Pinneberg is the Little Man; What Now is what everyone is asking at the outset of the Depression, when this novel is set. Fallada’s novel is about the piece by piece destruction of a young man by forces that are both incomprehensibly great and pathetically familiar, from the collapse of the world economy to the failure of basic decency. I’m overwhelmed just writing this ditty. But that’s what you get when you read Hans Fallada.