Hicrory of European Idem. Vol. 3. No. 3. pp. 349-353. 1982

Pergamon Press~td Printed m Great Britain.

BOOK REVIEWS

Das Treffen in Telgte, G. Grass (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1979), pp. 182, DM 24.00. The Meeting at Telgte, G. Grass, (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1981), f5.95. Also published in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 147, $9.95.

Just outside the Westfalian city of Miinster, now in the West German state of Nordrheinwestfalen, lies the pilgrimage centre of Telgte, the setting of Grass’s novel Das Treffen in Telgte (Meeting in Telgte). Why Telgte? In one sense, why not? The meeting, so the narrator relates, was originally planned for Osnabriick but lack of suitable accommodation forced those attending to continue their journey by night to Telgte. Yet Telgte was perhaps after all the right place: as a pilgrimage centre it was used to collections of strange visitors, and used to confessions. And on the edge of Miinster it lay appositely placed for the purpose in hand. Namely, the gathering in the late summer of 1647 of the luminaries, old and coming, of German literature, when, at the same time, the opposing forces of the last phase of the Thirty Years War were drawing their peace negotiations in nearby Miinster to a slow close. Perhaps from Telgte the poets could expedite the peace, advise the politicians?

Three hundred years later, in Munich, Hans Werner Richter to whom the book is dedicated brought into being Group 47 to which Grass belongs (with, among others, Heinrich Bell,) realising in practice what Grass’s imagination creates in Telgte. In a Germany reduced by twenty-nine years of war (1618-47) to nothing but burnt-out cities and thistles (the emblem of the poets’ meeting) the prickly poets must gather to rebuild in words what the politicians and their armies have destroyed with weapons. And so, as Grass makes explicit on the first page, he imagines the beginning of a German literary movement in 1647 which finds its continuation in German literature after 1947. Nor is his imagined meeting in Telgte that fanciful. Just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, Ludwig, Prince of AnhaltKbthen, founded the first and most important of German ‘Sprachgeselfschaften’, the so-called ‘Fruchtbringende Geseffschufr’, with the aim of purifying, improving and codifying the German language and with the language, the improvement of the manners of the German people. This society spawned many like it, such as the Pegnitzorden, based in Niirnberg, so it was not entirely inconceivable that such a national meeting should occur.

Just as Richter’s surname is fitting for the founder of a literary self-criticism group, so too. puns Grass. is it fit that Simon Dach should oversee the meeting in Telgte. His invitation draws Weckherlin from London, Gryphius aside from his return to Glogau, and most of the leading figures from North and East Germany, Greflinger, Laurem- berg, Moscherosch, Czepko, Logau. Hoffmanswaldau, Gerhardt, etc. The majority are Protestant. though Scheffler’s inclination towards Rome is apparent. From the Catholic South come only representatives from the ‘island’ of Niirnberg (still Pro- testant in the Catholic see of Bavaria). What matters however, is the fact that. despite the political divisions under which they live. they meet and find a common language. It matters in a divided Germany now just as much as then that the essential common uniting property of the writers and the people is their German language. Nor is this an implicit plea for uniformity: when they speak their regional dialects - which they do with pride - they are incomprehensible to one another. But they need their common high German as well. as does their Fatherland. divided and occupied. then as now. by foreign powers. Grass quite rightly offers his German readers, obsessed perhaps with

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3.50 Book Revieir,s

their divided state, an historical perspective in which political division. in itself no stranger to German soil. is only surmountable through linguistic exchange and parity.

Einzig die Dichter, das sagte der Aufruf. wiigten noch. was deutsch zu nennen sich lohne. Sie hatten ‘mit vielen heigen Seufftzern und ZBhren’ die deutsche Sprache als letztes Band geknupft. Sie seien das andere. das wahrhaftige Deutschland (p. 92).

Only recently, in the summer of 1981, Grass joined many writers in East and West Europe in a letter pIeading for an end to the arms race.

