Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? and Dreiser's Tragedy

As I remarked a while back Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers is the novel to which I tend to find myself comparing Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but these days I also find myself thinking of Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now?

The cultural distance between Dreiser and Fallada is, of course, rather smaller than that between Dreiser and Dostoyevsky. Both were Westerners who were much closer in time (their books appeared seven years apart, 1925 and 1932). And both, one might add, based their art on the observation of an objective, material, social world (Dreiser a naturalist, Fallada a participant in Germany's "New Objectivity," a thing which was to make them unfashionable with the Modernism-worshippers who have so much marginalized them and their like within the history of twentieth century literature).

Perhaps for that reason the similarities in the situations of the protagonists are particularly strong. In both novels a young man of humble origins, alienated from a family of which he is ashamed because of how it has placed itself outside society's mainstream, tried to get on in the world--and have a good time. In the course of this that young man gets his girlfriend pregnant, and while they try to secure an abortion, the legal barriers that present no challenge to the rich in such a situation prove quite enough to defeat them. (Dreiser, in fact, has the reader comparing Clyde Griffith's situation to that of the lawyer his uncle hires to represent him--a rich man's son who, when much younger and in similar straits, was able to arrange the operation and just get on with his life, spared the dilemma that Clyde had to face. And if Fallada does not do the same he gives us no reason to think he thought differently.)

The result is that the protagonist faces a difficult choice. Clyde, of course, takes the course that leads to his girlfriend's death and his own trip to the gallows, while Fallada's Johannes marries his girlfriend (the crisis of the unplanned pregnancy the starting point rather than the climax of the book in Fallada's book)--and finds himself faced with only the beginning of a new round of troubles that are the novel's real subject, namely how a young couple might, or might not, get on in a very difficult world. It is a subject that Fallada, to his very great credit, treats as one who knows life at the bottom, and not only sympathizes with those who are there, but empathizes in a way that, as might be expected given the hard realities of social class and the opportunity to pursue an artistic career, very few major authors do. (I find myself recalling E.M. Forster's quip in Howard's End: "We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet." The remark said more about the Bloomsbury crowd, and what critics respect, than it does the reality, as writers like Fallada make clear.)

Thus we follow Johannes and Emma as, with the power in the situation somehow always in someone else's hands amid an insecurity that never gets better, that only gets worse as Germany and the world sink into the Great Depression and the fetid smell of fascism hangs in the air, and they struggle through one disaster after another--one change of job, one change of residence, one makeshift, one indignity after another that make a mockery of pompous talk of "choice" and "making do." The Hollywood film version (the book was so popular that the more cosmopolitan Hollywood of the '30s took sufficient notice to rate a major motion picture directed by Frank Borzage and starring Douglass Montgomery and Margaret Sullavan), if lacking the book's flow, conveys a good deal of this faithfully, but makes the concession to commercial expectation of tacking on a Hollywood happy ending far less convincing than the bleak picture we see at the end of the novel. It is less convincing still, I suppose, because of our later vantage point. After all, we know just how very, very dark things will get for Germany and the world; what their little son Horst will have to live through. Certainly Fallada found this out for himself--and produced a work about what it was to live through the Nazi era and the war that was at least as memorable, Every Man Dies Alone.