The Meeting At Telgte

Günter Grass’s The Meeting at Telgte is one of those novels that sounds deceptively civilised when summarised aloud. A gathering of poets and intellectuals in seventeenth-century Germany during the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War? Very literary. Very cultured. One imagines candlelight, philosophical discussion and perhaps some dignified reflection upon civilisation.

What one actually gets is a sharp, strange, satirical procession of writers, egos, politics, hunger, vanity and exhausted Europe stumbling through catastrophe while attempting to preserve culture amid total societal collapse. In other words: a literary conference, only with more plague and fewer tote bags.

Grass imagines a fictional meeting of German baroque poets in 1647 as war devastates the land around them. These are not romanticised artistic geniuses floating above events, but deeply human, argumentative, self-important and frequently ridiculous intellectuals trying to decide whether literature can survive when society itself appears busy tearing out its own foundations. The answer, naturally, is complicated.

Part historical novel, part satire and part literary in-joke stretched magnificently across the ruins of Europe, the book carries all the sly intelligence and dark humour for which Grass became famous. He understands perfectly the absurdity of writers attempting to save civilisation while simultaneously quarrelling over reputation, influence and aesthetic principles. History may be collapsing outside the windows, but someone will still insist on reading an overlong poem.

There is something gloriously ironic in the setting. The Thirty Years’ War left huge parts of Germany ruined, depopulated and traumatised, yet here are poets debating language, culture and national identity while armies wander about the countryside setting fire to things. Grass quietly suggests that art and intellectual life are both absurdly fragile and strangely indestructible. Civilisation may collapse, but literary circles somehow continue functioning regardless.

The novel also operates as a sly mirror to modern literary and political culture. Written in the shadow of post-war Germany and Cold War tensions, it becomes clear that Grass is not merely talking about the seventeenth century. The anxieties of intellectual responsibility, nationalism, political compromise and cultural survival echo across centuries with uncomfortable familiarity.

And throughout it all there is that wonderfully European literary atmosphere: mud, smoke, exhausted scholarship, philosophical despair and people talking very seriously about art while surrounded by evidence that humanity is perhaps not entirely worthy of it.

A fascinating read for lovers of literary fiction, German history, satire, historical allegory and anyone who has ever attended an earnest intellectual gathering and suspected civilisation might already be quietly burning in the background.

Condition: Good. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where collapsing Europe, argumentative poets and historically significant cultural anxiety remain available in paperback form.

Keep browsing: See more Fiction books Other books by Grass Gunter