The Safety Net is pervaded by a profound nostalgia, although it is Böll's great virtue here that he does not sentimentalize the past; he suggests only that we cannot dispense with it as the revolutionaries and the technological profiteers, in their complementary ways, would have us do: The aging Tolm and Käthe, his wife of thirty-five years, are deeply attached to their own origins, but their flashbacks to childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood do not soften the remembered contours of physical hardship, frustration, local jealousies, Church-induced hypocrisies and guilt. The past was far from utopian, and it of course included the twelve most ghastly years of German history, but it did sustain a humanly necessary sense of community—among neighbors, co-religionists, members of the extended family, and between generations.

By contrast, the essential trait of contemporary Germany as Böll conceives it is divisiveness. We are...