Hans Fallada's Little Man What Now

Hans Fallada’s novel Little Man What Now, illustrates the story of a German man who hits low points throughout his life. Pinneberg is the man that is forced to marry when he gets his girlfriend pregnant. He struggles from one job to another and is struggling to support his family. This story depicts the overwhelming reality of a middle class family in Germany. A difficulty of maintaining a budget is important in society. It includes the fear of the middle class towards the government too. Han’s Fallada novel is effective in describing the realities of the middle class families in they struggle to maintain a job, to maintain a marriage, and to maintain the trends within society.

The novel is effective as it describes how the middle class tries to maintain a job in the economic downtown. An example of this is when Pinneberg works as a bookkeeper at his first job, but ends up losing his job after an argument with Marie Kleinholz.

One of Pinneberg’s former workers at his bookkeeping job is part of the Nazi party. The Nazi party is the party that helps create even more anti-Semitism towards the Jewish population. Many people know the story of what the party did to the Jewish party. Yet, in the novel people often supported other political views. Lammchen and Pinneberg illustrate their political views in the novel and their views are among the minority who believes that the system of government is corrupt. When a Jewish woman states that she was treated poorly by people based on her being Jewish, but Pinneberg is disgusted by the way these men treated her. People often blamed Jewish people for the economic downturn. Anti-Semitism occurred before the depression and it is illustrated though this novel that it is deeply rooted within German society. It never really went away. Lammchen in the novel states at one point that she is “not keen’ on Jewish people, but she did not blame the race for the