"Robert Menasse - The Capital"

In his grand European novel "The Capital," the award-winning writer Robert Menasse draws a wide arc between times, nations, the inevitable, and the irony of fate, between petty bureaucracy and great emotions.

**Cast**
Robert Menasse — Recitation
Robert Menasse was born in Vienna in 1954 and grew up there. He studied German studies, philosophy, and political science in Vienna, Salzburg, and Messina, and earned his doctorate in 1980 with a thesis on the "Type of the Outsider in the Literary Scene." Menasse then taught for six years – initially as a lecturer in Austrian literature, and later as a visiting professor at the Institute for Literary Theory – at the University of São Paulo. There, he primarily held courses on philosophical and aesthetic theories. Since his return from Brazil in 1988, Robert Menasse has lived as a writer and cultural critic mainly in Vienna.

**The Capital**
Fenia Xenopoulou, an official in the Directorate-General for Culture of the European Commission, faces a difficult task. She is to polish the Commission's image. But how? She commissions the advisor Martin Susman to develop an idea. The idea takes shape – the shape of a ghost from history that causes unrest in the EU institutions. David de Vriend is fading away in a nursing home opposite the Brussels cemetery, approaching his death. As a child, he jumped from a deportation train that took his parents to their deaths. Now he is to testify to what he is about to forget. Commissioner Brunfaut is also faced with a difficult task. For political reasons, he must let a murder case rest – "file it away" would be too much to say, as the files are untraceable.