Little Man, What Now?

After Johannes loses his job, the family struggles. They are forced to move from the center of Berlin to a small summer house on the outskirts of the city. This physical removal symbolizes their growing alienation from society as their financial hardship worsens. Amid this hardship, gender roles are inverted. Since Johannes cannot find a job, Emma is forced to become the chief breadwinner for the household. She takes the few jobs she can, earning a pittance for sewing, darning, and other chores. Often, her clients are reluctant to pay her, and Johannes must spend his day chasing up debts while also caring for young Markel.

The inversion of roles is indicative of Economic Collapse and Societal Breakdown. Society is collapsing around them, and the state cannot do anything to help the young couple. The only safety net comes from interpersonal relationships, such as their friendships with Heilbutt and Jachmann. Amid this hardship, Johannes—who struggled to even change a diaper—becomes the primary caregiver for Markel. Circumstances demand that they abandon their preconceptions about gender roles to survive in a transformed world.

The return of Jachmann provides a note of absolution for his character. Throughout the novel, he has shown remarkable kindness to Emma and Johannes. As everyone else abandons or exploits the young couple, Jachmann goes out of his way to provide financial support. He typically does this with money that he has acquired illegally. Jachmann is self-aware; he knows that he is a criminal. When he looks at the young couple, he sees nothing of himself. In Emma, particularly, he sees an innate goodness and morality that he envies. Jachmann does not believe himself to be capable of such goodness, but he appreciates its existence. His charity toward the young couple is an act of absolution, in which he condemns himself to sin while trying to protect Emma and Johannes from his mistakes. By helping them retain their innocence, he hopes that he can save their souls. Jachmann is keenly aware that he is too far gone to save. As such, his empathy toward Emma and Johannes has an element of self-indulgence. By helping them, he hopes to absolve himself of his own sins in whatever way possible. He is trying to preserve what little goodness he detects in a world that punishes goodness and morality while rewarding immoral people like himself.

Johannes’s trip to Berlin develops the theme of Class Identity, Rivalry, and Solidarity. Throughout the novel, Johannes considers himself to be a white-collar worker. He is a member of the working class, someone who sells his labor for a wage, yet he prides himself on not doing manual labor like a blue-collar worker, and the nature of this distinction was a key part of his self-identity. Johannes might be struggling, he told himself, but at least he was not a blue-collar worker. After 14 months of unemployment, however, he can no longer cling to this identity. Johannes sees himself in a shop window and, for the first time, he sees what he has become. He is dressed in filthy clothing, replete with stains and rips. As well as removing his tie, he removes the white collar that was the source of so much of his identity. He no longer feels entitled to wearing the white collar, nor does he feel entitled to the small degree of status that he believed that it gave him. Johannes is then chased through the streets by a policeman, a symbol of institutional and legal authority. After this chase, Johannes no longer knows who he is. He has been broken apart, robbed of a key part of his identity. He returns home in shame, lurking in the shadows until Jachmann leaves. When Emma finds him, she senses that something is wrong. Emma helps him take the first step to building a new identity; this time, he will build his identity around his family, not his job. Emma teaches Johannes that they will always have one another, even if they have nothing else.