ABSTRACT
Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann – was nun? (1932, Little Man, What Now?) and Kristine Bilkau’s Die Glücklichen (2015, The Happy Ones) are two novels that deal explicitly with economic hardship and social decline. Bilkau’s novel reflects Fallada’s book in both structure and plot: each tells the story of a woman, a man, and their child, the loss of work, and a threat to their existence. Kleiner Mann – was nun? is a classic of German-language literature. The novel responds directly to the catastrophic economic situation of its time, with unemployment and misery affecting large segments of the population. By contrast, Die Glücklichen is set in the present and addresses the crumbling of the middle class. Its protagonists are not laborers but academics. This chapter takes a queer approach to examine how the new social figure of the “employee” (German “Angestellter”) is developed as a literary figure, and what consequences the loss of work and social decline have for conceptions of gender and sexuality in literature. This chapter discusses this question through the example of the two novels and with a view to each novel’s specific historical political and social contexts.
