100 books like Little Man, What Now?

This book taught me the meaning of the word “totalitarianism.” It’s like a horror movie you can’t escape from, but instead of a zombie fungus eating your mind, it’s the state controlling every little aspect of your life, down to—and worst of all—the words that you think with, and therefore what you can even conceive of.

Few books have stayed in my mind like this one. Even today—or more than ever—its images come to my mind over and over again when I see what is happening in America and the world.

This book made me think, reflect, and laugh (if a little unnervingly!). It is a quirky tale that warns us of threats to civil liberties from AI and corporate tech giants in a Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy meets 1984 way.

Some of the writing is lyrical and literary, sometimes perplexing and banal. I was not entirely convinced by the science behind the science-fiction elements, but that is perhaps allowed because of the Theatre of the Absurd approach the author takes.

This is more your standard genre political thriller: written from the perspective of a British Prime Minister and those pulling the political strings.

I really appreciated the insights the author brings, having been an observer of government machinations and an insider of the British Labour Party. I believe it has reflections for anyone interested in understanding the fragility of democracy.

I deliberately didn't read this until after I had written my book to avoid being influenced since there are parallel warnings about how the British Establishment has a stranglehold over real power and only plays lip service to the concept of democracy.

This play profoundly affected me (even though it only played out in my head and not on a real stage). It is both disturbing and moving. It is absurdist, but that nightmarish detachment from reality somehow sends an even stronger shock to the system in its warnings about how fascism takes hold: that strong human tendency towards social thinking (emerging neuroscience research suggests a substantial overlap between physical pain and social pain).

This is much more than just an allegory on authoritarianism, however. Recently, people have used it to explain how easily society gave up on a public health approach to the ongoing Covid pandemic. Maybe getting COVID-19 repeatedly and, at some point, eventually getting long-term COVID-19/turning into a Rhinoceros is not so bad?

In Berlin Stories, the book that inspired the movie Cabaret, comprising two linked novellas by Christopher Isherwood loosely based on his first-hand experience as an expat in Berlin in the Twenties, the British novelist evokes the anything-goes atmosphere that reigned in the capital of the Weimar Republic immediately prior to the Nazi take-over. That free-wheeling, raucous spirit survived the Third Reich and still thrives in Berlin today.     

Kurt Tucholsky’s books were among the first to be banned and burned by the Nazis. And with good reason. A Jewish journalist of a left-leaning bent with a tart tongue and an acid wit, Tucholsky, who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter," as per his contemporary, Erich Kästner, represented everything the Nazis sought to eradicate. Tucholsky tapped the anarchic spirit of 1920s Berlin just as painter Georg Grosz captured its bloated, pock-marked face. Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches from the Weimar Republic contain a representative sampling of Tucholsky’s pithiest texts. A forerunner of flash fiction, his concise writing style, and tongue-in-cheek tone are harbingers of new journalism and among the many influences on my own writing. 

While the title and even the prose are a bit off-putting, suggesting a dry academic account, it is actually quite readable. Mosse, the late Bascom professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was one of the great historians of Europe and of Nazism. See his classic book Nazi Culture: A Documentary History. Mosse presents a nuanced and complex analysis of nationalism and respectability.

He shows how concepts like sexuality “haunted” bourgeois society and European nationalism and led to society’s control over sexuality. The sexual excesses of the Weimar Republic between World War I and the rise of Nazism in 1933 were a threat to bourgeois society and thus had to be controlled or destroyed, especially “abnormal” behavior (Homosexuality, transvestism, sexual orgies, wild music).

We see the same thing happening in America and the West: a return to “respectable” authoritarianism (read: fascism) suppressing sexuality, birth control, and… show more.

This is one of the most influential studies of cultural politics in Nazi Germany which takes as its focus the bureaucracy Joseph Goebbels charged with integrating pre-National Socialist artists and their organizations into the new cultural and political order. Noteworthy, of course, throughout Steinweis’s masterpiece of institutional reconstruction, is the revelation that National Socialist aesthetic preferences were not novel but represented the appropriation of the prevailing conservative taste dominant in the late Weimar Republic.

Fritzsche shows here how, from 1914 to 1933, middle class Germans were welded into the political block that supported Hitler. Another spellbindingly original book – among other things, Fritzsche shows very persuasively that the Great Depression had little to do with the rise of Hitler – the Nazis’ recipe of egalitarian but nationalist politics was already doing its work before 1929.

For an understanding of how Munich became the birthplace of the Nazi movement, I highly recommend David Clay Large’s narrative nonfiction work Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road To The Third Reich. At center stage in Large’s book is Munich itself, a beautiful city that before World War I was known as “Athens On The Isar” because of all of the writers, musicians, and artists it attracted. Large tells of the 1918 revolution that toppled Bavaria’s monarchy, of the Munich Soviet Republic that briefly took its place, of Bavarians’ embrace of right-wing extremism that followed the communists’ bloody ouster, and the giddy enthusiasm showered upon a mustered-out World War I corporal named Adolf Hitler as he spewed anti-Semitic and anti-democratic venom at rallies.