Page - 45 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

45 (re)forming Vienna’s culture of resistance city’s social and cultural infrastructure, the modernist-minded city was now proposing to turn the main thoroughfare into the city center from the west (the Wienzeile) into a highway and de- stroy the city’s central Naschmarkt and the Otto Wagner Bridge in the Gumpendorfer Straße in the process (Höllerl and Span- bauer 2012b, 107). At the same time, the Arena, which had in the meantime established itself as a highly popular part of the Wiener Festwochen and had the previous summer moved out to the spacious slaughterhouse in St. Marx, learned that its new home, which had been abandoned since the mid-1960s, was about to be sold and demolished. Thanks to the attention its Festwochen performances had attracted the previous summer, the city had been able to find a buyer for the slaughterhouse in the form of the Schöps clothing company, whose owner, Leo- pold Böhm, was discovering that real estate was a much better business to be in than clothing.8 Böhm’s plan was to tear down the slaughterhouse and erect a large wholesale textile center on the site, and the city was clearly going to support him.9 How- 8 As one of his obituaries has it, “[e]ine Karriere wie aus dem Bilderbuch: 1954 übernahm Leopold Böhm die Firma seines Onkels Richard Schöps und expandierte in ganz Österreich. Ähnlich dem Billa-Gründer Karl Wlaschek eröffnete er ein Geschäft nach dem anderen, bis die Marke in ganz Österreich bekannt war. […] Das wirklich große Geld machte Böhm allerdings mit Immobilien. Branchenkenner schätzen seinen Besitz auf 30 bis 40 Immobilien. […] Der ‘Trend’ führte Böhm 2006 sogar auf Rang 34 der 100 reichsten Österreicher.” [“A picture-perfect career: [i]n 1954, Leopold Böhm took over the company of his uncle, Richard Schöps, and expanded throughout Austria. Like Billa-founder Karl Wlaschek he opened one store after the other until the brand was known in all of Aus- tria. […] However, he really made his money in real estate. Experts in the field estimated he owned 30 to 40 properties. […] In 2006 [the year before his death], “Trend” ranked him at 34 among the richest 100 Austrians”] (“Schöps-Gründer Leopold Böhm tot” 2007). 9 There is reason to suspect this deal was not completely above board: “mit großer Selbstsicherheit und trotz der Aufdeckung — zurückhaltend formuliert — problematischer Machenschaften rund um den Verkauf des Geländes an die Firma Schöps reagierten die Rathausverantwortlichen mit Hinhaltetaktik und schikanösem Verhalten, das auch die von den BesetzerInnen als ‚Kulturmutti‘ apostrophierte Stadträtin nicht kompen- sieren konnte.” [“With great self-confidence and despite the discovery