BERLIN — The European Union has been the subject of countless academic papers and newspaper articles. It inspired a comic-book character (called Captain Euro) and an anthem (they stole it from Beethoven). There’s even a board game, made in Taiwan, in which players compete for influence with supranational institutions. But no major writer had ever thought to do a novel about it — until Robert Menasse.
The Viennese author moved to Brussels in 2010 to start working on what would become “The Capital,” which won this year’s German Book Prize — the nation’s equivalent to the Prix Goncourt and the Man Booker — earlier this month. All the while, he was unsure if the undertaking made any sense.
What were the options for such a book, after all? A moving romance set in the bureaus of the Directorate General for Health and Food Safety? A Kafkaesque portrait of an anonymous competition official, lost in regulation? The coming-of-age story of a trainee at the European Court of Auditors?
Menasse had something bigger in mind. Inspired by sweeping novels that depict an entire era, like Robert Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” or Joseph Roth’s “Radetzky March,” he hoped the EU would merit a book that was as large, sprawling and multi-faceted as the thing itself.
Menasse’s novel revolves around the question of whether Brussels and, by extension, the EU can be more than just the sum of their parts.
Critics have duly mentioned the book’s crisp writing, the smart plotting and its whimsical sense of humor. (An episode about a Commission official sitting at home, squeezing mustard into “miniature sculptures of dog turd” particularly delighted German reviewers.) But they were also won over by the fact that Menasse had entered uncharted territory. There’ve been more than enough epic novels about German reunification and about the Nazi past and about what it was like to grow up in, say, 1980s North Rhine-Westphalia, but no one here has ever done something similar for Europe. “The Capital” is the first great EU novel (so far, only in German, since an English translation isn’t yet available).
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As a young man in the 1970s, Menasse spent years working on a novel that was never published. He earned his PhD with a thesis on “the figure of the outsider in the literary scene.” Since then, the 63-year-old Vienna native has written more than a dozen books — essays, novels, short stories — and become one of Austria’s most celebrated authors.
Sitting in the offices of his Berlin-based publisher on a recent afternoon, drinking white wine, he recalled how he got the idea for “The Capital.” He’d always liked the EU, he said, and had voted for membership when Austria held a referendum in 1994. But increasingly, he became aware he knew very little about the bloc and its day-to-day functioning.
One evening in 2010, when he was at home, gazing at the fireplace, he decided, on a whim, to move to Brussels and find out for himself. He thought he might find something that would lend itself to a sweeping narrative.
And so he rented an apartment in the city’s old cobblestoned center, on Rue du Vieux Marché aux Grains. He met with EU officials. He visited Commission archives and immersed himself in the memoirs of Jean Monnet and the speeches of Walter Hallstein. Then he started writing. But he soon found he was brimming with ideas that seemed more suited to an essay than to a novel.
In “The European Courier,” first published in 2012, Menasse called for a European republic that would replace the nation state but grant more administrative autonomy to the Continent’s regions. (Menasse argues that people’s identities in Europe are regional, not national.) Embracing the original European idea — transcending borders for peace — he positioned himself as a fierce critic of the EU’s current state and as an enthusiastic advocate of an ever-closer union.
The essay didn’t capture the imagination of the wider public. But it caught the eye of think tank types who were looking for new voices. The EU conference circuit had more than enough academics who knew the ins and outs of the Maastricht, Schengen and Lisbon treaties. There were also plenty of skeptics who didn’t know the ins and outs of the Maastricht, Schengen and Lisbon treaties — and who didn’t care to either. But very few pundits supported the European idea on principle while also criticizing the status quo.
Menasse chronicles an EU project unraveling as it moves through various departments and institutions | European Commission audiovisual
Menasse began to tour EU cities, give talks and participate in panel discussions. He could have gone on forever. But then an editor at Suhrkamp told him they would publish a compilation of his speeches — on the condition he stopped speaking and resumed writing his big book about the EU.
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Why on earth has no one else thought of doing this? The EU has gone through a series of severe crises in recent years. Its popularity has faded. Euroskeptics have entered the parliaments of most member countries. That’s why advocates have long said Europe needs a narrative, a vision, something emotional that speaks to people — as opposed to the tedious tales of convergence criteria, stability mechanisms and bailout packages that dominate news coverage.
Menasse, smartly, puts the search for that narrative at the center of his book. An official in the Commission’s education and culture department — the mustard-turd man, incidentally — is entrusted with the task of developing ideas for the Big Jubilee Project, a celebration of the Commission’s 50th anniversary. On a trip to Auschwitz, he has a revelation. To commemorate the EU’s beginnings, the official plans a gathering of all remaining Holocaust survivors. Menasse chronicles the project’s unraveling as it moves through various departments and institutions. A smooth-talking Italian — the Commission’s chief of cabinet — and a conniving Hungarian — his counterpart at the Council — eventually conspire to bury an idea they consider politically inopportune.
