Page - 29 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

29 introduction point for Germanists. In the wake of the thoroughgoing Ver- gangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past] that German society underwent in the final decades of the twentieth century, making reunification not just a possibility but a reality, Germans, and by extension Germanists, became sensitized to the fascist language of Blut und Boden [blood and soil] and the necessity of promoting anti-fascist practices so that they would never again [nie wieder] happen. The rise of Jörg Haider’s far- right Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs, FPÖ) in the 1990s was in some ways a backlash against the success of the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung of the 1980s, but also, more locally, against the debates over Kurt Waldheim’s election as President in 1986, which Katya Krylova notes “changed Aus- tria from the ground up” (2017, 3). Krylova is building on Dag- mar Lorenz’s assertion that “the political activism instigated by the Waldheim Affair was the first step towards an Austrian civil society” (Lorenz qtd. in Krylova 2017, 6), something well docu- mented in Andrea Reiter’s study, Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria after Waldheim (2013). The self-characterization of Aus- trian Studies in the us as “populated by people who don’t quite fit into their institutional homes, who constantly seek to make a place for themselves and their scholarly interest and who often have a bit of a revolutionary edge” (Herzog and Herzog 2016, 238) is in no small part due to the ongoing resurgences of dark forces in Austria’s political landscape that is the stuff of Fiddler’s study.11 A related challenge that anglophone, academic study of Vi- enna brings with it is the kind of black-hole effect Vienna and Austria seem to generate. While they continue to understand themselves as central in terms of Europe and the tradition of 11 The election in October 2017 of Sebastian Kurz’s conservative Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP) and their decision to form a coalition government with the FPÖ is a more recent, and indeed more troubling, episode. The EU’s lack of condemnation of this coalition, in contrast to the action they took in 2000 against Haider, is cause for concern on a number of fronts that Fiddler enumerates in her conclusion (Fiddler 2018, 190).