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. 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. Essays and writings on cultural theory 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. Essays like Die sozialpartnerschaftliche Ästhetik (1990; The Aesthetics of Social Partnership) and Das Land ohne Eigenschaften (1992; The Country without Qualities), which brought Menasse fame as an essayist, but also provoked criticism for "fouling his own nest," were followed in time by the essay collections Hysterien und andere historische Irrtümer (1996; Hysterics and Other Historical Errors) and Dummheit ist machbar (1999; Stupidity is Doable), Erklär mir Österreich (2000; Explain Austria to Me) and Das war Österreich (2005; That Was Austria). In these texts the author deals in critical-ironic way with political history, mentality history and literary history of the second Republic of Austria, takes a position on the current cultural policy situation in his homeland and recurrently draws attention to the latent continuity of Austrofascism. Since 2005, i.e. since his Frankfurt Poetics Lecture, Die Zerstörung der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The Destruction of the World as Will and Representation), Menasse has increasingly devoted his essays to themes around the EU and globalisation. In this European or worldwide context Menasse criticises in particular what he sees as the deficits in democratic policies and the idea that these deficits are structurally determined, which he argues obscures the prospects of possible alternatives. In doing so he does not oppose the European Union in principle but bases his critique of