HEINRICH BÖLL
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 Essential
HEINRICH BÖLL
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
The Safety Net
Originally published in German as Fürsorgliche Belagerung by Heinrich Böll
© 1979 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH
& Co. KG, Cologne, Germany
Translation Copyright © 1981 by Heinrich Böll and Leila Vennewitz
Introduction is reprinted from Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, © copyright Penguin Books, 1991.
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:
Böll, Heinrich, 1917-1985.
[Fürsorgliche Belagerung. English]
The safety net : / Heinrich Boll ; translated from
the German by Leila Vennewitz.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-935554-94-3
I. Vennewitz, Leila. II. Title.
PT2603.O394F8513 2010
833′.914–dc22
2010043894
v3.1
Translator’s Acknowledgment
My husband William has contributed unending patience and knowledge to this translation, and for this I warmly thank him.
Leila Vennewitz
To my sons
Raimund, René, and Vincent—
in gratitude
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
by Salman Rushdie
List of Characters
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
INTRODUCTION
by Salman Rushdie
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. (Wh
en 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.
LIST OF CHARACTERS
The Family
TOLM, 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
FISCHER, Sabine, née Tolm
Erwin, her husband
Kit, their daughter
FISCHER, Mr. and Mrs., Erwin’s parents
SCHRÖTER, Katharina, lives with Rolf, mother of Holger II
SCHRÖTER, Mr. and Mrs., Katharina’s parents
The Newspaper People
AMPLANGER senior, representative of Bleibl
AMPLANGER junior, his son; secretary of the Association
BLÖRL, elderly printer on Tolm’s newspaper
BLUME, small newspaper owners
BOBERING, small newspaper owners
KÜSTER, small newspaper owners
THÖNIS, editor-in-chief of Tolm’s newspaper
PLIEFGER, objects of attempted assassination
PLOTTETI, objects of attempted assassination
ZATGER, Birgit, Tolm’s secretary
ZUMMERLING senior, a publisher
ZUMMERLING junior, his son
The Industrialists and Delegates
BLEIBL, married to
(1) Hilde,
(2) Margret,
(3) Elisabeth,
(4) Edelgard née-Köhler;
Martin and Robert, his sons with Hilde
GROLZER, employees of Bleibl
KOLZHEIM, employees of Bleibl
HERBTHOLER
KLIEHM, one of Zummerling’s men
KORTSCHEDE, a friend of Fritz Tolm’s; lover of Peter Schlumm
Verena, his daughter
POTTSIEKER
“They”
BEVERLOH, Heinrich (“Bev”), an underground
activist; lover of Veronica Zelger
“Old Beverloh,” his father
TOLM, Herbert, son of Fritz and Käthe
ZELGER, Veronica, former wife of Rolf Tolm; mother of Holger I
The Police
HENDLER, Hubert, security guard; Sabine Fischer’s lover
Helga, his wife
Bernhard, their son
Heinz, Hubert’s brother
Monika (Monka), Helga’s sister
HOLZPUKE, officer in charge of security for the Tolm family
Dollmer, Holzpuke’s boss
Stabski, Dollmer’s boss
KÜBLER
LÜHLER
ROHNER
ZURMACK
KIERNTER, Dr., psychologist
Friends and Neighbors
THE BEERETZES, farmers
THE BLÖMERS, architect and lawyer
THE GROEBELS, friends of the young Fischers
THE HERMESES, neighbors of the Hendlers
THE KLOBERS, friends of the young Fischers
THE HERMANNSES, farmers
BREUER, Erna, née Hermes, lover of Peter Schubler
Mr. Breuer, her husband
GREBNITZER, Dr., the Tolms’ family doctor
HALSTER, Jupp, farmer who murdered his wife
KOHLSCHRÖDER, Pastor
Gerta, his housekeeper and companion
TOLM, Count Holger, former owner of the Tolm manor house
TOLMSHOVEN, Countess Gerlind, sister of Count
Holger; childhood girlfriend of Fritz Tolm
ROICKLER, Pastor
Anna Plauck, his lover
SCHMERGEN, Heinrich, farmer’s son; friend of Rolf and Katharina
SCHUBLER, Peter, lover of Erna Breuer
Others
BANGORS, a U.S. Army officer
Mary, his wife
BLUM, Maria, nursemaid to Kit Fischer
BLURTMEHL, Alois, manservant to Fritz Tolm
KLENSCH, Eva, lover of Blurtmehl
KULGREVE, secretary to Fritz Tolm
SCHLUMM, Peter (Horst), lover of Kortschede
ZELGER, Dr. and Mrs., parents of Veronica
ZURMEYEN, Karl, lover of Monka
1
Shortly before the conference came to an end, before the balloting, during the final, crucial session, the fear had suddenly left him. It had been replaced by curiosity. By the time he faced the inevitable interviews he was cheerful, surprised at the ease with which he trotted out the phrases: growth, expansion, conciliation, tariff autonomy, correlation of interests, looking back, looking ahead, the common ground of the early days—which allowed the sprinkling of a few discreet autobiographical details, his role in the development of a democratic press—the advantages and dangers of bigness, the invaluable role of both work force and unions, struggling not in confrontation but shoulder to shoulder. Much of what he said had