Setkání v Telgte

The story takes place in 1647 near Osnabrück, where the terms of the peace that would become known as the Peace of Westphalia are being negotiated. The subject is a fictitious meeting of seventeen German Baroque poets and writers, who are introduced by real names and works, but whom the author has furnished from his imagination with character traits, opinions, and modes of action, and has shaped them into full, idiosyncratic literary characters. The poets read from their works, and in discussions they resolve poeological problems and personal disputes and animosities, but eventually the theme of war and the question to what extent, if at all, literature - as a mere "beautiful appearance" - can or should interfere with real politics takes over. The literati present here will at least try to do so.Into this historical picture, however, the slightly ironic image of the well-known Group of 47, which met for the first time exactly 300 years later, just after the end of a war that was even more devastating for Germany and Europe than the Thirty Years' War, is subtly, unobtrusively, but easily recognisable to Grass's contemporaries. In this interweaving, Grass once again demonstrates his virtuoso ability for parody and paraphrase, as well as for a reader-appealing humorous and serious play with the fatal events of history. Thanks to his inexhaustible inventiveness as a fabulist, but also thanks to his extraordinarily thorough knowledge of the realities of the period, Günter Grass has here presented a vivid, plastic and, for all its fantasy, believable picture of the Baroque period for which we could hardly find an equivalent in German post-war literature.

Czech edition