The Meeting at Telgte

The Meeting at Telgte (German: Das Treffen in Telgte) is a 1979 novel by the West German writer Günter Grass. The narrative revolves around a fictional meeting for intellectuals hosted by Simon Dach after the Thirty Years' War. The story is an analogy for the post-World War II Group 47, of which Grass was a member.

Reception

Theodore Ziolkowski wrote in The New York Times that "Grass has chosen his historical analogy with brilliant precision" and that "the book is diverting as a history of 17th-century German literature, liberally sprinkled with quotations from the works and poetic treatises of the period". Ziolkowski continued: "All in all, however, the story remains a lifeless literary construct. The author, whose unerring sense of place put his native Danzig on the literary map along with Kafka's Prague, Joyce's Dublin, and Bellow's Chicago, has not succeeded in giving us a persuasive Westphalian town of the 17th century. With the exception of Dach and the young Grimmelshausen, whose ebullient novels anticipated Grass's own explosive works, none of the literary figures comes alive."^[1]

See also

• 1979 in literature
• German literature

References

Works by Günter Grass Prose The Tin Drum Cat and Mouse Dog Years Local Anaesthetic The Flounder The Meeting at Telgte The Rat The Call of the Toad My Century Crabwalk Peeling the Onion The Box Poetry "What Must Be Said" Related topics Danzig Trilogy