actually sounded quite convincing even to his own ears, although Rolf’s trenchant analyses and Kortschede’s gloomy predictions were beginning to acquire more and more credibility in spite of the fundamentally different premises on which they were based. He had enjoyed weaving in allusions to history, even to art, cathedrals and Menzel, Bismarck and Van Gogh, whose social (or perhaps even incipient socialist) energy and missionary zeal had found their outlet in art; Bismarck and Van Gogh as contemporaries: brief, thoughtful observations on this theme added color to the purely economic statements expected of him. He had been able to recapture a seemingly off-the-cuff elegance which, more than forty years earlier, had proved so useful in Truckler’s seminar and which he had later been able to exploit at numerous editorial conferences but until now had never been able to bring off in public.
What he was saying, ad-libbing, came out almost automatically, prefabricated, allowing him to think of other things, to determine at what point his fear had suddenly left him: most likely at the moment when he realized the inevitability of being elected. This would hoist him into a position where his fear should have been intensified, and—so his thoughts ran while he gave yet another interview—instinct had told him that the better course was to have no fear at all rather than more. No fear at all, merely curiosity; the fear that had weighed on him for months, the fear for his life, for Käthe’s life, for Sabine’s and Kit’s lives, was gone. Of course they would get him, probably even kill him, and there remained only the suspense of wondering: who, and how? And what he felt for Sabine had been transformed from fear into concern. He had reason to be concerned about the child.
During these last few months his fear had been directed almost entirely toward technical matters, security measures. Concern had been supplanted; now it was no longer fear of something but fear f
or: for Sabine, and for Herbert, for Käthe’s follies, least of all—and this surprised him—for Rolf. Sabine’s extreme religious devotion had always troubled him, he had felt envious too, and that fellow Fischer, his son-in-law, whose boyishness had fooled them all—but not him, even Käthe admitted that, not him—was not the right partner for her. The craftiness with which he was using Sabine and their child for his own purposes must surely have opened the eyes of all of them. As for Käthe, a trustee should simply have been appointed to look after her money: she gave to all and sundry while denying herself nothing, and someday—soon, he feared—she would come a fearful cropper.
All this was going through his mind while they were holding microphones to his mouth like hand grenades, while the glaring spotlights were trained on him. Amplanger had coordinated and timed the interviews with great precision, made sure there was mineral water and coffee on hand, kept eau de cologne in readiness—all this moved through his mind on double tracks, and even awkward questions concerning his family failed to disconcert him. While “on the rear track of his thoughts” he continued to mull over the worries lying behind his technical fear, in the foreground he was wondering whether it was possible to speak of “concerned cheerfulness,” as they questioned him without regard for his feelings about Rolf, Veronica, Holger, and even Heinrich Beverloh (didn’t they know yet that he now had a second grandson called Holger?). He displayed sincere and deep distress over Veronica’s chosen path, would not be lured into dissociating himself from Rolf (although they all tried more or less to put the words into his mouth), did not deny Rolf’s offenses, stressed the fact that his son had paid the penalty, also admitted his serious, his deep concern for Holger (the older, they obviously still knew nothing about Holger the younger).
This double-track function, which might also have been called media-induced schizophrenia, was beginning to amuse him: it was possible to reel off answers even to awkward questions while thinking about Sabine, who had obviously been shocked—probably by Kohlschröder, how else?—and was now pursuing her Madonna cult more fervently, more intensely, than ever. What he found difficult, while seeming to ad-lib into the microphones in a staccato laced with discreet little throat clearings, was to abandon the dream he had been cherishing for so long: Kit as a girl or a young woman in the manor house, in the park, in the corridors, feeding the ducks, in the orangery—and he couldn’t bring himself to cut this film once and for all—this dream, this game which, according to Kortschede’s devastating prediction, would now never be played; never would Kit—even as a ten-year-old—wander through the manor house, live here, never.