Pinneberg and Lämmchen are young parents who cling to their love and their faith in civic morality – despite their poverty, unemployment and social hardships. Their struggle for a last shred of dignity ends in the Moloch of Berlin. Hans Fallada wrote his internationally acclaimed novel in 1932, a time of extreme economic and political tension in Germany, and only a censored version could be published.
Image gallery
Kleiner Mann - was nun?
Kleiner Mann - was nun?
Kleiner Mann - was nun?
The author's summary of his book: "Marriage and woes of Johannes Pinneberg, employee, loses his job, gets a new job and becomes permanently unemployed. One among six millions, a nothing, and what this nothing feels, thinks and experiences."
The question "What now?" from the novel's title "Little Man, What Now?" was historically answered by National Socialists' seizure of power.
Fallada's answer to the question of how much impact humaneness can have in a mass society is a utopian moment.
FRANK CASTORF has adapted the original version of the novel for Berliner Ensemble and relates it to autofictional texts that Fallada mostly wrote in prison, as, for instance, "Die Kuh, der Schuh, dann du".
(in German)
Additional information
Run for your lives! Pinneberg and Lämmchen, a young couple in love, are expecting a child, Murkelchen, and quickly decide to get married.
The story of the lowly clerk Pinneberg begins like a fairy tale of great happiness for a small, brave family in an unjust world.
Despite unemployment, poverty, increasing social brutalization, and the radicalization of the political camps in Berlin in the early 1930s, the young lovers steadfastly hold on to their petty bourgeois moral values. Fallada answers the question "What now?" with a fantasy of interpersonal retreat in the midst of a merciless mass society.
Frank Castorf adapts the uncensored version of the novel for the Berliner Ensemble and relates the New Objectivity bestseller, which has been filmed several times, to an autofictional, expressionist text by Fallada. Fallada wrote the text in 1920 while in a psychiatric ward, under the influence of his cocaine and morphine addiction. He considered the text to be one of his strongest: "The cow, the shoe, then you."
Castorf responds to Fallada's question "What now?", which he asked shortly before Hitler's seizure of power, with Heiner Müller's "Die Schlacht" (The Battle). In his eloquent and disillusioned montage about fascism, the later-born playwright Heiner Müller refers to Bertolt Brecht's "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich" and said: "I don't believe that a story that makes sense can still do justice to reality."
By Amely Joana Haag
The story of the lowly clerk Pinneberg begins like a fairy tale of great happiness for a small, brave family in an unjust world.
Despite unemployment, poverty, increasing social brutalization, and the radicalization of the political camps in Berlin in the early 1930s, the young lovers steadfastly hold on to their petty bourgeois moral values. Fallada answers the question "What now?" with a fantasy of interpersonal retreat in the midst of a merciless mass society.
Frank Castorf adapts the uncensored version of the novel for the Berliner Ensemble and relates the New Objectivity bestseller, which has been filmed several times, to an autofictional, expressionist text by Fallada. Fallada wrote the text in 1920 while in a psychiatric ward, under the influence of his cocaine and morphine addiction. He considered the text to be one of his strongest: "The cow, the shoe, then you."
Castorf responds to Fallada's question "What now?", which he asked shortly before Hitler's seizure of power, with Heiner Müller's "Die Schlacht" (The Battle). In his eloquent and disillusioned montage about fascism, the later-born playwright Heiner Müller refers to Bertolt Brecht's "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich" and said: "I don't believe that a story that makes sense can still do justice to reality."
By Amely Joana Haag
Participating artists
Von Hans Fallada (Autor/in)
Artemis Chalkidou
Maximilian Diehle
Andreas Döhler
Jonathan Kempf
Pauline Knof
Maeve Metelka
Gabriel Schneider
Andreas Deinert (Live-Kamera)
Jonathan Bruns (Tonangel)
Jens Crull (Live-Schnitt)
Frank Castorf
Aleksandar Denić
Adriana Braga Peretzki
William Minke
Rainer Casper
Jens Crull
Amely Joana Haag
Sebastian Klink
