Last Tango in Leipzig : THE TANGO PLAYER, <i> By Christoph Hein</i> , <i> Translated by Philip Boehm</i> , <i> (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 220 pp.) </i>

In Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” a washerwoman in the court where Joseph K. is being prosecuted says to him: “It’s so horrible here. . . . Do you think you’ll manage to improve things?” He answers: “As a matter of fact, I should never have dreamed of interfering of my own free will, and shouldn’t have lost an hour’s sleep over the need for reforming the machinery of justice.” He goes on to announce that his arrest now forces him to intervene. But time after time in the novel, given the chance to either help someone else or pursue a more genuine course of subversiveness, he declines.

The reader wants to resist comparing a novel such as Christoph Hein’s “The Tango Player” to “The Trial”--the comparison seems so expected, so banal--and yet Kafka’s influence is so clear in this case that comparison helps illuminate what Hein is seeking to achieve.

Hein, author of the admirable novel “The Distant Lover” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) and one of Germany’s most notable literary figures, sets “The Tango Player” principally in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1968, just before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The novel concerns Hans-Peter Dallow, a young history professor and pianist just released after 21 months in prison.

Dallow is as innocent and as random a victim as one can imagine: His crime was to play a song for his students’ cabaret performance--a tango with mildly subversive lyrics. He was, as he futilely puts it to more than one puzzled listener, “only the tango player”; even more grotesquely, as luck would have it, only a stand-in for the real piano player. On top of that, Dallow is so apolitical that even as a historian specializing in Czech and Slovak history, he is at the moment apparently “the only one in the whole country who isn’t totally preoccupied with what’s happening in Prague.”

The novel follows the bumpy progress of Dallow’s attempts to readjust to freedom. He looks for work and finds that for mysterious reasons no one will hire him. As dazed as a puppy cuffed on the ear, he spends his time drifting through the surreal dailiness of his reestablished life, sleeping late, vegetating in cafes, spending evenings in his apartment sewing buttons on his clothes. Like so many postwar German protagonists, he suffers from a particularly debilitating boredom and restlessness, and he’s forever throwing on his overcoat and leaving the apartment in search of who knows what. But he has to confess that “his attempt to outfox himself, to force himself to view inactivity as a new enriching realm of experience had failed.”

He wants, primarily, two things: to resist society’s overtures to lure him back into the fold, and to resist following, as the rest of his society seems to be doing, the unfolding events in Czechoslovakia. Both courses of action would make him more political, he feels, and that’s something he’s determined to avoid.

Precisely like Joseph K., Dallow is so focused on his undeniable innocence of his particular crime that he’s able to overlook his complicity in a totalitarian state. His time in jail makes him even more determined to be apolitical, since politics, as he sees it, is what got him into trouble in the first place.

Through his attempts to readjust--his visits with neighbors, his run-ins with the police, various dismally loveless sexual encounters--we see the inevitability with which such a state perverts the most ordinary human interactions. (“I was thinking about something else,” Dallow says at one point to explain to a merchant his distraction. “I’m always thinking about something else,” the merchant retorts. “It helps.”)

Hein does a marvelous job of capturing the everyday petulance and weariness of those living under persistent oppression (“You got me out of bed,” Dallow says moodily to the police when they show up yet again to question him), as well as the enervation of having one’s powerlessness constantly confirmed. He evokes beautifully a sense of how viscerally unsettling the fear is. Here’s Dallow, three months after his release, upon receiving a letter from the judge who sentenced him:

“He sat down in the apartment, placed the letter on the table without opening it, and thought. He reached for the newspaper and unfolded it, but he was too nervous to read anything. He took the letter, turned it over in his hands indecisively, and put it back down. The letter upset him greatly. He suddenly felt acid collecting in his stomach and stood up. He took the paper and went to the toilet. He spat several times, then sat down on the rim of the tub. He waited, afraid he might vomit.”

The understatement and matter-of-factness of such prose is characteristic of the novel’s strategies, and central to its success.

The novel is not without its faults. Much of what we’re told about the ironies of Dallow’s psychological position seems familiar (“His cell, as he now discovered, had been a familiar environment, a home, safe and secure, and no matter how ardently he had desired and longed for it, freedom had become alien and strange”). At times, the narrative restraint that serves the novel so well is breached by thematically overt passages that do our interpreting for us: “He realized that he was now constructing another cell for himself, solitary and isolated, and that he was anxiously checking that the door stayed locked.” Characters are at times unconvincingly oracular: One pipefitter that Dallow meets announces, “I’ve learned that the straight way is the labyrinth,” and Dallow’s lover responds to his comment that he’s getting old with, “Memories are the most beautiful thing about love.”

A more pervasive problem is that the novel constantly confronts the difficulty of dramatizing stasis, and too often forces us to experience and re-experience Dallow’s aimlessness: “For a few minutes he lay in bed and wondered once more what kind of work he could do, where he should apply. Undecided, he finally got up and went to the bathroom.”

But finally “The Tango Player” is successful in bringing its historical and literary models together into a compelling and memorable aesthetic whole. We remember Dallow’s East Germany. We remember Schultz and Muller, two East German policemen of uncertain rank, comic/sinister bumpkins right out of Kafka, full of amiability and good cheer, who carry out the state’s wishes with such a lack of malice that they’re continually wounded by their victims’ puzzling irritability. They’re kind, they’re obliging, and they want to make clear that what’s happened--or what is about to happen--is no one person’s fault. They’re the people who keep the machinery of oppression humming along.

Which is, finally, the critically important point. Throughout “The Tango Player,” what develops before us is the unexpected irony that the totalitarian state, in its assumption of the guilt or potential guilt of all of its citizens, turns out to have been more prescient than we would have first believed. There is, after all, a case to be made that all those living under such regimes and just trying to get along, and all those not working actively for change, are guilty, as guilty as their governments arbitrarily announce them to be at any moment.

At one point, Dallow’s lover says to him: “You’re self-righteous and inconsiderate. None of these people put you in prison. And I didn’t send you there either.” But of course what Dallow senses is that in some way they did--in the same way that he effortlessly helps to send others.