The Safety Net

In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel,
The Train Was on Time
, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
(1959),
The Clown
(1963),
Group Portrait with Lady
(1971), and
The Safety Net
(1979). In 1981 he published a memoir,
What’s to Become of the Boy? or: Something to Do with Books
. Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

Salman Rushdie
is the author of ten novels:
Grimus; Midnight’s Children
(which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993—and again in 2008—was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won the prize in its first forty years);
Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor’s Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown;
and
The Enchantress of Florence
. He is also the author of a book of stories,
East, West
, and four works of nonfiction:
Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, The Wizard of Oz
, and
Step Across this Line
.

The Clown

The Safety Net

Billiards at Half-Past Nine

The Train Was on Time

Irish Journal

Group Portrait with Lady

What’s to Become of the Boy? Or: Something to Do with Books—A Memoir

The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

Translator’s Acknowledgment

My husband William has contributed unending patience and knowledge to this translation, and for this I warmly thank him.
Leila Vennewitz

Heinrich Böll never lacked courage. When most good German burghers were reacting to the words “Baader-Meinhoff” as if they were the names of Hell’s most fearsome demons, Böll attempted to explain, in print, why some of Germany’s most brilliant people had chosen the left-hand path of terrorism. It’s always easier to condemn than to understand, and Böll took a fair amount of flak for having assumed the role of devil’s advocate (although he never condemned the violence of the Baader-Meinhoff group, or of anyone else, for that matter). Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhoff, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins and the rest had given the German ruling class its biggest fright in years; the burghers didn’t enjoy being told that incomprehensible acts may arise out of comprehensible, even rational motivations.

The Safety Net
is about the effects of that fright on the frightened. Baader and Meinhoff appear in it, thinly disguised as “Heinrich Beverloh” and “Veronica Tolm”; but until the
novel’s chillingly orchestrated, thriller-like climax, they hover high above the action, like circling Furies, waiting to strike. (The central character, Fritz Tolm, actually speculates on the possibility of his being assassinated by an airborne bomb disguised as a bird.) The foreground is occupied by more or less “respectable” people and by the security forces—the “safety net” of the title—who must protect them; and Böll’s message, for this is certainly a message-novel, is that this security system is as destructive a force as the terrorists it seeks to resist. If Beverloh and Veronica are the novel’s devils, the security police are its deep blue sea.

The plot is pretty simple, even schematic. Tolm, a newspaper owner, becomes President of “the Association” and thus a prime target for the assassins. He is obliged to submit to the ministrations of the security police, although he remains convinced that absolute security does not exist, and that the killers will certainly get him. The safety net closes around his whole family, tapping telephones, destroying privacy, suspecting everyone, turning the most trivial events into a kind of battle against an invisible enemy—a visit to an art gallery is referred to by the security chief as “the Madonna front.” All the lives held in this net are corrupted in profound and subtle ways.

Meanwhile Tolm knows that his newspaper empire will shortly be gobbled up by his rival Zummerling (an Axel Springer figure), while his own house and lands will be swallowed by the open-cast mining machines that are already nibbling at his horizon—so that he is doomed to end up the victim of that same omnipotent force, Money, which is precisely the entity against which the terrorists are struggling. This is one of the novel’s darkest ironies.

And in the end, of course, the terrorists … but it would be wrong to spoil a climax as gripping as this one.

This fine, meticulous novel shows Böll at his most effectively ruminant. His method has always been to chew away at
people, details, places, turning them over and over until they yeild up every last iota of meaning. The Tolm family is perhaps a little too representative a cross-section of the German middle classes: Tolm himself is a weary fellow gripped by “capitalist melancholy”; then there’s his “ultra-capitalistic” daughter Sabine; his reformed radical son Rolf and Rolf’s communist wife; even a hippie-ish son, Herbert, rather quaintly described in the List of Characters as “one of the ‘alternate society.’ ” But Böll worries away at them all to such revealing effect that it’s easy to forgive the too-programmatical structure of the book.

“It’s the era of nice monsters, Kathe,” Tolm tells his wife, “and we must count ourselves amongst them.” The security policemen are nice. (When Sabine has an affair with one of her guards, Böll goes to great pains to present him as a decent, troubled chap. In his fair-minded way, he’s making the useful point that the guardians, too, are damaged by their roles.) Bleibl, the ex-Nazi newspaper man, turns out to have a human side. Only Zummerling, the media czar, and his creature, Amplanger, are not nice. Even Beverloh and Veronica seem nice enough, particularly Veronica, who keeps ringing up with warnings about her own group’s activities. Too much niceness, you may think; but it has the advantage of allowing Böll to present, sympathetically, a very wide range of points of view.
The Safety Net
is a sort of interior panorama: its primary purpose is not to judge, but to understand.

There is, however, a judgment. “It is Beverloh’s era and Amplanger’s era … figuring, figuring, figuring,” says Tolm, and you sense that Böll agrees; that the real tragedy for Böll is the replacement of the old kindnesses, of human values, by the remorseless, amoral world of the technologists. The press, the police and the bombers are all aspects (or victims) of this sickness and it is in bringing us to this perception that the achievement of this brave, pained novel really lies.

The Family

T
OLM
, Fritz, president of the Association; a newspaper owner

Käthe, née Schmitz, his wife

Sabine, their daughter, married to Erwin Fischer

Herbert, their son, one of the “alternate society”

Rolf, their second son, a former political activist; lives with

    Katharina Schröter; father of Holger I (with Veronica)

    and of Holger II (with Katharina)

Holger I, son of Rolf and Veronica

Holger II, son of Rolf and Katharina

F
ISCHER
, Sabine, née Tolm

Erwin, her husband

Kit, their daughter

F
ISCHER
, Mr. and Mrs., Erwin’s parents

S
CHRÖTER
, Katharina, lives with Rolf, mother of Holger II

S
CHRÖTER
, Mr. and Mrs., Katharina’s parents

The Newspaper People

A
MPLANGER
senior, representative of Bleibl

A
MPLANGER
junior, his son; secretary of the Association

B
LÖRL
, elderly printer on Tolm’s newspaper

B
LUME
, small newspaper owners

B
OBERING
, small newspaper owners

K
ÜSTER
, small newspaper owners

T
HÖNIS
, editor-in-chief of Tolm’s newspaper

P
LIEFGER
, objects of attempted assassination

P
LOTTETI
, objects of attempted assassination

Z
ATGER
, Birgit, Tolm’s secretary

Z
UMMERLING
senior, a publisher

Z
UMMERLING
junior, his son

The Industrialists and Delegates

B
LEIBL
, married to

(1) Hilde,

(2) Margret,

(3) Elisabeth,

(4) Edelgard née-Köhler;

Martin and Robert, his sons with Hilde

G
ROLZER
, employees of Bleibl

K
OLZHEIM
, employees of Bleibl

H
ERBTHOLER

K
LIEHM
, one of Zummerling’s men

K
ORTSCHEDE
, a friend of Fritz Tolm’s; lover of Peter Schlumm

Verena, his daughter

P
OTTSIEKER

“
They
”

B
EVERLOH
, Heinrich (“Bev”), an underground

activist; lover of Veronica Zelger

“Old Beverloh,” his father

T
OLM
, Herbert, son of Fritz and Käthe

Z
ELGER
, Veronica, former wife of Rolf Tolm; mother of Holger I

The Police