In January, Erna was having a coffee in her living room in Vienna when she opened a letter from something called the Guter Rat für Rückverteilung, or the Good Council for Redistribution. “Guten Tag Ernestine!” the letter began. “How wealth is distributed across the country shapes how we live together and influences how well a democratic society functions.”
The Good Council, the text went on, would comprise fifty Austrians selected by lottery—Erna was among ten thousand who made the first cut—and meet for six weekends to come up with proposals for how to address inequality in Austria, where the richest one per cent controls half of the country’s wealth. Additionally, the council would have twenty-five million euros to distribute as it saw fit, money provided by Marlene Engelhorn, who was described in the letter only as the council’s “Auftraggeberin,” or principal client. The letter emphasized that the council would make decisions “freely and without influence.” Those selected as members would also receive twelve hundred euros per weekend as compensation for their time and labor.
Erna, who is eighty and long retired from her job as a waitress in a corporate cafeteria, ripped up the letter and threw it in the trash. She lives on a state pension of four hundred and fifty euros a month. What do I know about distributing millions? she thought. The next morning, however, she came across a newspaper article on the Good Council. Engelhorn, an activist and an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, had announced its creation at a press conference in Vienna. She told journalists, “If politicians don’t do their job and redistribute, then I have to redistribute my wealth myself.”
Erna recalled the handful of euros she often gave a homeless man she passed in town, and the neighbor she’d accompanied to a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. She fished the scraps of paper from the trash, ironed them flat, and dialled the number included in the letter. Two days later, she received a call from a Good Council representative who asked her a series of questions about her income and education. By the end of the month, she had been selected as one of the council’s fifty members.
The council was convening in Salzburg, near the German border, and not far from where Erna’s daughter lives. “Mom, no, it’s a scam,” her daughter said. Nonetheless, in March, her daughter met Erna at Salzburg’s train station and drove her to the hotel where the council was scheduled to hold its first meeting. She wanted to know what her mother had got herself into. In the lobby, her daughter saw Engelhorn, whom she recognized from television. “Mom,” she said, “This is legit.”
Salzburg, a handsome storybook city at the foot of the Alps, is best known as the birthplace of Mozart. The Good Council’s hotel was on the outskirts of town. The first afternoon of the proceedings, I took a seat near the back of a bright, wood-panelled conference room and watched as Erna and the other council members—who referred to one another using only given names—introduced themselves. The group included college students, schoolteachers, accountants, immigrants, and retirees—a “mini-Austria,” as the statistical firm that compiled the final list of participants called it. The mood was eager and friendly, more summer camp than corporate retreat.
The concept of a citizen council—a democratic forum with roots in ancient Greece—is straightforward: a selected group of people come together to discuss a matter of public policy, with the goal of making proposals or clarifying public attitudes. Hélène Landemore, a professor at Yale and the author of “Open Democracy,” which argues for a more inclusive system of participatory governance, told me, “Parliaments are now largely defined by partisanship and the logic of power. You’re there to win, not to learn or change your mind.” The members of a citizen council, on the other hand, come without partisan allegiances and are typically more familiar with the realities of daily life. “It’s a very small subset of the population that enters traditional politics, and, once they do, they tend to stay there too long,” Landemore said. “They don’t know the price of a pain au chocolat or a metro ticket. They’re disconnected.”
In recent years, citizen councils in Ireland, France, and Austria have considered such issues as abortion, end-of-life care, and climate change. For the most part, the conclusions of these efforts have been nonbinding. The Austrian Citizens’ Climate Assembly, for instance, which convened in 2022 as a result of a nationwide referendum, produced a hundred-page report with dozens of recommendations, including the introduction of tariffs on greenhouse-gas-intensive food imports and mandatory charges for returning online orders. But no government agency was required to pursue them. The Good Council was different: Engelhorn’s millions were held in a trust and would be distributed in strict accordance with the council members’ instructions.
At a little after 2 P.M., Engelhorn walked into the room, wearing a navy vest, a white collarless shirt, and round metal glasses. She is thirty-two, with a voluminous wave of short brown hair. Her left arm is covered in a sleeve of tattoos. “Redistribution means recognizing that wealth comes from society and should return to society,” she told the council members. She spoke of wealth as power—a power she didn’t earn and doesn’t want. “I’m not a ministry to whom you make a recommendation that immediately disappears into a drawer somewhere,” she said. “You can really achieve something. My part is giving you access to my assets.”
She stepped forward and began speaking in sign language. Hildegund, a member of the council who is deaf and had been following Engelhorn’s speech through an interpreter, started to sign back. Later, I spoke with Hildegund, a retired seamstress in her seventies, who used to work in an Adidas factory. “People don’t pay attention to deaf people, let alone speak sign language—and definitely not the rich and powerful,” she said. “I was impressed—emotional, even.”
