“I’m not a ‘good’ rich person,” Marlene says. “I’m just a rich person.” Photograph by Ina Schoenenburg for The New Yorker
In 2019, when she was twenty-seven, she received an e-mail from her family’s financial adviser: she had been named a primary beneficiary in her grandmother’s will, which meant that, when Traudl died, Engelhorn would inherit tens of millions of euros. “For a long while, I had convinced myself that it wasn’t really my money but my family’s,” she told me. “I couldn’t touch it. I didn’t decide what to do with it—that was their problem.” But, from the moment she got the e-mail, “I understood, O.K., this is becoming my problem.”
Engelhorn shared her unease about the inheritance with a cousin, who put her in touch with Romy Krämer, the managing director of the Guerrilla Foundation, based in Berlin, which distributes funds to nonprofits and grassroots organizations through a participatory model. Representatives from communities that receive grants in turn makes decisions about which other causes to support. Engelhorn became an intern, sifting through the e-mail in-box and taking notes at team meetings. “It was deliberate,” Krämer told me. “We thought it would be educational and fun, a great way to flip the power dynamic, to have a wealthy person doing tasks that were sometimes, well, shitty.” Engelhorn was up for it. “She dispelled all the notions of rich people as lazy or flaky,” Krämer said. “She was organized, on top of things, very much willing and eager to be put to work.”
The Guerrilla Foundation’s approach appealed to Engelhorn more than traditional philanthropy, which, in her view, seemed only to reinforce power imbalances. The wealthy pick their pet causes without democratic input or oversight. What’s more, they park their assets in foundations, where the money grows tax-free, with only the capital gains parcelled out as grants or donations. The core wealth remains intact, often in perpetuity. “So you take part in the exploitation of people and the planet and then use the profits to sprinkle a little money over the fire you created,” Engelhorn said. “Shouldn’t the goal be to not be so rich anymore?”
Compared with much of the world, Austria is in the seemingly paradoxical situation of having relatively low income inequality and high wealth inequality. One reason for this is the country’s extensive social-welfare system. “If you need medical treatment, you get it,” Gabriel Felbermayr, the director of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, told me. “When you retire, you have a guaranteed income, and a rather high one, at that.” The level of public support, combined with high taxes on income—as much as fifty-five per cent for those earning more than a million euros a year—means that not many Austrians get rich off of money that they make themselves. “The incentive to build wealth is reduced,” Felbermayr said.
Instead, wealth in Austria is often an intergenerational matter, as the great fortunes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are at once preserved and divided among the members of an ever-expanding family tree. Austria was one of the few countries in Europe that didn’t seize or otherwise dismantle aristocratic holdings after the fall of the monarchy. In 1919, when the last Habsburg king was dethroned, noble families were allowed to retain their wealth so long as they recognized the authority of the new Austrian Republic. The Esterházy estate, the holdings of a once prominent family in the aristocracy, for example, is today the country’s largest private landowner, with more than a billion euros’ worth of forests, farmland, lakes, and vineyards.
Austria has had no inheritance tax since 2008, the result of a dispute among members of a wealthy family which worked its way up to the country’s constitutional court. Under the previous tax rules, assets such as cash and company shares were taxed at market rates when passing between generations, but real-estate holdings were taxed according to government land valuations. Family members who received cash, rather than property, found that unfair. The court agreed and did away with inheritance tax entirely. Austrian politicians were aware that the ruling would make the country an attractive destination for Europe’s rich, especially those in neighboring Germany. Alfred Gusenbauer, then the Austrian Chancellor, told German journalists “to publicize this as widely as possible!”
In 2021, Engelhorn and a dozen other heirs and young entrepreneurs in Germany and Austria founded Taxmenow, which advocates for wealth and inheritance taxes. The German press had taken to calling demands for such reforms “eine Neiddebatte,” or “an envy debate.” “We heard time and again from activists who have been working on inequality for years that they are simply not listened to,” Stefanie Bremer, a scion of a wealthy German family, said. “But they told us, If those of you with privilege were to make the same points, people would pay attention in a different way.”
Engelhorn is far more public than many Taxmenow members, most of whom prefer to keep their faces and family names out of the press. “Stefanie Bremer,” for example, is an alias; she is a shareholder in a family business whose governance rules restrict public-advocacy work. “In my case, it’s the only compromise available,” she told me. Other Taxmenow members declined to speak with me on the record. “It’s not like the U.S. here,” Yannick Haan, a Taxmenow member who wrote a book, “Disinherit Us Already!,” said. “It’s very much a quiet, private, secretive, no-pictures kind of culture.”
In 2022, at the age of ninety-five, Traudl died in Switzerland. “I knew I couldn’t hide anymore,” Engelhorn told me. “If I don’t act, then everything I’ve said that I believe in won’t be worth much of anything.” She had followed the councils in Ireland and Austria—the climate assembly had concluded a few months earlier—and had read Landemore’s book on participatory democracy. “I wanted to get as close as possible to being taxed,” Engelhorn said. She also wanted to stir things up, to get people talking: “I wanted a public discourse.”