Menasse could have easily built the novel around that plotline alone. But he didn’t leave it at that. There’s a trade department official, too, who struggles with national interests over the terms of an agreement with China (pigs’ ears are the product at stake.) A Holocaust survivor spends his last days in a senior citizens’ home next to the Laeken cemetery. An aging detective and lifelong fan of football club RSC Anderlecht tries to solve a high-profile murder mystery. And a retired economics professor (who may or may not be Menasse’s alter ego) delivers a controversial speech at an EU think tank, calling for Auschwitz to become the EU’s capital.
Sometimes the lives of Menasse’s various protagonists intersect. Occasionally, they harbor similar thoughts or observe the same events, such as the unexpected sight of a pig running across Place Sainte-Catherine. But more often than not, they narrowly miss each other as they move around Brussels — a location Menasse found conducive to his writing because, much like the EU, it is a literary nowhereland that doesn’t conjure strong associations.
Menasse recalls what an EU trade official told him over dinner and — inevitably — a few glasses of wine one evening: “You know, all of us here in Brussels, we pretend that the city is a mosaic when, in fact, it’s confetti. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” Menasse never forgot that line. His novel revolves around the question of whether Brussels and, by extension, the EU can be more than just the sum of their parts.
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Research for “The Capital” involved wine-soaked dinners with high-ranking officials who spoke freely about their concerns. The easy access (and the wine) may account for the fact that Menasse’s view of the typical Eurocrat — a term he wouldn’t use, of course — differs sharply from the negative stereotype.
He met people who were “polyglot, highly-qualified, enlightened and liberated from the irrationalities of national identity,” he wrote in his 2012 essay. “I found open doors and talkative officials.“
To research his novel, Robert Menasse moved to Brussels and rented an apartment in the city’s old cobblestoned center | Arne Dedert/AFP via Getty Images
The only place Menasse encountered resistance was where he expected it least: No one wanted to talk to him in the department responsible for culture and education. When he finally secured a 40-minute-appointment with the Cypriot chief of cabinet, she asked him what exactly he wanted. Talk to her for a novel, he said truthfully. Now why would he would want to write a novel about the EU, she asked and, in Menasse’s telling, brusquely showed him the door.
The novelist took revenge: The cabinet chief, it seems, ended up as a none too sympathetic character named Fenia Xenopoulou who gets transferred to the culture desk, hates it and plots her way out.
In Menasse’s view, the culture department is the odd one out in Brussels — the department no one wants to work for. “Culture is a department without any significance,” says the book. “It’s got no budget, no weight within the EU, no power, no influence.” That may or may not be true. But it neatly serves Menasse’s argument that the EU neglects culture — its narrative, its history — to focus on the economics instead.
Xenopoulou is not the only character who doesn’t match Menasse’s description of the enlightened Eurocrat. Most of the book’s EU protagonists come across as weak, eccentric, opportunistic or downright cynical. But Menasse denies that his perception of Commission officials changed as he wrote the novel. They have become depressed, he tells me, because they surrendered control to the European Council as well as to national governments over the past few years. His novel reflects that shift, he says.
Menasse recalls a recent meeting with a high-ranking trade official somewhere on the top floors of the Berlaymont building. During their conversation, the official received an email. He read it, then silently walked to the window and stared spitefully at the Justus Lipsius building across the street. The Council, the official told him, had just held a meeting and annihilated months of work done by the Commission.
Novelists, much like the EU, need to strike compromises. Readers will be thankful. “The Capital” is a romp.
Menasse thought he’d include the incident in his novel. But in the end he decided against it. He wanted “The Capital” to remain truer to fiction than to life.
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“My experience is that most people get bored if you tell them the story of the EU, even if you keep it very short,” Menasse once wrote. “I am a fan of this kind of boredom because I do not want to tell myself or anyone else the doubtlessly exciting story that would come with a collapse of the EU.”
True to his word, Menasse hasn’t written that story. And yet, his EU novel isn’t boring either. In “The Capital,” the European institutions, the officials working there and the city they inhabit come across as slightly more interesting and colorful than their real-life counterparts. If the author had been more truthful to his subject, the result might have been less entertaining. But then again, novelists, much like the EU, need to strike compromises. Readers will be thankful. “The Capital” is a romp.
Konstantin Richter is a contributing writer at POLITICO. He is the author of the German-language novel, “The Chancellor: A Fiction,” about Angela Merkel and the refugee crisis.