“The Meeting at Telgte”: An Excerpt from the Novel

Günter Grass (1927-2015) was a German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker. His first novel, Die Blechtrommel (1959) was a literary spokesman for the German generation that survived the war after growing up in the Nazi era. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. Ralph Manheim(1907-1992) was an American translator of German and French literature. He also occasionally translated works from Dutch, Polish, and Hungarian.