Engelhorn invited questions from the council members. Someone asked whether the twenty-five million was the entirety of her fortune—though a sizable sum, it’s not all that much for many of the world’s ultra-wealthy. Engelhorn laughed and made a chef’s-kiss motion. Another three million was being spent on the council itself, she said, which together made up more than ninety per cent of her wealth. “I’ll keep a small amount for living costs and the transition into working for a living,” she added. Next someone asked, How do you know sign language? Engelhorn recalled that, when she was twenty years old, she was riding the subway and saw some people communicating in sign language. “In that moment, I decided this is important,” she said. “I want to learn it.”
Then Engelhorn prepared to catch a train home to Vienna. She would have no more involvement in the council. “I’m a rich person,” she told me. “I have an effect on people. What I say can influence their ideas, but I want to limit that influence as much as possible.” The only rules she stipulated were that the money could not go to for-profit entities, political parties, or groups whose activities are “unconstitutional, hostile, or inhumane.” The small group of experts and facilitators who helped organize the council had added another rule: no private recipients. Engelhorn initially objected. She didn’t want to take away the members’ right to give the money, or a portion of it, to themselves. “I wanted to be able to prove that they wouldn’t pocket it,” she said. But ultimately she accepted the team’s decision. “Democracy is never perfect,” she told me. “It will always be messy.”
The story of Engelhorn’s wealth begins in 1865, in southwest Germany, where her great-great-great-grandfather, Friedrich Engelhorn, was one of the founders of a chemical company named Badische Anilin- & Sodafabrik, or B.A.S.F. In 1883, he sold his shares and invested the money in a pharmaceutical company now known as Boehringer Mannheim. A decade later, his son, Friedrich, Jr., became its sole owner. During the Second World War, Boehringer Mannheim moved its research facilities to the Bavarian countryside, to escape Allied bombing, but little else is known of its activities under the Third Reich. “I don’t know all the details, but there was collaboration, no doubt,” Engelhorn said. B.A.S.F. has a far less ambiguous wartime record: it was part of a conglomerate that produced Zyklon B, the lethal chemical used by the Nazis to kill Jews and other victims in the gas chambers.
After the war, Curt Engelhorn, Marlene’s great-uncle, took over the company, which was then a medium-sized family business, and turned it into a global empire. Along the way, he availed himself of several tax-avoidance tricks, moving to a private island in Bermuda and creating a shell company there for his and his family’s shares. (A German magazine described the Engelhorns as “mortal enemies among themselves, united only when it came to saving taxes.”) In 1997, Curt sold Boehringer Mannheim for eleven billion dollars to Roche, a Swiss holding company, in what was then the largest corporate acquisition in European history. Since the shares were technically held in Bermuda, the profits flowed to Curt and the other Engelhorns entirely tax-free. (Curt boasted of successfully avoiding the “tax trap,” but German authorities later investigated him and his two daughters for evading more than four hundred million euros in taxes; the daughters settled and agreed to pay back a hundred and forty-five million.) Marlene’s grandmother Gertraud, or Traudl, as she was known, who was then living on the shores of Lake Geneva, became a billionaire.
Marlene grew up in a villa outside of Vienna and attended the Lycée Français de Vienne. “Our mansion was surrounded by other mansions,” she told me. “I thought that’s what a house is, that’s how people live.” Still, she learned not to share too widely at school what gifts she received for her birthday or Christmas, or where the family had vacationed during summer break. (When an interviewer at Der Spiegel recently asked Engelhorn if she grew up with “limousines, chauffeurs, and servants,” she replied, “The joke is that it’s irrelevant. My unpleasant answer is that it’s none of your business.”) As she got older, she became careful about inviting friends over to her family’s home. “When you grow up wealthy, it’s not that one day you realize how much money you have,” she told me. “But, rather, that there is such a thing as people who don’t.”
She enrolled at the University of Vienna, where she studied German language and literature, and expanded her circle of friends, meeting people on every point of the class spectrum. Conversations about rent (“I had never thought about what you can afford with a certain amount of money,” Engelhorn said) and the time a friend needed help with a legal problem (“Why don’t you ask the family lawyer?” she replied) awakened her further to her own privilege. She began reading philosophy, political theory, and economics. When I asked for a list of influences, she sent me more than forty works, ranging from Albert Camus and Susan Sontag to more contemporary books on inequality, including “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth,” by the Belgian-Dutch philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns, and “Having and Being Had,” a meditation on accumulation and consumption in a capitalist society, by the American author Eula Biss. “It became clear to me that being wealthy in an unequal world means you’re doing so at the cost of other people’s lives,” Engelhorn said.
