Page - 31 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

31 introduction These are all names, I should add, with which the majority of my students, the majority of whom come from non-European backgrounds and have enjoyed a postcolonially oriented multi- cultural education in Toronto, are unfamiliar.14 Like Vegas, then, most of what happens in Vienna, not to mention Austria and Austrian Studies, tends to stay there and to take on a heightened local significance out of proportion with external ramifications. These are thus concentric rather than ec- centric places, to evoke Lotman’s terminology. Whereas an ec- centric city “is situated ‘at the edge’ of the cultural space: on the seashore, at the mouth of the river” and “is interpreted either as the victory of reason over the elements, or as a perversion of the natural elements,” the concentric city is “as a rule associated with the image of the city on the hill (or hills),” in Vienna’s case, terraces, and in Austria’s, the Alps.15 A concentric city is “the mediator between heaven and earth” and “the focus for myths of origins[…], it has a beginning but no end” (Lotman 2000, 192). That the image of a concentric city may be heavily contested internally, or may in other ways not conform to its external im- age, does not register in the outside world because of the vertical directionality of this mediating quality, which makes it appear as a powerful center and erases internal divisions, silences and forgettings.16 presented at the MLA. 14 While demographically very different, the constraints of my undergradu- ate teaching at York are not too dissimilar from those Jennifer Marston William describes in teaching German film at Purdue, “a Midwestern, public land-grant university that is heavily oriented toward engineering programs,” to students who “have not yet left the state of Indiana in their lives, let alone traveled outside the country,” who “know precious little about German culture and history upon starting the course” and “regularly confuse Socialism with National Socialism” (2006, 91, 92). 15 As one reads in Maderthaner and Musner, “[f]or Vienna’s topography follows a concentric model in which inner and outer suburbs are grouped around the center in a social gradient” (2008, 2). 16 I am thinking here in particular of Ruth Beckermann’s comments at the “Wir sind Wir” [“We Are Us”] session in the Volks theater’s Rote Bar on December 2, 2018 that she made Waldheims Walzer [Waldheim’s Walzes] after realizing in discussions with young people that they had no knowl-