THE SAFETY NET
by Heinrich Böll;
Translated by Leila Vennewitz
Knopf; 314 pages; $13.95
Why are old Fritz Tolm and his wife Käthe leaning out of a window of their Rhineland manor and getting wet in the rain? He only wants to tell her that she is "still the best remedy against boredom." It is a novel way to say "I love you," but the house is bugged and Tolm does not want the police to overhear him, even if it is for his own good. As Holzpuke, the officer in charge of household security, explained, all conversations are analyzed. Even the most innocent exchange may contain a clue about where and when terrorists will strike.
The Safety Net, Heinrich Böll's 14th book, his fifth since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, is not a thriller but an extended rumination on the post-postwar era of divided loyalties, lost traditions, desperate rebellions and amalgamations. As one of Tolm's associates puts it, "It's all decided, Fritz, and it'll happen in your lifetime—not a thing will remain, not one stone upon another—just don't be too surprised; nothing is more dangerous than when unions and the Association are in agreement. Energy. Jobs." In short, Böll, like the ancient Chinese philosophers, continues to worry about the world before the world worries about itself. He is passionate, biting and not always consistent. Böll, 64, survived the Russian front to write stories and novels of war protest. As a Catholic with socialist ideals, he took a sardonic view of Germany's "economic miracle." Later, his position on violent urban radicals was less severe than one might have expected from an author with pacifist leanings.
Although thematically urgent, the new novel exhibits some escapist tendencies. At the end of the book, Tolm suddenly blurts, "Some form of socialism must come, must prevail." That forms of socialism already prevail in most modern democracies should have been obvious. Furthermore, the statement is a surprise coming from a man who heads a newspaper syndicate and is president of his nation's most powerful association of business interests. Still, aging Fritz Tolm is a good choice for the job. He is not one of those suspect postwar tycoons who have had their SS tattoos removed by a discreet plastic surgeon. He ran a liberal paper, has been a scholarly author (The Rhenish Farmhouse in the Nineteenth Century), and is a bird watcher and armchair environmentalist. So the profits and honors roll in, the guilty conscience thrives, and poor old Tolm gives up bicycle riding because he cannot go out without two carloads of guards and a surveillance helicopter.
These are happy problems by ordinary human standards. By the special values that won Heinrich Böll the Nobel Prize, Tolm's fate as a prisoner of his own wealth and station is a model of contemporary political and moral confusion. The evidence surrounds him. Capitalists eat caviar from Russia and smoke cigars from Cuba; socialists spend an evening playing Monopoly, and the village priest sleeps with his housekeeper. Closer to home, Tolm's son Rolf is a former radical who now grows vegetables and lives with Katharina, mother of their son Holger, who is named after a dead German terrorist.