The Safety Net

First trade edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. xi, 313. Quarter-bound black cloth over black paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt to spine. In the sunned, price-clipped, Secker & Warburg dust-wrapper of the UK edition, published the same year. They were both preceded by the limited, privately printed edition issued in 1981 by the Franklin Library.

Translated from the original German Fürsorgliche Belagerung, by Leila Vennewitz.

"What price freedom?" An ageing newspaper proprietor surrounds himself with an all-pervasive "safety-net" of police protection and surveillance, to guard against terrorist threats to his immediate family. Inspired by the radical leftist violence convulsing West German society through much of the '70s and '80s, spearheaded by the Baader-Meinhof Gang, which assassinated prominent political and business leaders, in the belief that their actions would spark a broader revolutionary movement.

In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize in literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), and Group Portrait with Lady (1971).