The Meeting at Telgte is an imaginary conference of German writers toward the end of the Thirty Years War when, as after another disastrous and unbelievably violent 30 years (from 1915 to 1945) every detail of civilization had been raped, mutilated, and dishonored.

Ostensibly, Grass' gathering of literary people is to assess what can be saved from the rubble. Their concern is for the German language: which dialect is most "German," what authors from ancient times are to be used as models, what literary forms best fit their needs. They think in terms of healing a ravaged language. The answer is that literature needs every form it can have, every kind of sensibility. The most unlikely person at the gathering to figure in German literature is the soldier of fortune, swashbuckler, and knave Christoffel Gelnhausen, a rascal out of the woodcuts of Urs Graf or the pages of Rabelais or Thomas...