Last fall, she hired Alexandra Wang, a fund-raiser at a progressive think tank in Vienna to which Engelhorn was a major donor, as the director and first employee of what would become the Good Council. A small team came together in secret, with the hope of avoiding an influx of requests for money before the effort took shape. (That happened anyway; after a story spread in Brazil claiming that Engelhorn was giving away her fortune, she was inundated with appeals in Portuguese.) Engelhorn was more interested in process than outcome. The Good Council was meant to be a living experiment, one that others could learn from, just as she had drawn on the precedent of citizen assemblies in Europe. None of this made her noble or virtuous, she insisted. “I’m not a ‘good’ rich person,” she told me. “I’m just a rich person.”
At the council’s opening session, Karin Heitzmann, a professor from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, led an exercise to illustrate the distribution of wealth in Austria. Heitzmann asked half the group to move to the back of the room, where each of them was given a tiny scrap of toilet paper, representing the wealth held by fifty per cent of the Austrian population. Another group, almost as large—the middle class—was handed a slightly larger scrap. Five people in the room, as the upper class, were each handed a single square of toilet paper, the equivalent of a million euros. Erna was the only person left. She was brought to the center of the room and handed a dozen sheets of toilet paper—she was Austria’s one per cent. “I guess I’m the millionaire here,” she said, laughing.
Afterward, I asked Erna what it felt like to be the richest person in the room. “A little overwhelming,” she told me. One quickly gets used to wealth, however, even when it’s measured in toilet paper. Later that evening, after dinner, Erna called out, with a wide smile, “The rich lady is going to bed!”
In any citizen council, the moderators guide discussions and help keep the proceedings on schedule. “They try and be neutral and non-manipulative, but of course they wield huge power,” Landemore, the author of “Open Democracy,” said. “An emphasis on getting things done, producing proposals, leading to a concrete outcome—it can all mean that, in the moment, you take away the possibility for improvisation or dissent.”
In Salzburg, a hand-drawn road map for achieving the final redistribution of the twenty-five million euros was projected onto a screen at the front of the room. Hanna Posch, the Good Council’s head moderator, who previously worked with the climate assembly in Vienna, told me that a legible process was necessary given the range of experience that the participants brought to the council. “The group is so diverse,” she said. The youngest member was sixteen, the oldest eighty-five. Toward the back of the room, a row of translators sat in glass booths, as if at the U.N., and relayed the proceedings for participants who spoke Croatian, Dari, and Turkish. “Our job is to make sure that no one gets left behind,” Posch said. “For that, you need some rules—a structure—which gives a feeling of safety to the participants.”
Engelhorn had told me that she was prepared for all manner of outcomes, but the presentations from experts had left a clear impression: wealth is distributed across society unfairly, and policies of redistribution are required to fix this injustice. Julia Friedrichs, a journalist for the German newspaper Die Zeit, asked the moderators why the proceedings didn’t reflect more ideological diversity. “That would not have been in the spirit of Marlene,” a moderator replied. Wang, the council’s director, gave me a slightly different answer: “If you look for experts who specialize in inequality, you’ll often end up with those who are more progressive.”
As a result, the council did not hear from experts who might have argued that a wealth tax can come with burdensome administrative costs—Who will regularly update a register of yacht owners or reassess the contents of a vault filled with Dutch Old Masters?—and runs the risk of persuading the wealthy to take their assets elsewhere, leaving governments with less tax revenue than before. When Norway increased its wealth tax to slightly more than one per cent in 2022, for example, dozens of ultra-wealthy Norwegians fled the country, depriving the state budget of the equivalent of some fifty billion dollars.
Among the council members, opinions varied on the question of inequality. “I feel like the idea here is that making money is bad, that rich people are the bad guys,” Florian, who grew up in Salzburg and now studies engineering at a university in Vienna, said. “I don’t look at someone who has more than me and think to take it away from him.”
Franz, who used to run a dairy farm in Upper Austria and now works as a repairman in a retirement home, said that Perg, the city where he lives, has plenty of jobs and a low cost of living. “My friends have cars, go to the cinema, take holidays,” he said. He recently discussed the idea of inheritance taxes with his eighteen-year-old daughter, who took over the family farm last year. Franz thought it would have been fair if she had paid, say, a ten-per-cent estate tax on the land transfer. But, he went on, “she tells me I don’t understand the real cost of running a farm.”
Anna-Lena, who teaches biology and geography at a school in Volders, a village in the foothills of the Alps, said that she was lucky—she lives with her boyfriend in an apartment that he owns. But she remembered what it was like to be out with friends and wonder if she could afford a second drink. “It often felt like you were surviving, rather than enjoying, life,” she said.
