Robert Menasse

Robert Menasse (born 21 June 1954) is an Austrian writer.

Menasse was born in Vienna.

As an undergraduate, he studied German studies, philosophy and political science in Vienna, Salzburg and Messina.

As a character, Nathan stands for the generation that was socialised in the 1970s with the claim for the “sexual revolution".

Robert Menasse's first short story Nägelbeißen (Engl. Nail-Biting) was published in the journal Neue Wege in 1973.

From 1975 to 1980 he worked on his unfinished and unpublished novel Kopfwehmut (Engl. Mind's Melancholy), a social novel set in 1970s Vienna.

In 1980 he completed his PhD thesis "Der Typus des Außenseiters im Literaturbetrieb. Am Beispiel Hermann Schürrer" ("The outsider phenotype within literature").

Between 1981 and 1988 Menasse worked as a junior lecturer at the Institute of Literature Theory at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

He has been working as a freelance publicist, columnist and translator of novels from Portuguese into German ever since.

His first novel Sinnliche Gewissheit, published in 1988, is a semi-autobiographical tale of Austrians living in exile in Brazil.

His first published novel, Sinnliche Gewißheit (Engl. Sensual Certainty) appeared in 1988 as the first part of a trilogy started in Brazil Trilogie der Entgeisterung (Engl. Trilogy of Dismay), which also includes the 1991 novel Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt (Engl. Wings of Stone, 2000), which is at once a crime story, a philosophical novel and a Jewish family saga, and finally the 1995 novel Schubumkehr (Engl. Reverse Thrust, 2000) as well as the postscript Phänomenologie der Entgeisterung (1995, Engl. Phenomenology of Dismay).

The magazine Literatur und Kritik published Menasse's first poem ("Kopfwehmut") in 1989.

In Schubumkehr, against the background of the private life of the literature teacher Roman, who was already introduced in Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt, Menasse describes the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the breakdown of the familiar order in a small Austrian village.

His later novels were Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt (1991, translated into English as Wings of Stone ISBN 0-7145-4295-4), Schubumkehr (1995, Engl. Reverse Thrust) and Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (2001, Engl. Expulsion from Hell).

Menasse's language is at times playful and at times subtly sarcastic.

Recurring themes in his

novels are loneliness and alienation within human relationships and as a result of his character's lives' circumstances.

In his work Menasse often criticises what he sees as the latent form of antisemitism still widespread in the German-speaking world today.

Menasse has also written some essays on Austria (especially on Austrian identity and history; "Land ohne Eigenschaften" (1992) a.o.).

This novel, which is not least an artistic treatment of the spirit of the age, was awarded the Grimmelshausen Prize in 1999 and made the author a household name.

As suggested already by the title of the novel Schubumkehr and in the Trilogie der Entgeisterung Menasse turns Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit on its head.

In contrast to Hegel, who assumes a development of human consciousness to all-embracing spirit, Menasse postulates a regressive development, whose final stage will be "sensual certainty", according to Hegel the most naïve form of consciousness.

In his novel Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (2001; Engl. Expulsion from Hell) Menasse casts doubt on the objectivity of history, coupled with the personal history of the author and his Jewish roots.

As a spin-off of his researches on the character and real person Menasseh Ben Israel for his novel Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle translated in ten languages, Menasse formulated the hypothesis of Abaelard‘s influence on Menasseh Ben Israel and Spinoza, published among others in his essay Enlightenment as Harmonious Strategy.

More recently, he wrote about the future of Europe and the European Union, criticizing tendencies of re-nationalization (especially in Germany, but also elsewhere) and anti-European integration movements, which he interprets as a reaction to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its aftermath (Euro crisis) ("Der europäische Landbote", 2012).

Since returning to Europe from Brazil, Menasse has mainly lived in the cities of Berlin, Vienna and Amsterdam.

He currently lives in Vienna and is married.

In 2007 he published Don Juan de la Mancha, where he tells of more or less fictitious events from the (love) life of the newspaper editor Nathan – a mixture of listlessness, drive, lust and the search for the fulfilment of love.

Since 2011 Menasse has been curating a writer in residence programme with the one world foundation in Sri Lanka.

His books have been translated in over twenty languages, among others: Arabic, Bask, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Flemish, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Today, Menasse lives alternately in Vienna, in the Waldviertel (Forest Quarter) in Lower Austria, and in Brussels.

He is the son of the footballer Hans Menasse and the brother of the journalist and writer Eva Menasse.

In 2017 Menasse published his analytical novel Die Hauptstadt (The Capital), which has been described as the first novel about Brussels as the European Union's capital, and which received the German Book Prize.

The story is focused on officials from the Department of Culture, who are expected to add polish to the image of the EU Commission on its birthday.

The main character in this novel, Pote, explores his family's history.

This is to be accomplished with a "Big Jubilee Project" event with concentration camp survivors in Auschwitz.

The life stories of characters lead the reader into six EU countries.

The stage director Tom Kühnel and the dramaturg Ralf Fiedler translated the novel into a theatrical version with about twenty characters played by seven actors, which was premiered in January 2018 at the Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich.

The English translation, The Capital by Jamie Bulloch, was published by MacLehose Press in February 2019.

In his political and journalistic work, Menasse is seen as an "old-style Enlightenment thinker," whose intellectual predecessors are especially Hegel and Marx but also Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School.