The narrative strategy Grass adopts has another ancestry, different from the ‘high linguistic and aesthetic purpose of the meeting, yet a constant factor within it. When the poets have gathered in Osnabrtick only to find their meeting place occupied, their plan is rescued by the mysterious and flamboyant soldier of fortune Christoffel Gelnhausen, known in the book as Stoffel. He and his men take the poets to Telgte, to the inn of a certain Libuschka, or Courage, with whom he has a Iove-hate relation- ship. She calls him to his annoyance, Simplex, he calls her, to hers, Courage. Both are. to the poets’ astonishment, familiar to the point of quotations with their published work and can dispute in Latin and Italian. Gelnhausen even expresses the wish to take the minutes of their conversations. In their unselfconsciousness, their depth of experi- ence of war and depravation, in their willingness to lie. both figures counter-balance the urge for truth and integrity in the poetic gathering. Yet both, in their wit and humour, succeed in keeping the group together when political and aesthetic differ- ences threaten to break their fellowship. Libuschka is, of course, Grimmelshausen’s creation, the irrepressible mistress of men and money through the length and breadth of the war. Married to countless men and yet childless, stronger than many soldiers, fearless in battle, raped by whole regiments, she becomes a figure not only of undaunting resilience but of the land itself, so used to war it cannot imagine peace. By bringing the ‘real’ poets to her fictional’ company Grass exposes the reader once again to the debate between history and fiction as to which is the ‘true’ history. Is Courage any less a truthful representation of her age than Dach? Is she not, in fact, vastly better known than he - and not just through Brecht’s exploitation of her story?

The bridges between the real poets in their fictional meeting with fictional charac- ters in a real place are built by two figures - Stoffel and the first-person narrator. Stoffel is, we learn near the end of the book, G~mmelshausen himself, fictionalised by Grass into the Grimmelshausen figure Simplex Simplicissimus, whose naive good nature leads him in Grimmelshausen’s tale through an eventful life during the war, a life captured in the picaresque ‘biography’ which bears his name. In 1647 Gelnhauseni Grimmelshausen has not yet started to write, but swears on leaving the fellowship that he soon will. When he does, it is in the sort of prose that Grass was to use as model for his own great picaresque war novel Die B~echtromme~. Grimmelshausen’s narrative form is largely episodic, each chapter an episode, but contains debates, largely of a parodic nature, on issues of the time; some of the episodes are more extensive than the standard single chapter unit which dominates in Courage and Simplicissimus. This chapter/episode strategy Grass follows, treating each group of authors and each session (a morning or an afternoon) as a unit. The units are punctuated by detailed descriptions of meals, which provides a possible clue to the purpose of the second of his bridges between the real and the fictional, the ‘I’ narrator. In his late Drz.s Wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest (1672) of which the second part is thought to be his last work, Grimmelshausen explores the device of the anonymous first-person narrator at great length. While the reader is aware all the time of an observer whose thoughts

Book Reviews 351

colour the narrative at every point, there is no interference in the tale of his fictional biography of the sort that enables the reader easily to remember that what he is reading is fiction. Grass uses just this device, telling the story of the meeting in such a way that it is clear that the narrator is telling the story from memory, from Personal not second-hand experience. And he combines in his first-person figure the quite exceptional interest in food displayed by the narrator of the first part of Vogelnesr with the sexual interest of the narrator of the second.

The catch however, is that Grass never identifies the ‘ich’ by whom we are ad- dressed. In Grimmelshausen we do at least in the course of the story get to know the social status and attitudes of the narrators and learn through their environment and their reactions a great deal about them. But who is addressing us about Telgte? He is present as a writer, he tells us, and yet he does not read his work to the assembled group, unlike all the others. (This is Group 47’s practice.) One answer is of course, that the narrator is consciously Grass himself. The power of literature is to be present even when past, and there is no reason why Grass cannot reconstruct from the perspective of 1647 and not from 1947 what a meeting of poets in 1647 must have been like. He is present as well because he has made the meeting. Yet the refusal of identity, when placed in the context of the doubt the assembled poets have about whether politically they can have any influence, suggests that his ‘ich’ is divided between the optimism of the early years of the 47 group and the sense recently that writers have no influence at all on politicians. To underline this point, Stoffel tricks all the poets into thinking a huge meal he has foraged was a respectful gift to the poets from the diplomatic corps in Miinster. a trick the poets gullibly believe. Only when the outsider, Heinrich Schiitz, musician not poet and seemingly God-like in his integrity, comes to question Stoffel (suitably, in the middle of their feast) does the truth emerge, to the dismay and self-disgust of the epicurean writers.