Sara, who immigrated to Austria from Tanzania a decade ago, has four children—she brought the youngest, Malik, who was four months old, to Salzburg—and works as a cashier at a supermarket in Vienna; in February, she launched a side business selling hair oil. “If you really need something in life,” she said, “you find out the price, and figure out how to get it.” But the council had also revealed the full extent of wealth disparity in her adopted country. “I had no idea that so few people in Austria had so much,” she told me. “And I didn’t know there are rich people like Marlene.”
During the council’s third session, in mid-April, the members were split up into six groups: education, housing, environment, health, rights, and economic policy. Each group would be allocated a maximum of four million euros to fund projects and organizations, using a democratic mechanism known as consensus decision-making: a thumbs-up expressed support for a proposal; one raised hand meant that a participant had a slight objection; two hands up was a sign of serious opposition, in which case the group tried to address the concerns. Consensus didn’t require unanimous approval, only that no one strongly disagreed.
I paid a visit to the education group, where members were talking through the implications of overcrowded classrooms. “I don’t see myself in a kindergarten in ten years,” Selin, a teacher in Vienna, said. “You can’t engage in real education when you have one teacher for twenty-five children.” Someone suggested that higher salaries might attract more people to the profession. Benedict, in his mid-twenties, who works in quality control at an industrial manufacturer in Pottendorf, noted that the state already directs billions of euros to the education sector each year. “The money here is just a drop in the bucket,” he said.
Many of the ideas under discussion were based on the lived experiences of the council members. Selin favored Kids‑in-Motion, an intiative that leads schoolchildren in physical exercises to build fitness and motor skills. Erna, in the housing group, wanted to give money to Frauenhäuser, a network of shelters for women and children fleeing domestic violence. Hildegund, the deaf council member, who joined the health group, proposed directing money toward training more sign-language interpreters, and building more accommodations for children with physical disabilities in schools. “We’re here to help the weakest,” she said.
At the start of the council, I was expecting to witness weeks of passionate debate, with members fighting over the fate of millions of euros like loose poker chips. But there were few unmoderated moments in which the unexpected could emerge. At one point, several people in the housing group discussed the prospect of a Guter Rat Haus, a building bought—or perhaps even built from scratch—with the council’s money which would live on after the twenty-five million had been distributed. “We could realize all our ideas right there,” Wilfried, a retired corporate manager for a shoe company, said. “Study cafés for teen-agers, a safe space for women, a meeting point for the elderly.” Franz thought one Guter Rat Haus could inspire others. “Imagine, there could be a whole network of them,” he said. The experts standing by subtly talked the group out of it: the startup costs would be too high, and there were already plenty of organizations pursuing such work. Later, when council members raised the idea of funding an accountability body to study the results of the council—“A long-term thing,” Wilfried said—one of the moderators replied, “But this is not part of your assignment.”
In the end, the only real conflict arose in the education group, where a debate erupted among the eleven members over whether to send funds to Wikipedia. The idea came from a Vienna resident in his mid-thirties, who, out of a fastidious concern for privacy, asked that I call him Peter. He saw Wikipedia as addressing many of the council’s core values: democracy, accessibility, transparency. The idea was immediately opposed by Kyrillos, a high-school student and the council’s youngest member. “We have a lot of other, more important issues to address here,” he said. Anyway, he went on, his teachers wouldn’t allow him to use Wikipedia as a source in his papers—why give it money?
Factions emerged. Some saw Wikipedia, a nonprofit based in the U.S., as an inefficient use of the council’s resources. Others viewed the effort to nix it as a violation of the council’s ground rules. The voting process became messy and convoluted. Things got tense. Kyrillos put up two hands. Peter was upset that the veto of one person could kill an idea just like that—could he put up two hands for every project and bring the work of the group to a standstill?
Dorothee Vogt, an outside expert who was observing the session, recommended that the group take a break. “People were tired,” she told me later.
To Vogt, whose experience is in participatory philanthropy, the process in Salzburg seemed rushed. “The questions put to the Guter Rat are vast, almost unimaginably huge,” she told me. “Its members are asked to draw up a solution to the problem of high wealth concentration while also distributing twenty-five million euros for, as they were told at the outset, nearly anything at all—and for that they have six weekends.” Still, Vogt didn’t want her critiques to overshadow what she viewed as an inspiring prototype for civic engagement. “You want to give people space but also get to a result,” she said. “It’s not easy.”
The Wikipedia debate was ultimately settled with a compromise. The members of the education group agreed to give the organization fifty thousand euros, a small portion of their total. No one seemed entirely satisfied. Kyrillos said that he only agreed because Peter “got so deeply absorbed by this.” Peter, for his part, looked unhappy. “I feel like shit,” he said.
