Intrigue in Europe’s Capital, Imagined in a Satiric Novel
BRUSSELS — In a cynical line in the Danish political TV drama, “Borgen,” an aide to the prime minister discusses sending a rival into exile as a European commissioner, saying: “In Brussels, no one can hear you scream.”
But if the European Union has meaning, surely Brussels must. At least that was the hypothesis of Robert Menasse, an Austrian novelist and essayist who moved here in 2010 to try to get under the bureaucratic skin of the place. The result is thought to be the first novel about Brussels as the capital of the European Union, called “Die Hauptstadt,” or “The Capital,” and much to Mr. Menasse’s surprise, it won the 2017 German Book Prize, Germany’s most important literary award. MacLehose Press will publish an English version of the novel in early 2019.
For Mr. Menasse, 63, the European Union remains a remarkable response to the horrors of the two world wars and the incessant rivalries among Europe’s larger powers. It is also in his view the best answer to the challenges of globalization. In this period of renewed populism and nationalism, he concedes, “it sounds crazy to develop a new transnational European democracy.” But “all the big challenges we face today are transnational,” he said, citing the financial crisis, migration, climate change, terrorism and trade.
“To that extent the European Union is the world’s avant-garde, the world’s future,” while the United States, especially under President Donald J. Trump, “is retro, even if they don’t know it,” he said.
Brussels is an administrative, political and lobbying center, chosen only because Belgium came first in the alphabet of the founding six nations and so first hosted the new institutions. Except for the Parliament, it evidently was too much trouble to rotate.
Mr. Mena sse rented an apartment in the center of the city, and set about meeting officials, reading the histories, digging into the archives. “The European Union is manmade, and everything done by man contains a story,” he said.
The result is an almost Balzacian novel, with a plot centered satirically around an unhappy Greek Cypriot eurocrat, Fenia Xenopoulou, who is charged with revamping the tarnished image of the European Commission.
The novel ends, eerily enough, with a terrorist bombing of the Maalbeek subway station, in the European quarter.
“When I planned the novel, I knew it would end with an attack on the Maalbeek metro station, and then it happened,” Mr. Menasse said. “I was in Brussels then and in the beginning I really couldn’t believe it.”
The real attack at the station and the airport in March 2016 killed 32 people.
The success of his novel was a complete surprise, he said. He had spent painful years on another novel that did badly, he said.
When nominated for the German Book Prize, he said, “I didn’t care. But I went with this attitude and suddenly I had it!”