To Redeem the German Language

...The coin here is verities, not facts (For a short journalistic account of an actual meeting of the Group 47, see my "Notes from Germany," Partisan Review, I, Winter, 1968) Although historical characters come and go, types and urgent themes remain What is packed into these brief pages in erudition and fantasy, what is ordered from the chaos of experience and knowledge, is nothing short of staggering And all of this in a prose that flows along in one cool stream A pattern has emerged in Grass' output, for just as the lapidary Cat and Mouse followed The Tin Drum, so this slim volume comes after a fat one, The Flounder But there is a more tangible connection between Grass' two latest works Readers who want to prepare their palates for this somewhat arcane, delicate dish can go to the chapter in 77ie Flounder entitled "the Burden of an Evil Day "It will lead them right into The Meeting at Telgte As the Swedes who usurped the poets' planned Congress as Oesede would say, Skol...

...No, he would let every foul smell out of the bag, a chronicler, he would bring back the long war as a word-butchery, let loose gruesome laughter, and give the language license to be what it is crude and soft-spoken, whole and stricken, here Frenchified, there melancolicky, but always drawn from thecasksof life Yes, he would write'" In the horrendous times of the Thirty Years' War politics cannot be altogether denied On several occasions during their meeting the poets try to draft an appeal for peace But after three days days of total exposure to the ultraviolet intensity of each other's testy egos they can only solemnly proclaim "the death of literature," and their peace manifesto is "a statement of the usual helplessness So why were they sitting there7" To this lament the composer Hein-rich Schutz, present in search of a librettist, replies "For thesake of the written word, which poets alone had the power to write in accordance with the dictates of art And also to wrest from helplessness—he knew it well?a faint 'and yet '" Long after the reader has closed the pages of this miniature masterpiece, Schutz' brave, feeble "and yet" will linger, in polyphonic echoes, in his ear The Meeting at Telgte is a funny book and a wise book, rendered with a painterly eye trained on Jacques Callot's engravings of villages ravaged by the Thirty Years War as well as Bruegel's grotesque peasant scenes Oneof Grass' amazing feats is the delicious re-creation of the flavor of the Group 47 sessions in the linguistic and thematic framework of the Baroque He was there, he was witness, yet this does not explain away the author's genius Much that is contemporary will be lost on non-German readers, but this should not detract from the pleasure of reading the story...

...To Redeem the German Language The Meeting at Telgte By Gunter Grass Translated by Ralph Manheim Afterword by Leonard Forster Harcourt 147pp $9 95 Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "TimesBook Review" "The thing that hath been tomorrow is that which shall be yesterday " With this cryptic first sentence, Gunter Grass brings the reader up short, and by translating it in an archaic, Biblical mode, Ralph Manheim signals that what ensues will be gnomic and packed with Baroque paradoxes Telgte is a tiny village between Protestant Osna-bruck and Catholic Munster, where the Peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War was being negotiated in May 1647 But the meeting Grass locates there at that time is fictuious It boasts no heads of church or state Rather, it is a congress of literary men—all hision-cal figures—who are trying to rescue their language from the ravages of the most destructive war Germanv had ever known This gathering in Telgte 300 yean-ago, which torms the (.enter ot Grass' latest novel, corresponds to ihe activities ot the Group 47, a loose band ot writers, protessors, publicists, and publishers w ho i.ame together in the wake o! W orld War 11 to collect trom the rubble whatever honest shards of German remained More specifically, they sought to rid the language of Nazi meta-talk, and, in the words of their poet-spokesman, GunterEich, to humbly take "Inventory " HeinrichBoll, Grass himself, Uwe Johnson, Hans Magnus Enzen-berger—all were children of the Group 47 The Group 47 began meeting in 1947 under the tutelage of Hans Werner Richter, and it is to him this book, published in Germany in 1979, is dedicated A more moving encomium to a friend, mentor and fellow writer than the first paragraph would be hard to find in modern letters Richter is clothed in the mantle of the Baroque professor of verse, Simon Dach, who sets himself the task of assembling diverse men of letters under one roof (Dach) and taming their rampant, quirky egos long enough to permit fruitful discussions He had "a wide-ranging mind and generously dispensed warmth," Grass tells us, and could get everyone to shut up merely by admomshing, "But no fighting, children " We see this comi-tragic crew of 17th-century poets arriving from all directions—on foot, on horseback, in covered wagons, by sail down rivers, and one by ship from London by way of Bremen No roads are safe, highway robbers and plague pose threats at every turn From the start the endeavor seems doomed The inn at Oesede that Dach had paid for in advance to house the conference is occupied by the Swedish War Council Staff The literati lose heart and talk of giving up and going home Enter Gelnhausen, or Grrmmelshaus-en, author of the fabulous German novel of the Thirty Years War, Simphcissi-mus Grass lifts him right out of the pages of the original, down to the randiest autobiographical detail A musketeer serving as a regimental secretary, Gelnhausen devises a scandalous ruse to secure lodgings for the poets in nearby Telgte, at the inn of his old acquaintance, the runagate Courage (Yes, she is the original Courage after whom Brecht drew his figure) Once installed, these Chaucerian pilgrims of the Muse read in turn from their works and, having read, submit to the criticisms of their peers No one may rise in defense or "explication" of his text The Word stands (This was a cardinal rule of the Group 47, too, prompting the term "electric chair" for the seat the authors read from ) There are late arrivals, as well as unexpected and unwanted guests as the readings get under way Of the " youngsters," still yawning after a wearing mght with the maids in the attic straw, the lyricist and playwright Andrews Gryphius says "Perhaps some of their own verse, sleepy as it might make others, would wake its authors " Of Gryphius himself, the narrator tells us " though only thirty, [he] was well upholstered on all sides, bloated no doubt by grief and disgust with the world At the same time, his disgust with everything written, let alone printed, went hand in hand with his eagerness to see everything he had recently poured forth—certain tragedies, for example, and various projected comedies or tragedies—published without delay" Naturally, Gryphius goes on reading for several manuscript pages too many The rambling discussions touch on the power and impotence of the Word, art and politics, the German capacity for irony instead of humor (where have we heard all this before9), and of course the purification of the German language Should the foreign sounding "convent" be replaced by the more Teutonic Jungfernzwinger (virgin's dungeon)7 The poets spend the evemngs " storytelling, keg-tapping," whoring and/or praying, according to their individual bent A revealing moment occurs down at the banks of the river Ems, where Philip Von Zesen has gone off to be by himself He sees a dead man and woman tied together, washed against the shore "The pair broke loose from the tangled reeds, spun around playfully in the current, escaped from the eddy, and glided downstream to the mill weir where evening was blending into mght, leaving nothing behind except potential metaphors, which Zesen began at once to pad with resounding neologisms He was so hard pressed by language he had no time to be horrified ' Some of Grass' uncanny insights into both poetry and politics are passed off so lightly they might almost go unnoticed He casts the Baroque poets as precursors of Expressionism, and on this idea alone a graduate student might do a thesis Or listen to this in the light of the German avant-garde's massive condemnation after Vietnam, which unconsciously minimized the evils in Germany's past "To Dach's mind this verdict of universal guilt amounted to a universal acquittal He would have none of it The present problem, he said, was not to deplore man's innate depravity or to seek out individual culprits, but to assign individual responsibility Fittingly enough, Grass places his own artistic credo on the tongue of Gnmmelshausen via the narrator " But let no one expect mincing pastorals sensitive soul-blubber, or well-behaved rhymes for church congregations...