Trading Rhinegold for Deutschmarks : WOMEN IN A RIVER LANDSCAPE<i> by Heinrich Boll; translated by David McLintock (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 240 pp.) </i>

Through the late Heinrich Boll’s last novel, the Rhine flows, a mutilated symbol of spiritual recovery.

The dead or near-dead river, supreme national emblem of 19th-Century Romantic Germany, became the sludge-choked victim of the postwar boom that was known, for a time, as the German economic miracle. No writer set himself so fiercely to denounce the moral illness of that miracle as Boll, a winner of the Nobel Prize.

It is a measure of the melancholy darkness of this final work that Boll should use the burnt-out river to suggest a faint glimmer of hope for his countrymen.

“Women in a River Landscape” is a series of dialogues and soliloquies among a cast of characters who represent the German ruling classes. They range from corrupt and criminal through a middle area of uneasy compromise to battered but persistent idealists. Several of them resign, in effect, in the course of the book, turning away from their success and opening themselves to the possibility of a German future built upon something other than the defense and enlargement of material prosperity.

The men are politicians, high bureaucrats or bankers connected to the politically vast financial machinery at the heart of what is clearly meant to be the Christian-Democratic Party. They are powerful and prosperous, but there is a murderous undercurrent in the living rooms and terraces of their Rhine mansions; a state of rot like that of Hamlet’s Danish Court.

Boll’s vision of the party that was founded by Konrad Adenauer and that has played a dominant role in postwar Germany, is that of an uneasy coalition of decent men and villains, former anti-Nazis and former Nazis, whose joint involvement in building up the state and their own fortunes has erased the lines between honor and criminality.

In all the intrigues, the shady deals, the political plots, and an occasional mysterious murder or suicide, some essential moral oxygen has been used up. There are late-night meetings behind closed doors, and deadly secrets.

We hear, for example, of a major Nazi war criminal--perhaps we are meant to think of Martin Bormann--who has reappeared and, under a new name and in disguise, is playing an important political role. When the wife of Blaukramer, a particularly nasty politician, recognizes the Nazi and goes into hysterics, she finds herself in a discreetly run asylum used for a number of women who cannot stand their husbands’ sinister games. Eventually, she hangs herself.

It is the women, in fact, who assert some of the moral values that were supposed to have been established by the defeat of Nazism, and that have been corrupted. Their assertions, as with Frau Blaukramer, demand a price. The wife of Krengel, a banker, refuses to wear gold jewelry or take showers. The gold may have come from the teeth of concentration camp victims, and the camps gave showers a bad name. She dies, finally, half out of her mind.

The wife of Kreyl, an old-line aristocrat and a devoted Catholic who has joined the Christian-Democratic hierarchy, walks into the Rhine and drowns herself after seeing former Nazis turn up at the party meetings. Befouled as it is, the river is a link to a distant Germany; it can still purify.

The women are dying, getting sick or, as with Erika Wubler, wife of another high party official, they quit. Erika suddenly refuses to take her ceremonial place at receptions and memorial masses in honor of dead party leaders. (“Security masses,” they are called, heavily guarded as they are against terrorists and pew-crashers.)

“I am withdrawing from my duties as a picture-book Democrat,” Erika tells her husband. She is the book’s center of moral gravity. Wubler, a decent man who has made too many compromises, defends her against the pressures and threats of his colleagues and superiors. His defense, we sense, may be the beginning of his redemption.

The women lead their men. Kreyl suddenly refuses the party’s offer to make him prime minister. Krengel, the banker, makes a quixotic and ultimately costly gesture in support of his daughter who resigns her job at his bank and goes to do relief work in Nicaragua.

There is also a younger generation, and Boll’s gloomy hopefulness aims there, as well. Karl, Kreyl’s son, lives an erratic life, separated from his first wife and inhabiting a trailer with a free-spirited young woman. Discharged from a government job for eccentricity, he maintains a surreal, black-humor connection with the intelligence services. He steals the stars off cabinet ministers’ Mercedes-Benzes; the intelligence people give them to a Soviet double agent who has a fetish for them.

Karl has also chopped up and burned the grand piano that came down to him through his family, and on which Beethoven played. At the same time, another figure--he never learned who--has been successfully dismantling the grand pianos owned by the country’s leading bankers, and whose lineages encompass performances by Mozart, Brahms and Wagner.

Grand pianos, huge, pompous and expensive, represent the ruling classes’ understanding of art and culture. They can be owned and displayed; and their owners can congratulate themselves on being able, as it were, to command the artistic heritage of a country they have corrupted.

Piano-chopping is a wonderfully lively image for Boll’s mordant, complex and cleverly assembled message about the state of his country. Unfortunately, the liveliness is generally in short supply.

What Boll has to say is absorbing, and his stoical, dying women are truly affecting. But the form he has chosen is turgid and forced. He uses his soliloquies and dialogues largely to do the work of narrative; to recount the histories of his characters and of their society. A soliloquy can just about manage such a thing. But when a dialogue is forced to, it resembles a burlesque of the heaviest and most static kind of stagecraft.