46 pages • 1 hour read
Hans FalladaLittle Man, What Now?
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Economic Collapse and Societal Breakdown
Content Warning: This section discusses antisemitism and substance misuse. In addition, the source text uses offensive language regarding Jewish people, which is replicated only in direct quotes of the source material.
Little Man, What Now? is set during a period of economic turmoil marked by hyperinflation and high unemployment. Prices continually go up while wages do not, which creates a situation in which even employed people face poverty. This has a devastating effect on the population’s morale. Mrs. Scharrenhofer is a case in point. Johannes and Emma rent a room from her and soon discover that she is in the midst of a breakdown. She believes that someone is stealing from her, as her carefully kept accounts no longer make any kind of sense. With costs going up, Mrs. Scharrenhofer can no longer make sense of the world. Previously, she could trust in the value of her money and her savings, but now she can barely comprehend her financial struggles, much less address them. Mrs. Scharrenhofer’s situation speaks to the way the Weimar Republic’s economic collapse turned the lives of its citizens upside down.
Amid this economic downturn, newlyweds Johannes and Emma try to forge a life together. They are expecting a child, desperately poor, and lacking the maturity needed to navigate such circumstances. They frequently make unwise financial choices, such as Emma buying expensive salmon or Johannes buying a vanity unit. They believe that hard work alone should be enough to support a family, but the immediate reality of their lives contradicts this belief. They do what they are supposed to do, but the collapsing society does not conform to their expectations. In this context, their poor financial decisions can be read as a response to a society that no longer functions as advertised. The characters are defying rules that no longer seem to matter.
While Johannes and Emma try to deal with their poverty in socially accepted ways, others turn to crime. Jachmann is generous with his time and his money, offering financial support to Johannes and Emma. This money, however, is acquired in a morally dubious way. Jachmann is sent to jail for 12 months. When he comes out, however, he is once again rich and generous. Jachmann’s wealth illustrates how the collapsing society rewards people for breaking the rules. In a similar way, many desperate people go out to scavenge or steal firewood. Emma refuses to allow Johannes to do so, and they become poorer, essentially punished for following society’s rules. The people who scavenge firewood can heat their homes, while Johannes must waste countless hours navigating the illogical bureaucracy of a collapsing state. Desperate poverty inverses the moral code of the society, rewarding bad behavior and providing no tangible benefit to those who follow the rules. In the novel, poverty functions as a marker of social collapse.
The Rise of the Nazi Party
During the early 1930s, the Nazis emerged as the driving force of German politics. As Weimar Republic faced economic collapse, with money worth less and jobs harder to come by, the Nazi Party offered Germans an alternative explanation for their suffering: antisemitism. To accomplish this, they exploited numerous agendas and beliefs that already existed beneath the surface of German society. In the world of the novel, antisemitism is rampant, even among people who do not consider themselves Nazis. For example, Johannes, who barely associates with Nazis and who considers himself to be friends with Jewish people, thinks of his old Jewish employer as “the ugly little Jew, not one of the Almighty’s finest creations” (98). Johannes’s overt antisemitism is closely linked to his dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic’s economic collapse. To feel better about having to beg for his job back, he elevates himself above the Jewish shopkeeper. The spread of Nazism preys on the prevalence of antisemitism in post-war Germany.
The Nazis also took advantage of Germans’ disempowerment after World War I by promising a return to greatness. When Johannes listens to the other new fathers in the maternity ward discuss their children and wives, their conversation is filled with nationalistic nostalgia: “What do you think my Germanic forefathers did with their wives!” (226). The idealized past they evoke may never have existed, but for emasculated men who want to be strong, its appeal is obvious. This scene illustrates how Germans at this time latched on to certain myths to prop up their own identity. The Nazi Party flourished in part because it traded in these myths.
Johannes exists in a political bubble. He is almost completely disengaged from politics at any level, rarely expressing political opinions except as emotional outbursts after he encounters a setback. When he struggles with government bureaucracy, for example, or when he feels targeted by a white-collar worker, he insists to Emma that he will vote for the Communists. Johannes’s political disengagement is portrayed against the backdrop of rising Nazi violence. His colleague Lauterbach joins the Nazis out of boredom and goes out fighting every weekend, while the bosses assure Johannes that Lauterbach’s new social network helps with business. Although Johannes focuses on the more immediate concerns in his life, such as money and family, his political indifference illustrates how extremist ideology can take hold of a struggling society while many people are focused on meeting their immediate needs. There is no great plot or conspiracy in which Nazism arises fully formed and seizes control of the state. Instead, the desperation of characters like Johannes means that the ideology can metastasize in the discontented corners of society, preying on the desperation and alienation of voters to become a legitimate, destructive political force.
Class Identity, Rivalry, and Solidarity
During the early chapters of the novel, Johannes is introduced to Emma’s family. Emma comes from a politically active family, with her father and brother voicing their strong support for the Communist Party, worker solidarity, and labor unions. During their discussions with Emma’s new fiancé, however, they begin to create an important distinction, which fuels the novel’s exploration of class identity. They consider themselves to be blue-collar workers, as they perform manual labor, while the office worker Johannes is a white-collar worker. Though he does not say as much, Johannes accepts their framing of class identity. He does consider himself different from and even superior to blue-collar workers, though he may never say as much. In truth, Johannes and Emma’s family occupy the same status in society. They are equally beholden to their bosses to pay their wages; they are equally exploited by their employers. The intra-class rivalry between blue- and white-collar workers is a smokescreen that keeps them from uniting in a broader class struggle against their employers.
While the blue-collar workers strive for working-class solidarity (at least among themselves), Johannes discovers that white-collar workers lack this collective class identity. His fellow office workers agree to quit if any one of them is fired. Once the reality of unemployment sinks in, however, they all back out of this agreement. In the Berlin store, this lack of solidarity is even more evident. The bosses impose sales targets that pit the white-collar workers against one another, and instead of coming together to oppose the bosses, they conspire against and betray one another. Their understanding of class identity, like Johannes’s, is shallow and binary. When Johannes goes to the government offices and is treated like anyone else by the clerk, rather than a white-collar comrade, Johannes must face the truth: There is no solidarity among white-collar workers.
After losing his job, Johannes loses his grip on his own identity. While he previously defined himself as a white-collar worker, he realizes that this identity is a sham. He is ostracized by his former comrades, and only Heilbutt continues to be his friend. Even they begin to grow apart as Heilbutt becomes more successful while Johannes struggles. After his meeting with Heilbutt, Johannes decides that he is no longer worthy of wearing the white collar: He has been unemployed for 14 months. He removes his collar, his symbol of class identity, and is promptly moved along by the police. He realizes that he has lost any status he once had, and in losing his class identity, he loses his sense of self. When he returns to Emma, she encourages him to restructure his identity around his family rather than his work, suggesting that family can provide the solidarity and support that his work could not.
