Page - 33 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

33 introduction October 1848 to the uprising in Ottakring on September 17, 1911 (cf. Maderthaner and Musner) to the riots in July 1927, during which the Palace of Justice was set on fire. (Ingram and Reisenleitner 2013, 63) A proper appreciation of the length and strength of Vienna’s radicality can actually be dated back much further, at least as far as the Wiener Neustädter Blutgericht (Blood Court of Wiener Neustadt) of 1522, a show trial of strength put on by Archduke Ferdinand, who had been awarded the Austrian lands at the Diet of Worms the previous year (the one at which Martin Lu- ther was declared a heretic). Ferdinand wanted to put an end to the Ständeregierung [estate-led government] that opposed him. To that end he had Viennese mayor Martin Siebenbürger and seven others (two nobles and five commoners) executed, all of whom had been part of the revolutionary movement that had chased the Habsburg regiment out of Vienna after the death of Maximilian I in 1519. The corpses were then brought to Vien- na, where, in a macabre display of sovereign humor, they were displayed at the city’s Fleischmarkt [meat market].17 Fiddler’s national focus thus sweeps Vienna’s extraordinary history of protest and political action under the carpet, making it seem as though the resistance she analyses in works that are mostly from and about Vienna did not build on a long history but sprang fully formed from the head of a mythical god in the early 1990s in response to the rise of Jörg Haider’s FPÖ.18 17 For greater detail, see Winkler 2010 and “Wien Geschichte Wiki” n.d. 18 The one study Fiddler cites, Robert Foltin’s Und wir bewegen uns doch: Soziale Bewegungen in Österreich [Actually We Do Move: Social Movements in Austria], is an excellent resource but also one limited to contemporary history [Zeitgeschichte]. Its thirty-eight-page historical chronology begins with the founding of the second Austrian Republic on April 27, 1945 and continues through to a strike of railway employees in November 2003 against the privatization and dismantling of the ÖBB as well as incursions on workers’ rights (Foltin 2004, 283–311). A perusal of Maderthaner 2018, Maderthaner and Musner 1999, and Ebner and Vocelka 1998 will also familiarize readers with the more recent history of protest culture in the city.