Page - 39 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

39 1 (Re)Forming Vienna’s Culture of Resistance: The Proletenpassions @ #Arena “Mit uns kommt die neue Zeit” [“The new era accompanies us”]. —Gustav, “Die Hälfte des Himmels” [“Half of Heaven”] from the musical Alles Walzer, alles brennt [Everything’s Burning, Let’s Waltz]1 “Some ghosts are more equal than other” —A Marxist mashup of Animal Farm The Arena in Vienna’s third district has not always been one of the city’s premier venues for alternative concerts, which is to say concerts not of classical or pop music but harder genres such as punk and death metal.2 It started out in 1970 as an avant- garde theatrical stream “für junge Leute” [“for young people”] of Vienna’s renowned summer cultural festival, the Wiener Fest- 1 This chapter reworks and builds on material that appears in Ingram (2019), a special issue on spectral cities, for which it was framed in hauntological terms. 2 That that is its current status can be seen on its website at http://arena. wien.