Word: grasse
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Historical novelists commonly cast imaginary characters in real events. Author Günter Grass, 53, turns this standard formula on its head. The Meeting at Telgte teems with more than 20 German writers and literary figures, all of whom actually lived and worked during the 17th century. What these people did not do, how ever, is precisely the subject of Grass's novel. They did not meet together in 1647, near the end of the Thirty Years' War, nor did they sit down to discuss ways of uniting their ravaged father land through the power and the glory...
...conceiving and describing a happening that never happened, Grass is playing a sophisticated version of the what-if game. His point is not to guess how German history might have been changed if, at a crucial moment, the poets had rallied round the native tongue. Instead, he frames a long-ago analogy for recent reality. In 1947 a loose confederation of German writers and publishers did as unlike their predecessors 300 earlier. As citizens, they looked on a divided, devastated nation; artists, they found their language by the murderous rhetoric the Nazis. They argued and dis literature and the writer...
...helps to know this while reading The Meeting at Telgte, for the novel is in part Grass's allegorical tribute to Group 47. But the book is also an imaginative leap, and easily accessible as such even to those unfamiliar with the details of German life in this or the 17th century. Grass whisks himself off to one of the many times in history when the sword seemed mightier than the pen. He watches poets' gather at an obscure village inn, all of them taking risks to get there. Brigands and bands of hungry soldiers terrorize travelers...
...underscore this point, Grass gives the best speech in the novel to the rascally Gelnhausen. The discredited young man takes his leave, boldly promising the group that some day he will write a book: "But let no one expect mincing pastorals, conventional obituaries, complicated figure poems, sensitive soul-blubber, or well-behaved rhymes for church congregations. No, he would let every foul smell out of the bag; a chronicler, he would bring back the long war as a word-butchery, let loose gruesome laughter, and give the language license to be what it is: crude and softspoken, whole and stricken...
This description jibes perfectly with Grass's own fictional methods, particularly in The Tin Drum, a sprawling, picaresque vision of a later war. The Meeting at Telgte is considerably shorter and less ambitious than its famous predecessor, much more an elegy than an encyclopedia. But for all its brevity, the novel fleshes out serious old questions about the place of literature in the lives of nations. Grass allows his imaginary meeting to end on a note of ineffectuality. The inn burns down, and with it a peace proposal that the poets composed: "And so, what would in any case...