The Austrian Robert Menasse is one of the rare contemporary writers to have taken up European construction to turn it into novelistic material. Exclusive interview, on the occasion of the publication of Enlargementsecond volume of a trilogy started in 2019 with The capital (Verdier).
You were born in 1954, in Vienna, in post-war Austria. Your father, of Jewish origin, had returned seven years previously from the United Kingdom, saved from deportation thanks to a transport of children. How was your Austrian identity formed?
My father never spoke to me in English. However, he was quite British and knew almost no German when he returned to Austria. This perfect assimilation in the place where we live was the Jewish side of my father. The perfect Austrian, who knew how to make everyone love him. I have always had a lot of difficulty defining myself as Austrian or identifying with Austria.
For what ?
Austria, within its current borders, is only the result of a coincidence of history. It is a country where democracy was not won or even wanted by the people, but decreed after 1945 by the victorious powers. Why should I feel a sense of national pride? I find it important to have a Heimat, a “country of the heart”, but for that I do not need to identify with a State, and even less with this one. I am Viennese, she is there, my Heimat. The values, culture, legal system of a Heimat far exceed the state whose name appears on your passport.
What triggered your European awareness?
I could not precisely date the moment of this awareness, but, in 1995, it was in any case obvious to me to say yes to Austria’s entry into the European Union. [UE]. I had the wildest hopes. I imagined that patriotism and nationalism – particularly ridiculous and embarrassing in Austria –, the narrow-mindedness, the servile megalomania of this country, that all this would disappear into something bigger, more sensible: a Europe of Enlightenment, with a common legal system based on respect for human rights, rich in its cultural and linguistic diversity.
Would you say you were naive at the time?
No not at all. It was the very concrete dream of the generation of the founding fathers. The awakening was brutal, certainly, but that does not mean sweeping away the hopes contained in this dream.
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