| In writing Das Treffen in Telgte, Gunter Grass successfully achieved his immediate goal of providing a fitting tribute to his friend Hans Werner Richter, founder and leader of the Gruppe 47. He went much further, creating a lively depiction of a (fictional) meeting of most of the leading literary figures of mid-seventeenth-century Germany. The focus of this study is on the portrayal of the eighteen seventeenth-century authors who attend the meeting, analyzing how Grass portrays them and what possible authorial intention can be seen in these portrayals.; Although Grass did not use a great variety of sources or a critical approach to checking his information, he is generally accurate and often quite detailed in his presentation of the historical figures. By emphasizing certain aspects of a figure's personality or writings, he molds some characters--most notably Andreas Gryphius--to give them a particular profile that fits his constellation of characters in a way that a strictly accurate portrayal of the historical figure would not have allowed. In other figures he pre-dates later historical developments in order to allow them to become factors in the portrayal of his meeting.; The resulting constellation of characters functions ultimately as a study in the varieties and possibilities of the literary personality. Each character has a place in this constellation, and spectrums of piety, humor, political activism, etc. are created, with various figures taking the extreme positions and the remainder falling somewhere between them. The feasibility of writers playing a significant role in politics is an important part of the discussion, but many other factors--religion, humor, the role of dialects in literature, questions of formal rigor and literary realism, etc. all play a role in Grass' discussion of writers and their literature. Das Treffen in Telgte thus functions as a poetics in the guise of a literary narrative, and as such deserves more serious consideration in Grass scholarship than it has received in the past. |
