THE MEETING AT TELGTE by Günter Grass
Translated by Ralph Manheim; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 147 pages; $9.95
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 of the German language.
In 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's ability to heal his countrymen. They read manuscripts to each other and decided to convene annually, which they did for the next 20 years. They came to be known as Group 47; Grass joined them in the middle '50s and became the most talented and distinguished alumnus of them all.
It 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; the local river yields up dead bodies. Ignorant armies have been clashing night and day for nearly 30 years. Food is scarce; there is "nothing left to cackle" in the village.
The poets' purpose amid all this car nage and chaos is noble: "Giving new force to the last remaining bond be tween all Germans, namely, the German language they held in common." Their behavior quickly proves unworthy of their unifying ideal. They begin by squabbling over the proper use of dactylic words. They fall into grim dispute "over the essence of irony and of humor." Thunderous abuse follows the reading of each manuscript. Worst of all, these noble spirits find themselves implicated in the cruelty of their age; the feast mysteriously provided them by Gelnhausen, a dashing young member of their entourage, turns out to have been tainted by violence and plunder.