Robert Menasse, The Capital. A satirical novel on the European Union

After a short introduction to Menasse´s ideas about the European Union presented in different theoretical texts, the paper will concentrate on the novel The Capital, published in 2016. It will focus on the idea the reader will react with strangeness to the diminished narrative space taken in the text by topics like migrations, terrorism and islamofobia, which are generally accepted as the main issues affecting the EU today (Griffen 2019). Nonetheless, a more detailed analysis of three moments of the novel that critics tend to consider as subsidiary according to their place in the textual economy will show the importance of the aforementioned topics and their (possible) recognition as the new challenges that mark the EU.

Politics and Morality in the Novel “The Capital” by Robert Menasse

The article illustrates the relationship between politics and morality in the novel «The Capital» written by the famous Austrian writer Robert Menasse, a recipient of the German Book Prize in 2017. The research focuses on the study of the preliminaries for the 50th anniversary of the European Commission, one of the principal bureaucratic institutions of the European Union. The article highlights the anniversary celebration settings in the Department of Culture and Education. It considers different views on the event format in terms of the fundamental provisions of the European Commission with reference to historical memory and internal conflicts within the bureaucracy. The message of the primary slogan of the project “Concentration camps – never again!” is explained, integrating the past (remembrance of Auschwitz, the Holocaust) and the present (the real state of affairs in the European Union) along with a vision of the prospective political establishment of the shared European community. In this respect, some bullet points of the report made by the professor Alois Erhart from Vienna, a think tank member and the author’s alter ego, represent a common view of substantialization of the united Europe based on overcoming contradictions between the European Union policy and the national interests of the member countries. The research examines the peculiarities of the literary space in the «The Capital». It is determined that the complexity and diversity of the work produce a hybrid novel form, incorporating the features of the intellectual prose, essay, political pamphlet, and the thriller. An important aspect, highlighted in the article, involves the issue of fiction, fabrication, factuality in terms of the author-reader game accompanying the process of sense generation and text perception. The connotation of a grotesque image of a pig running through the center of Brussels is examined from different perspectives, both as an artistic device implicated in distinct plot lines, and as a metaphor attributed to the overall state of affairs in the capital of the united Europe.

Engagement

The idea of literary ‘engagement’, first introduced to a wider public by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, is perhaps the most important twentieth-century contribution to our evolving understanding of authorship. The question of how authors should position themselves vis-à-vis the human conflicts of their day remains as pertinent as ever. In this chapter, Benedict Schofield analyses how two contemporary novelists—Robert Menasse and Ali Smith—have found distinctively twenty-first-century forms of literary engagement, transforming themselves into what Schofield calls ‘cultural statespeople’. The works of Menasse and Smith cement their creators’ demands that they be taken seriously as literary authors, rather than as celebrities or even generic public intellectuals. Yet, both are deeply cognizant of the extra-literary factors that contribute to their popular appeal and use these to agitate for the strengthening and transformation of the European Union.

Overcoming the crisis of disunity: Writers on a constitution for Europe

The topic of this paper is a retrospective of the history of literary discourse on Europe, from the Vienna Congress to the present. The Congress of Vienna was seen as a step back for European cooperation by contemporary authors like Saint-Simon, Schmidt-Phiseldek, Goerres and Mazzini. They understood that a constitution was the precondition for the future unity of a European federation. Later, new voices were heard in which the debate about a common constitution for Europe played a dominating role, and writings on Europe were published by Richard Graf Couldenhove-Kalergi, Heinrich Mann and Jules Romains. After WWII writers like Ernst Jünger and Reinhold Schneider pleaded for a continental constitution. After the common constitution was rejected in 2005, the debate on Europe gave way to other topics. Today, Robert Menasse believes the European crisis can be overcome by using regions (instead of nations) as the building blocks of a united Europe.

Versteckte Juden im Affenkäfig

In his story The End of the Winter of Starvation, Robert Menasse portrays a Jewish family that in 1944 survived the war in a monkey cage in the Amsterdam Zoo. The article uncovers the representation of historical matters, scrutinizes the narrative strategy that both strives to question the truth of memory and aims to reveal how ritualized memory-talk is. By interpreting the performance of memory in Menasse’s story, and by highlighting insights from animal studies, the intertextual negative of Franz Kafka’s story A Report to an Academy is revealed.