Eavesdropping

By R.Z.Sheppard

THE SAFETY NET

by Heinrich Boell;

Translated by Leila Vennewitz

Knopf; 314 pages; $13.95

Why are old Fritz Tolm and his wife Kaethe 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 Boell'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, Boell, 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. Boell, 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 Boell 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.

Don't go away. Rolf has another son named Holger by former wife Veronica, a radical who is raising the boy in the Middle East and/or Turkey where she lives underground with a lover, whose wardrobe includes an exploding vest. Herbert, Fritz Tolm's other son, also belongs to an "alternate society." A married daughter, Sabine, is not politically inclined, though she has taken a compromising position with Hendler, her security guard, and is expecting his child. By fast count the novel contains over 70 other characters engaged in various plays, stances, conspiracies and love affairs both hetero-and homosexual.

Thus summarized, The Safety Net sounds like Dallas auf Deutsch. But Boell has the technical skills to lighten weighty social themes. His best narrrative trick is to keep the public Stuerm und Drang at bay and focus on the private lives laid bare by pervasive surveillance. Suspense takes a back seat. Somewhere, hazily defined terrorists are poised to punish Tolm for his real and imagined sins of omission. Will the assault be by cake bomb, a flight of mechanical birds stuffed with explosives or a mysterious boy with a "bomb in his head"? Who will attempt to kill Tolm, where and when, is not so important as how this highly concentrated bit of modern society keeps its humanity when its every move is known. For the most part, the irony of Tolm's character is well realized: privately, he is a decent, doddering family man; publicly, he is an inflammatory symbol in an ideological passion play. But as an ambivalent humanist figurehead for Big Business, he earns little sympathy or credence. It is never clear whether Tolm adequately understands a world where there can be Russian caviar and Cuban cigars on Wall Street and Monopoly sets in the Kremlin.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"There remained only one question, to which the answer contained some consolation: what good would it do them to kill him off without at least profiting by the publicity? ... no machine pistols ... just an accident in the bathtub--what would they get out of that? What good would it do them?

After him it would be Amplanger's turn, one of the 'new men': ruthlessly dynamic, jovial, robust--his smile was enough to scare a person, and perhaps they needed him quickly to kill him off spectacularly, and could therefore get himself--Tolm--quietly out of the way. Amplanger stood for stock exchange, Olympic shooting team, tennis, Zummerling, and teeth-grinding ruthlessness. Perhaps they wanted to speed up Amplanger's election--he, Tolm, radiated too many humanistic thoughts, self-doubts, too much capitalist melancholy. "

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