Germans

LITTLE MAN, WHAT Now -- Hans Fallada--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

There is not much plot to most men's lives, and the ending is invariably "un-happy." But few novelists attempt a complete picture of even one individual career. Since the main outline is universally identical, writers do not concern themselves so much with total similarities as with partial differences. Author Fallada's case-history is of a young German couple whose developing plight is echoed everywhere today throughout the western world; but his Teutonic tones give the well-known story a kind of foreign freshness.

Hans Pinneberg, 23, was a smalltown bookkeeper, a decent but rather timid sort. Cupid drove an arrow straight through Hans's heart when he and pretty young Bunny met on a temporarily deserted beach. Before they even knew each other's names they were married in every sense but the legal. Then a baby threatened, so they got married legally. Pinneberg lost his job, because his boss had wanted him for a son-in-law; there was nothing more for him in that town. His mother, who was no better than she should have been, wrote that she had a job for him in Berlin. When they arrived it turned out that she had no job, she simply wanted them to rent a room in her middle-aged love nest. Pinneberg pulled what wires came to hand and became a salesman in a slave-driving department store. Bunny luckily turned out to be a good manager. They left his shameless mother's flat, got a tiny apartment almost as cheap as it was inconvenient, counted every pfennig twice before they let go. But shortly after the baby was born Pinneberg was fired. They moved out to a hut in the country; Bunny went out washing by the day; Pinneberg minded the baby and tried to keep from stealing. Author Fallada leaves it an open question whether Bunny would succeed in pulling the Pinneberg family through to better times.

Though Publisher Schuster calls Little Man, What Now? "the Odyssey of the Forgotten Man, the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the world-wide economic crisis," though it has been a big seller in Germany, and though the Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen it for June, many a bewildered reader may ask himself what all the shooting is for. To many a reader Little Man, What Now? will seem a thickly sentimental, occasionally pathetic, never tragic or deeply moving story of a very ordinary little man. As a case-history it is competently managed; as a novel it is second-rate.

The Author, a rangy, 39-year-old Pomeranian farmer, may well be surprised at the fuss he has stirred up. So would his neighbors be if they knew that Farmer Dietzen (his real name) was "Hans Fallada." A lawyer's son, Author Dietzen spent an awkward and unhappy childhood in Berlin and Leipzig but has never felt easy in urban surroundings. Failure as a farm executive, clerk, bookkeeper, estate agent, provision-dealer, potato grower, he failed also with his first two books. Then he married, settled down in Holstein, then Berlin, with his wife and child, and made enough money with his third book to get a house and garden. With the comfortable profits from Little Man, What Now? he bought his own farm in the country, where he spends his days farming, his evenings writing.

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