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

Abstract

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.