the figures, resulting in a “much more authentic image of the late 20s,” he said. Fallada also put political positions in the mouths of his characters in the original version, all of which tended towards the left - Lammchen clearly sympathized with the communists. Here, too, the publisher used the red pencil.

Expenses (selection)

  • Little man - now what? Novel. Rowohlt, Berlin 1932 (first edition).
  • Little man - now what? Novel. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1950; 66. A. 2016, ISBN 978-3-499-10001-7 (= rororo paperback no.1).
  • Little man - now what? Novel. Construction paperback, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-7466-2676-5
  • Little man - now what? Novel. For the first time in the original version. Structure, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-351-03641-6

Film adaptations

Audio

Productions

Adaptations

literature

  • Michael Grisko: Little man, what now? Explanations and documents. Reclam, Ditzingen 2002; Reprint 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-016024-4 .
  • Barbara Hartlage-Laufenberg: Dismissal and Protection against Dismissal in Hans Fallada's novel Little Man - what now? In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (NJW) 1994, pp. 1930–1933.
  • this: Financial security in the event of unemployment in Hans Fallada's novel Little Man - what now? In: Neue Juristische Wochenschrift (NJW) 1996, pp. 1116–1118.
  • this: On the legal background of Little Man - what now? In: Hans Fallada Yearbook No. 4, Neubrandenburg 2003, pp. 99-106.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/hans-fallada/kleiner-mann-was-nun-roman-erstmals-in-der-originalfassung-2016.html
  2. ^ NDR: Hans Fallada - The indomitable author. Accessed June 1, 2020 .
  3. ^ Grisko, Michael: Hans Fallada. Little man - what now? Explanations and documents. Stuttgart: Reclam 2002 (RUB 16024). P. 56, quoted from Christian Thüringer: The type of the “little man” as a figure of identification in the German-language world bestseller novel of the 20th century. Paul Bäumer (Nothing new in the West) - Otto Kringelein (people in hotels) and Johannes Pinneberg (Little Man - what now?) in comparison, 2010
  4. ^ Gustav Frank, Stefan Scherer: Hans Fallada Handbook . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-028214-6 ( com.ph [accessed June 1, 2020]).
  5. ^ Yearbook on the culture and literature of the Weimar Republic . Ed. Text + Criticism, 2008 ( com.ph [accessed June 1, 2020]).
  6. ^ Johanna Rittinghaus: Fallada, Hans: Little man - what now? In: Michael Grisko: Little man, what now? Explanations and documents. Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-15-016024-3 , p. 79.
  7. ↑ Ernst Bloch : Letters 1903–1975 . Edited by Karola Bloch . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 3-518-57713-1, p. 432.
  8. ^ Gustav Frank, Stefan Scherer: Hans Fallada Handbook . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-028214-6 ( com.ph [accessed June 1, 2020]).
  9. ↑ Hans Fallada: Little Man - What Now ?. Novel. For the first time in the original version. Accessed June 1, 2020 .
  10. ↑ "Little man - now what?" - First original edition of Fallada's bestseller. Accessed June 1, 2020 (German).
  11. ↑ See also the description on www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de ( Memento from July 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), the opinions on www.nachtkritik.de and the description of the selection on www.berlinerfestspiele.de
  12. ↑ Staatsschauspiel Dresden schedule ( Memento from February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Review in SaaleReporter.de ( Memento from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Schauspiel Frankfurt - Ensemble site ( Memento from January 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Performance by Theater Bremen on www.theaterbremen.de.
  16. ↑ Little man - what now? ( Memento from March 17, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Theater Augsburg
  17. ↑ Janis El-Bira: On the boulevard of exploitation , nachtkritik.de
  18. ↑ www.theater.baden-baden.de
  19. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from December 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ TUFA-Tanz eV presents: Little man what now? Retrieved December 8, 2017 (German).