The meeting in Telgte

The meeting in Telgte is a story by Günter Grass from 1979 . It depicts a fictional meeting of German poets and writers in Telgte in 1647 and is an encrypted representation of the meetings of Group 47 after the Second World War . The book is dedicated to Hans Werner Richter on his 70th birthday, who initiated and led the meetings of Group 47.

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In 1647, shortly before the end of the Thirty Years' War , the Königsberg poet Simon Dach invited a number of German writers and poets to a meeting. Since the “Rappenhof” inn in Oesede near Osnabrück, which is intended as the conference venue, has been seized by the staff of the Swedish War Council Erskein , the meeting threatens to break up before it has started. The imperial officer and writer Gelnhausen , who, without being invited, appeared accompanied by two writers, offers his help and arranges for the onward journey to Telgte. Under the pretext that as the personal physician of the papal nuncio Chigi he had to quarantine a group of people suffering from bubonic plague , Gelnhausen requisitioned the "Brückenhof" belonging to his beloved Libuschka as accommodation. Hanse merchants staying in the inn are forced to leave in a hurry. The participants of the meeting move into their rooms and the day ends with the conference leader Simon Dach worrying about the successful outcome of the meeting.

Under the direction of Badger, the poets, some of whom have come with their publishers, read each other their manuscripts. The texts are discussed and the situation and situation of the German language after the years of war are discussed. In between there is food and drink, some of the younger ones spend their nights with the maids in the attic.

The poets would like to contribute to the end of the long-term war and finally agree after lengthy discussions on a joint call for peace. Simon Dach's final speech culminates in the “sentence of the lasting verse”: “And if you wanted to stone it with hatred, the hand with the pen would stick out of the rubble.” Language - even more than literature - is home all of “what is worth calling German” . This commitment to the autonomy of language and literature and the associated rejection of political, religious and ideological appropriation - whether the writers present will accept this remains an open question - draws the consequence of the 29 years of war chaos at the time.

But then the house goes up in flames and all efforts to save it are in vain. Recognizing their own physical impotence, but now also filled with a vague idea of ​​their actual calling, the poets part without arranging a further meeting. The outcome of the conference remains open.

Language, historicization

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In keeping with the meaning of the language and the literature ( “skillfully setting words” ), the novel is kept in an elaborate, strongly rhetorical style, in which indirect speech, baroque verbs and adjectives, rankings and similar stylistic devices dominate and Grass' thorough knowledge of literary and political baroque shows. The untimely, long underestimated, multiple broken and multi-layered roman clefs - the small work was still available in the first edition for a long time - not only takes into account the thesis of the servitude of literature that was common in the 1960s (which Grass himself had introduced), but at the end of the 1970s reassigned the historical, literary, poetic and linguistic to an independent rank.

Participants of the meeting

Heinrich Albert (1604–1651), composer, song writer and cathedral organist from Königsberg Sigmund von Birken (1626–1681), poet and freelance writer August Buchner (1591–1661), classical philologist, poet and literary theorist Daniel Czepko von Reigersfeld (1605–1660), poet and playwright Simon Dach (1605–1659), poet from Königsberg Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676), Evangelical Lutheran theologian and hymn poet Georg Greflinger (around 1620–1677), poet and writer Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (around 1622–1676), writer, names himself in the book Gelnhausen after his place of birth Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664), poet and playwright Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607–1658), poet Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau (1616–1679), poet and epigrammatist Johann Lauremberg (1590–1658), Low German poet and writer

Friedrich von Logau (1605–1655), poet Johann Michael Moscherosch (1601–1669), politician, satirist and educator Johann Rist (1607–1667), poet and Evangelical Lutheran preacher Johannes Scheffler, who later called himself Angelus Silesius (1624–1677), religious poet Johann Matthias Schneuber (1614–1665), German and Latin poet and educator Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), composer Georg Rodolf Weckherlin (1584–1653), court lyric poet Philipp von Zesen (1619–1689), poet and first German professional writer Publisher Elzevihrn (1596–1651) from Amsterdam Publisher Endter from Nuremberg Publisher Mülben from Strasbourg Publisher Naumann from Hamburg Wilhelm Schlegel, merchant from Szczecin a publisher from Wroclaw

"Decryption" of the people

The writer Rolf Schneider , who himself took part in some meetings of Group 47, made assumptions about the identification of the people in his review in the Spiegel in 1979: Hans-Werner Richter, to whom the book is dedicated, is of course portrayed with Simon Dach. Grass, who joined Group 47 in 1958, portrayed himself in Grimmelshausen. The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki should be recognized in the strict Magister August Buchner, who tends to teach , and the gentle Sigmund von Birken was given traits by the writers Martin Walser and Hans Magnus Enzensberger . In Andreas Gryphius, who expressively describes the effects of the war in his poems, Heinrich Böll is reflected as one of the main exponents of rubble literature . Georg Greflinger, who later published a weekly newspaper in Hamburg, is similar to Rudolf Augstein , the publisher of Spiegel , who was a frequent guest at Group 47 meetings.

Libuschka is the title character from the novel Detailed and Wondrous Description of the Life of the Ertz Betrayer and Landstörtzerin Courasche von Grimmelshausen, which Bertolt Brecht also took over for his play Mother Courage and Her Children .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the cover of the first edition you can see the drawing of a hand with a quill, which Grass himself made, rising from the rubble.
2. ↑ It is a key novel insofar as not only Hans Werner Richter and Gruppe 47 from 1947 are presented, but also, in disguise, the literary theory of the present from 1979, and with regard to his statements on the German language he is broken again, especially after Grass' part of the Waffen-SS became known.
3. ↑ The first-person narrator is by no means to be confused with the figure of Grimmelshausen, as he describes as an eyewitness events that occur in the absence of Grimmelshausen.

Expenses (selection)

• The meeting in Telgte. A story . Luchterhand, Darmstadt and Neuwied 1979, ISBN 3-472-86480-X - first edition
• Work edition. Volume 9. The meeting in Telgte. A story . Steidl, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-88243-490-2

literature

• Susan C. Anderson: Grass and Grimmelshausen. Günter Grass's "The Meeting in Telgte" and Reception Theory . Camden House, Columbia SC 1987, ISBN 0-938100-48-3 .
• Stephan Füssel (ed.): Günter Grass: The meeting in Telgte. Explanations and documents. Reclam, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-15-016012-X .
• Marco Fuhrländer: “The meeting in Telgte”. In: Harenbergs Kulturführer Roman und Novelle , Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus AG, Mannheim 2007, ISBN 978-3-411-76163-0 , p. 296f.
• A baroque group 47 - Rolf Schneider on Günter Graß: “The meeting in Telgte” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1979, pp. 217-219 ( Online - Apr. 2, 1979 ).