Albert, Dach’s friend, has persuaded the famous Schlitz to call at Telgte on his way to Denmark’s court. Schiitz disturbs the writers deeply, casting a cold shadow on their amusement and demanding of them his sort of inner commitment to art which none of them seems able to give. Perhaps Grass vests Schiitz with slightly too strong an ethereal presence; he did after all work with Monteverdi and, like his teacher, compose an opera Orfeus und Eurydice (1638) to a libretto by August Buchner, one of the participants at Telgte, a fact Grass suppresses. Yet Schiitz poses a crucial question to the German writer, and not least the Group 47 member: should one engage politically? Perhaps the writer’s duty is to give the reader a sense of unity and higher purpose in the German-language area which is in danger of neglect in the detail of politics. This seems to lead Grass back to the classical refuge of the poet at odds with his ruler in the claim that he, the poet, would be immortal, the prince forgotten: Horace and Virgil. Spenser and Milton braced their flagging morales with similar thoughts.

The political question has another aspect which fits perfectly into the Baroque movement towards Academies of arts and sciences which, especially in the ‘latin’ countries but also briefly in England. dominated the literary scene in the mid seven- teenth century. The Academies in their dedication to pure and codified language brought about that process whereby literary language lost contact with the language of the people - with the Courages and Stoffels - and became a recondite province of its own. accessible only to the fine and educated. Grimmelshausen stands against this tide. against the complex word-tirades of Gryphius (which send his Telgte hearers to sleep) and the rules of the Academies. Not surprisingly therefore. Grass takes up his parole. Yei for all the praise of Grimmelshausen there remains the fact that the great hulk of Das Treffen irk Telgre concerns writers long forgotten except by Baroque

352 Book Re\siervs

scholars, which suggests that part. at least, of Grass does not believe literature should be easy of access nor clear, even to the reader able to decode its complex net of literary references. The debate is a fine one: if the writer talks above the people’s heads he loses their interest but wins the respect of princes interested in elites and autocratic power, and interested too in language suitable for privilege and high ambitions. If the writer is too much a man of the people, too available. he will be spurned by prince and pauper alike on the grounds that the reader cannot be asked to value what the writer himself despises.

Grass only partly resolves this debate with his fictional and invisible ‘ich’. For in refusing on the last page to tell us whom the ‘ich’ is we are led to speculate. That leads us back to Grass and to the conclusion that the abrupt end to the Telgte meeting, caused by the house catching fire, (burning with it the final agreed version of the letter to the Princes) is not just an elegant fictional way of indicating why no trace of the meeting survives, but also is tinged with the feeling that Grass himself set fire to the house in a despair similar perhaps to that which closes Forster’s A Passage to India - ‘Not now! Not yet!’ can politics and art be joined. Retaining intellectual integrity and speaking to the people seems to be the insoluble problem of squaring the circle.

The urgency of his novel has, however, despite the difficulty it presents to the unliterary reader, gained in intensity with the revival of the debate about disarmament and the harder, more conservative climate in Europe and America. The sentence which comes near the end of the book makes this clear: ‘Wieder einmai war den Poeten nichts gewisser als.ihre Ohnmacht und ihre mangelnde Kenntnis der politis- then Krafte’ (p. 169). Writers are trying, must try, to influence the fate of the world, to prevent war: yet the harder they try the more they realise their limits.

Universiry of East Anglia Julian Hilton

Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France 1789-1880, M. Agulhon (Cambridge University Press and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1981), trans. J. Lloyd, pp. 235, f6.95.

This is a study of the allegory of the French Republic, known half derisively and half affectionately as ‘Marianne’. A projected second volume will take the study from 1880 towards the present day, and will include an exhaustive study of that representation of the Republic most commonly encountered, the statues and busts erected in public squares over the length and breadth of France between 1870 and 1940. The present volume focuses on the main lines of development of the allegory of the Republic from its origins in the French Revolution, that ‘embattled heart of the national identity’ (p. 27). In the course of this enquiry, Agulhon of course finds himself faced with questions whose scope goes far beyond that of the history of a particular imagery: ‘After all, when we ask ourselves why it should be the body of a woman (rather than that of a man or an animal, or any other object) that should, in our western culture, be the visual symbol used in allegory of the highest values, we are embarking upon a far-reaching enquiry’ (p. 1). Why a woman? Why an allegory? Although Agulhon rightly remarks that the quest for a theory of personification goes beyond the com- petence of the historian, yet this book will surely, as the author hopes, contribute much to the efforts of those who try to construct one. However, the study of images also raises problems which the historian should certainly attempt to answer. The allegory of the Republic is closely connected with those of France and of Liberty.