Die Hauptstadt

Robert Menasse

4 ideas

1. The Commission's Auschwitz Jubilee Project Fails

   Fenia Xenopoulou, an ambitious head of department in the European Commission's culture directorate, wants to boost the Commission's poor image. Her Austrian subordinate Martin Susman proposes a 'Big Jubilee Project' that would put the last Auschwitz survivors at the centre of the Commission's anniversary, as living proof that the Union was founded to make 'never again' real. The plan passes through interservice consultation and is quietly killed by national governments and their allies, who object to anything that presents the Commission as the bearer of a supranational European identity.

2. Bilateral Pork Deals Undercut European Unity

   In the pork-export subplot, Germany and the Netherlands secure their own bilateral deals with China instead of backing a common European position. The novel uses this case to show national self-interest working against the Union's collective strength, in a project meant to move beyond the nationalism that led to Auschwitz.

3. Building Europe's Capital at Auschwitz

   The aging economist Alois Erhart proposes to a think tank that the EU build a new capital at Auschwitz. His reasoning is that the only credible centre for a post-national Europe is the place whose horror made the project necessary, not an existing national city. The proposal ties institutional legitimacy to the memory of the catastrophe rather than to economic utility.

4. Commemoration Outliving Its Living Witnesses

   As survivors like the elderly David de Vriend die or lose their memory, remembrance shifts from testimony to institutional staging. The moral lesson can then be absorbed into public-relations and career goals. Watch who uses a founding trauma and for what purpose once no living witness can contest the story told about it.

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