His later novels were Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt (1991, translated into English as Wings of Stone ISBN 0-7145-4295-4), Schubumkehr (1995, Engl.

[1] His books have been translated in over twenty languages, among others: Arabic, Bask, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, 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.

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.

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.

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.

[4] 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 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.

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.

[6] 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).

[8] In this connection Menasse also speaks in favour of the specific vision and its realization of a “European Republic”[9] formulated together with the political scientist Ulrike Guérot on the basis of a Europe of regions[10][circular reference] beyond the nation states.

[11] In December 2018, Welt am Sonntag revealed that Robert Menasse had fabricated several quotes attributed to Walter Hallstein (1901-1982), one of the founding fathers of the EU) to support his argument for overcoming nation states.

[12] With the prize money that Robert Menasse received for the Austrian State Prize (1998) he re-founded the Jean Améry- Preis für Europäische Essayistik, whose winners so far have been Lothar Baier (1982), Barbara Sichtermann (1985), Mathias Greffrath (1988), Reinhard Merkel (1991), Franz Schuh (2000), Doron Rabinovici (2002), Michael Jeismann (2004), Drago Jančar (2007), Imre Kertész[20] (2009), Dubravka Ugrešić (2012), Adam Zagajewski[21] (2016) and Karl-Markus Gauß (2018).