Surrealpolitik: The Safety Net

Quick Summary

A frequently cited classic of the genre "terrorism novels," notable for having a thoughtful response to the Baader-Meinhof gang. A newspaper owner becomes president of an elite establishment circle known as The Association, becoming a prime target of terrorist assassination, and thereafter must live in the close embrace of security forces and systems, "turning the most trivial events into a kind of battle against an invisible enemy" as Salman Rushdie's introduction puts it. As Rushdie notes, this novel is about the effects of fright on the frightened. Rushdie also writes: "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 Boll'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 novel is particularly good at highlighting how indistinguishable are protection and surveillance. The protagonist and his family are constantly under guard, which equates to constantly being spied upon. The surveillance extends to the whole town, which becomes flooded with cops, scandals that would have remained secret are exposed, everyone becomes more distant and guarded with each other, cool to each other, resentful of each other, take to spying on each other, like Erwin and his binoculars focused on the breasts of his topless 18-year-old neighbor on the terrace of the next house (55). Surveillance becomes a cancer, it changes behavior and values, inhibits openness and community. Yet everyone is nice and we see all sides of everything, as in Sabine being attracted both to policemen and to terrorists (or in any case to the main terrorist, Beverloh, as a youth, and later to Hendler, her main guardian, who she runs away with in the end). Meanwhile, money and power continually eat away at everything that once had value to people, from the literal power-hungriness of the encroaching coal mining operation eating up property (and literally burying the past) at an alarming rate to the larger and increasingly more conservative newspapers gradually eating up all their smaller and more liberal competitors. Neighborhoods, communities, the past, real security in the sense of feeling safe, and the liberal tradition, all being inexorably eaten up and buried. There's a repeating theme of yearning for something undefinable, a repeating phrase "somewhere -- where?" or slight variations, occurring in multiple places throughout. There are also multiple references to the "reformed radical" Rolf building with child's blocks on the floor (42, 152, 173)!

Last updated: April 8, 2022