Headbirths, or the Germans Are Dying Out/The Safety Net
Richter, David H.
The problem: no problems HEADBIRTHS, OR THE GERMANS ARE DYING OUT Gunter Grass Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, $9.95, 136 pp. THE SAFETY NET Heinrich Boll Alfred A. Knopf, $13.95, 314...
...They speak out against the Brokdorf fast-breeder nuclear reactor, all right, but it is their own slowness to breed, their ambivalence about having children that concerns them most...
...As Tolm surveys from the balcony of his castle the Rhenish farm country where he grew up, he can see the dredges of the strip-miners excavating the land, uncovering coal for German industry...
...THE SAFETY NET Heinrich Boll Alfred A. Knopf, $13.95, 314 pp...
...On the morning Boll's narrative begins, Tolm has been elected, against his private wishes, head of "The Association," spokesman for the organization of German media and industry...
...Boll's protagonist, Fritz Tolm, has a bit more than the middling comfort of Grass's schoolteachers: he is the millionaire publisher of a chain of liberal newspapers...
...But from the nightmare vision of "a hundred million Saxons and a hundred twenty million Swabians emigrating to offer the world their tight-packed industriousness," Grass returns to reality...
...Quiet, intellectual, unassertive - his wealth and power seem to have come to him by accident rather than actively sought - Tolm would have been happier as the curator of some small museum than as a wielder of wealth and power in Germany...
...Tolm's chief antagonist, the terrorist Beverloh, had once been his superefficient protege...
...Nothing could be further from the tone of Headbirths than the meditative, intro-spectional atmosphere of Boll's The Safety Net...
...Boll's narrative method is the interior monologue, letting his viewpoint shift from one individual to another - most of them essentially decent people - in his large and diverse cast...
...Sabine's imprisoning marriage breaks up when she falls in love with (of all people) a security guard whose seriousness and religious devotion mirrors her own...
...In "dying out" by failing to reproduce themselves, Germans are reversing that population pressure, that need for lebensraum, which had given rise to their dark history within this country...
...This inner focus tends to bring out the ironies of his characters' lives...
...almost too well...
...the author is less interested in narrating the Peters odyssey than in interrupting it with a series of digressions - zany, bitterly ironic, touching by turns - about the difficulties of being a writer, and specifically a German writer today...
...With its wartime guilt a good thirty-five years behind, and its place in current world tensions reduced to that of the disputed center of the chessboard upon which Russia and America offer gambits, Germany's problems are the problems of a domestic system that works (can such things be...
...Instead, Germany is dropping out of history, producing only "headbirths" - like Athene from the brain of Zeus...
...As a result, Tolm becomes the obvious target of terrorists on the radical left - his predecessor had resigned after receiving a bomb in a birthday cake - and the police weave, as they must, a "safety net" of security guards that threatens Tolm's peace and privacy almost as much as the terrorists do...
...Rolf lives with his lover and their son on the fringes of society, supporting his family by gardening and repairing light machinery...
...His daughter, Sabine, is a devout Catholic, unhappily married to a predatory and unfeeling industrialist...
...This may be the ultimate burden of Boll's headbirth: his Germans too are dying out...
...This proposed rebirth of a pan-German literature was aborted two years ago, the meetings stopped, the Eastern writers deported...
...Instead of a single Gulliver, Grass invents a pair of intrepid travelers, Harm and Dorte Peters, typical Germans from a typical German town...
...David H. Richter POISED on its island of space betwixt the armed camps of East and West, poised equally within its island of time between the Armageddon of the last European war and that of the next, Germany sits...
...Consider: no overpopulation problem threatening to split a zero-sum society, but rather a birth rate that has fallen below the replacement level...
...But Boll's principal concern, even as the drives his suspenseful narrative to its poignant and wistful conclusion, is with larger ironies than these...
...The real problem, as Gunter Grass recognizes in Headbirths, is that of not having any problems...
...It is from this revery that Grass generates his satirical entertainment upon Germany and the larger, more fecund world...
...The cost of progress, of the protection that corrupts whatever is most worth protecting: this is Boll's main theme...
...Headbirths is, in part, Grass's satirical lament for the child that might have been...
...But Headbirths is Grass's Tale of a Tub, rather than his Gulliver's Travels...
...Consider: no native-born underclass, oppressed and restive, only a small army of foreign "guest-workers" who can be shipped home at no cost to the unemployment rolls whenever the economy turns down...
...The ironies tend to gather around a single issue: the frightening propensity of the guardians to damage what they are designed to protect...
...The heart of Headbirths is here, particularly in Grass's fading dream of a Germany once again made whole by culture and poetry, even though it cannot be politically reunited...
...The constant snooping, the gathering of dossiers, breaks up marriages and careers in the lives of the neighbors and acquaintances that surround the Tolms, for which they feel perversely responsible...
...This was the theme Grass took up in The Meeting at Telgte, and which, he recounts here, he had enacted in private readings held in East Berlin, cross-fertilizations with the poets and novelists of the DDR...
...Almost too well, at least, for the socially committed novelist, who must try to make passionate art out of these unpromising materials...
...Once student radicals, the Peterses have joined the comfortable system, teaching foreign languages by day, and by night salving their waning social consciences lecturing on environmental issues at the local Social Democratic Party club...
...soon, he knows, they will root up his past, and even the very castle wherein he stands...
...And it is contradicted, in a very different way, by the latest work of his friend and compatriot, Heinrich Boll...
...They take their unconceived child - their own headbirth - together with all the emotional and rational arguments for and against bringing a little Peters into the world, on their whirlwind tour of the East...
...Arching over the characters' relationships and fates is the fate of the German landscape itself...
...On a 1979 trip to the Orient sponsored by the Goethe Society, Grass encountered at first hand its swarming millions of the Chinese and Indians, surviving on the edge, and fantasized what the world would be like if the German nation were expected to number, as the Chinese are, 1.2 billion by the year 2000...
...And perhaps there is a still larger issue for which Boll's "precautionary siege" is only a metaphor: the safety net with which the superpowers have invested Germany, one more form of protection that spiritually destroys...
...This "precautionary siege" (as one might more literally translate Boll's paradoxical title) spreads to invest not only Tolm himself but also his wife, children, grandchildren, neighbors, and friends...
...But like the kilo of liver sausage the Peters stuff into their luggage (it's meant as a gift for the expatriate brother of the friend who is caring for their cat), the Peters's headbirth is never delivered...
...Rolf the ex-convict is the only one who can offer intelligent advice to the security forces, which he loathes and which continue to mistrust him...
...But Grass's implication that German literature is, like the German people, dying out is contradicted by his brilliant improvisations, by the lunatic vitality of his prose...
...Despite Tolm's unique position as leader of the Establishment, his children have been drawn by Boll as representative of major political forces operating in Germany today...
...Like the sausage itself, it returns to Germany with them, a little battered for its travels, the problem of Yes-to-baby or No-to-baby still unsolved...
...Consider: two parties, both liberal by American standards, each struggling to occupy the center...
...Considering its situation, it sits very comfortably indeed: the DDR is more prosperous than its Soviet masters, the western two-thirds better fixed than most of its NATO allies...
...What they share is a concern for the problems of prosperity...
...And the younger son, Rolf - in whom we see reborn Tolm's inner peace and strength - is a former radical, once jailed for a car-bombing, who had dropped out from both left and right...
...The elder son, Herbert, is a member of the "alternate society," a rigidly dogmatic leftist group with no program save terror and destruction...
Vol. 109 • July 1982 • No. 13
