Robert Menasse’s novel ‚Die Hauptstadt‘ (“The Capital”, 2017) was acclaimed by critics as the first EU-novel and was widely found to be a more or less successful satire. The Austrian author himself, by contrast, emphasized that he had written a realistic novel and referred to Balzac after the publication of his work. This article measures ‚Die Hauptstadt‘ by the author’s self-imposed task, “to write a realistic novel that shows the essence of an epoch in the forms of appearance of reality.” The thesis is put forward that Menasse’s concept of realism is the same concept of great realism that Georg Lukács developed in the 1930s and further that the conditional clause, “if it is still possible […]” that precedes the above quote results in the concrete problem of ‚Die Hauptstadt‘. On that score this paper examines whether and how Menasse has succeeded in further developing the tradition of Balzac’s great realism with the artistic means of modernity and postmodernism and under the social conditions of our time.