The group moved on to its other projects, which were far less contentious, including Teach for Austria, a program that recruits university graduates to work in disadvantaged schools, and the Integrationshaus, a center in Vienna with language courses, tutoring, and counselling for young migrants and refugees. The housing group, meanwhile, had settled on a dozen organizations working on homelessness, rental protections, and providing shelter for those in crisis, including the Frauenhäuser. Anna-Lena, the biology teacher, was in the environment group. “We made good choices,” she said. Among other projects, they funded Arche Noah, a foundation devoted to crop diversity, and Klimadashboard, which tracks emissions and calculates various scenarios for reducing them.
The members of the economic-policy group spent much of their time drafting “Botschaften,” a kind of statement of basic principles for addressing inequality. They debated, for example, whether a primary family residence should be carved out of a proposed inheritance tax. They also considered a wealth tax of as high as ten per cent. Initially, Sara seemed uncomfortable with the idea.
“Do you feel bad for the rich?” another member of the group asked.
“I fight for what I want in life,” Sara said. “How do you think the rich get up there? They must have done something.”
In the end, the group decided to leave exact numbers out of their proposal for taxes on wealth and inheritance. “We don’t want to sound like we’re attacking anyone, including the rich,” Florian said. He suggested another swap: instead of calling for a “more fair” distribution of wealth, he proposed advocating for one that was “less extreme.” Martin, an accountant in his thirties, asked if they wanted to address the matter of capital-gains taxes or “scratch it.” The rest of the group, eager to finish, answered unanimously: “Scratch it!”
A few days before the council wrapped up, I travelled to Vienna, where I joined Engelhorn for a walk around the Augarten, a stately park with tree-lined promenades. Engelhorn didn’t know much about what had been happening in Salzburg. “I want to avoid founder’s syndrome,” she said—that is, when an organization’s creator stifles the creativity of the rank and file. At one point, she said that she would have been perfectly happy if the deliberations had become so wrapped up in matters of democratic process that the council never managed to distribute any money at all. When I told her that the council seemed designed to prevent such a non-result result, she sounded deflated. “If I wanted to redistribute twenty-five million perfectly, like a re-granter”—a type of philanthropy in which one large grant is used to finance lots of smaller ones—“I would have just chosen a re-granter,” she said. “But I didn’t. I wanted discussion.”
The next morning, in Salzburg, the groups assembled in the conference room to learn how the council had, in sum, distributed Engelhorn’s inheritance. The largest amount, more than €1.6 million, went to the Nature Conservation Union, which buys untouched land in order to preserve it. More than two hundred thousand euros went to the children’s programs of the Salzburg Philharmonic. Tens of thousands more were directed to efforts such as a counselling center for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, a children’s soccer league, a newspaper distributed by the homeless in Vienna, and a coalition of civic-minded scientists which tries to inject scientific findings into the mainstream discourse. Over all, nearly eighty organizations received a slice of Engelhorn’s inheritance. Florian, the engineering student, said that it felt like a list of “social projects” more than something addressing the fundamental issue of inequality. “It’s not bad,” he told me. “Maybe just a missed opportunity.”
More than three and a half million euros remained undistributed. That amount, the moderators explained, would be divvied up among pairs of participants, each of which would get seventy-three green stickers worth two thousand euros each. The funded projects would be displayed on stands in the conference room, and council members could walk around fixing their stickers to initiatives they wanted to receive additional money. After dinner, I took a seat at the side of the hall and watched what felt like a rare moment of unscripted drama: a room of ordinary people, sheets of stickers in hand, parcelling out euros as they liked—redistribution in action, I thought.
The next day, the Guter Rat members met for a party. The ballroom was decorated with white tablecloths and glittery streamers. There was cake and sparkling wine. A stack of toilet-paper rolls, marked “€1.000.000” in thick black marker, was arranged on a buffet table like a wedding-reception centerpiece. Wang, the council’s head, took the microphone. “Democracy begins here,” she said. Engelhorn had joined the celebration via video call, her face projected at enormous scale onto a screen. Wang turned to her. “Thank you for choosing a completely different path,” she said. Some cheered; others rubbed wet eyes. Engelhorn seemed on the verge of crying herself. “I am so proud of you, and have the deepest respect for your work,” she said.
In Vienna, Engelhorn had told me that, by the end of the year, she could find herself needing to earn money for the first time. “I don’t want a job that I only have because I’m riding on my privilege,” she told me. “But, at the same time, I want a job that takes advantage of my privileges.” The Engelhorn family, of course, remains phenomenally wealthy—there will be other relatives who die, including Marlene’s parents, all with their own inheritances to pass along. She hopes that, by then, there will be other solutions in place, like proper wealth and inheritance taxes, or a spirit of redistribution so embedded within her own family that there won’t be much left to inherit. Barring that, she said, “I guess I’ll have to do it all over again.” ♦